The bargain is dead. Well, at least for most people, anyway.

Seth Godin's book Linchpin traces the history of the bargain. He says that in the early part of the twentieth century, during the height of the Industrial Revolution, an idea took hold in the world.

Mass production. Taking the work necessary to make a thing, breaking it down into discrete actions, and then training people to do one of those actions exclusively.

Take a chair, for instance. It used to be that a master craftsperson made the whole chair in a shop. The end product was a beautiful thing, depending on the particular furniture maker—demonstrating the exacting care and attention to detail that a true artisan takes in their craft.

Mass production came along, though, and put ten people to work—each one concentrating on a single facet of chair-making. And because they only had one job each, those ten people achieved a level of efficiency at chair-making that allowed them to make not ten times the number of chairs of a single master craftsperson but hundreds of times the number of chairs.

That was the beauty of mass production: It allowed you to manufacture goods at an amazingly fast rate and with greater efficiency.

Why?

Because if one person on the assembly line lost a hand in the band saw, you could find someone to replace that person in no time. Production didn’t suffer, hardly at all.

People became interchangeable parts in the manufacturing process. That is, they became individual cogs in a larger manufacturing machine.

The skill of experienced craftspeople was lost. None of the assembly-line workers could make a chair; they could only make part of one. But the sacrifice of general expertise seemed a small price to pay for exponentially increased productivity. Factories.

But, it turns out, people don’t yearn to be interchangeable parts, just cogs in the manufacturing machine. They want something out of the deal. That’s where the bargain comes in.

In exchange for trading in their uniqueness as artisans, people received the assurances of lifetime employment and a pension when they died. All they had to do was show up on time, do their job, obey the foreman, and not cause trouble. These production jobs didn’t require a whole lot of thinking, no quick decision-making. Just do what you’re told and put that bolt there. The whole bargain between manufacturers and their factory workers depended on steady, predictable work from steady, predictable workers.

It was genius. It’s how the middle class emerged. People cashed in their creativity for good pay, a steady career, a gold watch, and a dependable pension.

Stability. That was the bargain. In deciding between creativity and a predictable life, most people found it easy to choose. Take the sure thing, right?

That bargain is all but dead now. In a world that’s no longer dependent on manufacturing to drive its economy anymore, the bargain doesn’t work.

As recently as when I was in school in Michigan, it was still possible to think about catching on at one of the auto plants, working forty years at the same place, and retiring. Good pay, good health insurance, good retirement.

That dream is largely gone now.

But it wasn’t just factory work. Almost everybody grew up believing that employment and stability were a recipe for a respectable life.

That’s how the ministry was presented to me in seminary. Clergy, on the tail end of the mid-twentieth century religious bubble, were still semi-respectable people. Professionals, like doctors or lawyers, like psychologists or school principals.

Show up when you’re supposed to. Make the right people happy. Keep your nose clean. And you, too, could have a career that moves along a certain trajectory—from rural or small-town church to county-seat church to urban church to a “big steeple church” or a church in the paradise of suburbia.