.jpg)
Wanted: Young People for Dead-End Jobs
Or, How the Future Became a Parking Lot
By Mihar Dias April 2026
The Grab driver swivelled around at a traffic light, looked at me as if he were about to reveal the location of buried treasure, and said:
“Tell your children and grandchildren — don’t become an e-hailing driver. And don’t become a security guard.”
I thought perhaps he was recruiting for the Diplomatic Service.
But no.
“There’s no future in these jobs.”
He said it with the grim certainty of a man who had spent years watching other people go somewhere.
Now, in most countries career counseling is done by universities.
Here it is done in a Perodua during surge pricing.
And frankly, it may be more honest.
The man had an argument.
No insurance.
No EPF.
No medical benefits.
No promotion.
No pension.
No corner office.
No office.
And the only performance review comes from strangers who can destroy your livelihood because the air-conditioning was too cold.
Try explaining that to your grandchildren.
“Yes, Ahmad, your grandfather rose from a 4.7 to a 4.9 rating in the difficult years.”
This is what we now call flexible employment.
Flexible is a lovely word.
It means everything bends except the system.
The driver said he started at fifty after quitting another job because of a superior he could no longer stand.
In the old days, people escaped tyrannical bosses.
Now they escape into algorithms.
Progress.
Since driving full-time, he has developed diabetes, hypertension and heart trouble.
Occupational hazards, apparently, of sitting ten hours a day and eating whatever can be bought between rides.
He made gig work sound less like a career than a slow medical experiment.
And this was not the first prophet in a Grab.
Another driver once told me no bright young graduate should do this as a future.
“What skill is there,” he asked, “in driving around eight or ten hours a day?”
A rude question.
Also difficult to answer.
We are forever lecturing young people about acquiring skills.
Then we funnel many into jobs where the principal skill is not dying in traffic.
There is something magnificently absurd in this.
We used to dream of producing scientists.
Now we applaud app-dependent chauffeurs as symbols of digital innovation.
Every age has its propaganda.
Ours comes with a promo code.
And don’t get me started on security guards.
Once, nations used old men as wise advisers.
We put them at condominium gates.
Twelve-hour shifts guarding parked Toyotas.
Civilisation advances.
We are told these are respectable jobs.
Of course they are respectable.
So is digging ditches.
The question is not dignity.
The question is whether a society should be offering its youth survival as ambition.
That is different.
There is a national tendency to romanticize hardship.
No benefits?
You’re independent.
No job security?
You’re entrepreneurial.
No future?
You’re part of the gig economy.
With sufficient vocabulary, misery can be made to sound innovative.
Somewhere a consultant is charging money for this.
I have begun to think the gig economy is simply unemployment in evening wear.
It is sold as freedom.
You can choose your hours.
Yes.
All of them.
You can be your own boss.
Which means you may now exploit yourself directly.
No middleman.
Efficiency.
The beauty of modern economics is that people with no pensions are told they are disruptors.
Even the language has become comic.
The man driving me around the city was, according to economists, a micro-entrepreneur.
He considered himself exhausted.
I know whom I believe.
And yet politicians love citing employment figures.
Everyone employed!
Marvelous.
Never mind whether the job has a future.
A man can be drowning and still be technically occupied.
The driver’s real point was not about Grab.
It was about warning the young not to confuse a lifeboat with a cruise ship.
A temporary fix can become a permanent trap.
Many enter “for now.”
Years later, they are still waiting for “later.”
That may be the most expensive traffic jam of all.
I liked the driver.
He was not bitter.
He was simply unimpressed by national mythology.
And in an age of slogans, the unimpressed are often the wisest.
As I got out, I thought: economists should stop commissioning studies and start riding in the back seat.
The best labour analysis in town may be sitting behind the wheel complaining about cholesterol.
The man gave me a phrase I can’t forget.
“Bad end job.”
Perfect.
Three words that say more about modern insecurity than a hundred government speeches.
And perhaps that is our new development model:
Study hard.
Graduate.
Acquire debt.
Drive strangers around.
Warn them not to let their children do the same.
A circular economy.
Mihar Dias (mihardias@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
The User Content (as defined on Newswav Terms of Use) above including the views expressed and media (pictures, videos, citations etc) were submitted & posted by the author. Newswav is solely an aggregation platform that hosts the User Content. If you have any questions about the content, copyright or other issues of the work, please contact creator@newswav.com.