The economists are weeping again. In the hallowed, marble-floored halls of European power, where the scent of expensive cologne masks the stench of intellectual rot, a new decree has been issued: you, the miserable laborer, are the problem. According to the latest hand-wringing from the technocratic elite, European workers are far too stationary. They have the audacity to hold onto jobs for more than a fiscal quarter, and in doing so, they are single-handedly strangling the golden goose of 'Productivity.' It is the ultimate irony of the modern age: we have built a civilization so complex it has become a suicide pact, and now the ruling class is annoyed that we are not jumping into the furnace with enough enthusiasm.

The premise is simple, or at least as simple as anything dreamt up by a think-tank drone with a degree from a university that costs more than your childhood home: European workers are 'static.' They stay in their roles for decades, clutching their pensions and their predictable weekends like security blankets. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the Americans are being fired and rehired with the frenetic, twitchy energy of a meth-addicted squirrel, and this—we are told—is the pinnacle of economic health. The EU labor market is apparently 'ill-suited to an age of disruption.' If you translate that from Ghoulish into English, it means the corporate overlords are finding it too difficult to liquidate you.

Let’s talk about 'disruption.' It is the favorite buzzword of the billionaire class, a linguistic shell game used to justify why your life should be as unstable as a three-legged chair in an earthquake. 'Disruption' is just the polite way of saying the world is changing in ways the ruling class didn't predict, so you need to be the one to suffer for it. Whether it is the green transition, which involves replacing real jobs with subsidized fantasies, or AI, which is essentially just a very expensive way to plagiarize the entire history of human thought, the message is clear: your stability is a friction point in their spreadsheet. They don't want employees; they want human gig-economy grease for the gears of a failing machine.

The Left will, of course, perform its usual dance of theatrical outrage. They will hold rallies, wave flags that were probably manufactured in the very overseas factories they are mourning, and demand 'protections' that are essentially just sandbags against a rising tide of global irrelevance. They cling to the 'European Social Model' as if it were a holy relic, ignoring the fact that the gold leaf is flaking off and the wood underneath is termite-ridden. Their solution to a changing world is to demand that time stand still, which is about as effective as yelling at a hurricane to lower its voice. They want to preserve a 1970s utopia while living in a 2020s dystopia, and they expect the bill to be paid by a future that doesn't exist.

On the other side, the gentry of the Right and the neoliberal center view the worker not as a person, but as a 'resource' that has become uncomfortably 'sticky.' They want 'labor mobility.' They want you to move from your ancestral village to a grey industrial park three borders away because a 'dynamic' startup that delivers artisanal dog food needs a warehouse drone for six months before it inevitably implodes. They call this 'vibrancy.' I call it the commodification of human desperation. They look at a man who has worked in the same bakery for thirty years and see a failure of resource allocation. I see a man who probably has a decent sourdough starter and a sense of belonging, two things an economist wouldn't recognize if they hit them in the face with a brick.

The truth, as always, is far more depressing. We are witnessing the final stages of a system that has run out of new markets to exploit and has decided to start cannibalizing its own foundations. The demand for workers to 'switch jobs' is a desperate attempt to manufacture growth through churn. If you are constantly moving, you are constantly consuming 'reskilling' services, you are constantly paying for relocation, and you are never staying in one place long enough to realize that the person signing your paycheck is a parasite. It’s a shell game where the only thing being 'disrupted' is your sanity.

The age of disruption isn't coming; it is here, and it is a meat grinder. The technocrats want you to believe that if you just become more 'flexible,' if you just embrace the 'gigification' of your existence, you will somehow come out on top. It is a lie. The only people who benefit from disruption are those who own the disruptors. For everyone else, 'switching jobs' is just a euphemism for a game of musical chairs where the music is composed by a heartless algorithm and there is only one chair left, and it is currently being sat on by a robot. So, by all means, 'retool' your skills. Learn to code. Learn to install solar panels that will be obsolete in five years. Change your career like you change your socks. The result will be the same: a life spent in transit, serving a machine that views your very existence as an overhead cost to be minimized. Welcome to the future. It’s exactly like the past, only with faster internet and less job security.