This image and caption are wonderfully revelatory about how many options young people (especially) now have and how our expectations for our work lives have risen.
The caption is sarcastic, suggesting that settling for a job in such a place is beneath one’s expectations and aspirations. Great.
Yet when we look closely at the work environment (and compare it to the average work environment of generations past), we see: The cubicle has a comfortable chair, a computer, a telephone, additional lighting, carpet on the floor, some privacy, and is presumably heated in the winter and cooled in the summer.
And yet, the meme suggests, That is not enough. Excellent.
The meme takes issue with the claim that the pictured environment is “exciting.” Your response gives the misimpression of rebutting the meme, talks past it, and ultimately leaves it unrebutted. The meme is about excitement, not comfort. Your response is about comfort, not excitement. You’ve managed to combine a red herring with a straw man. It may score points with a certain audience, but it’s not a successful rebuttal.
This is a bit like explaining a joke to someone who is trying hard not to get it, Irfan.
One part is that, say, a hundred years ago, the opportunity to work in such a comfortable place would have been *exciting*. Try some empathetic historical imagination to see how far we’ve come on average that such comfort is taken for granted.
Another part is that this apparently now un-exciting environment gives one access to the whole world — the power of the phone, the computer, and more. Try some opportunity imagination to see how such a now-ordinary environment affords the possibility of excitement. So the suggestion is that the meme-maker not be content with easy sarcasm but envision what exciting power lies in potential in even a now-ordinary work environment.
One more thing, Irfan: When I first saw the sarcastic meme, it recalled this image of Jeff Bezos working in his first office back in 1999:
https://www.stephenhicks.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Bezos-1999.jpg
Why not just employ some ordinary reading comprehension? The meme suggests that some jobs are advertised as exciting when they’re not. Nothing you’ve said disputes that, because nothing could. It’s too obvious to be denied. That’s why it seems to have elicited an elaborate missing of the point.
It doesn’t take make effort either to interpret the meme at face value, or to grasp that it makes an obvious point. What takes effort is to fail to do so. Your interpretation of the meme gets an A for effort, but not for interpretive acumen or common sense.
If the phone or the computer were as self-evidently exciting as you suggest, robo-calls and spam would be occasions for ecstasy. They aren’t. Our hearts would swell every time someone called to discuss the status of our auto warranty. That doesn’t generally happen. One’s use of a phone or computer in the workplace is constrained by the demands of the job. A job is not a free-form jazz exploration of life. Many jobs (not all, obviously) are mind-numbingly tedious. In those cases, the computer and phone become instruments of tedium. Many jobs of this description are falsely advertised as “exciting.” Yet they aren’t. And so we circle back to the obvious point of the meme. I’m not sure why I have to explain the obvious to someone who runs a center for ethics and entrepreneurship, but evidently, I do.