Obsolete Occupation

It was easier being a viking 1000 years ago...

"Since there are no more books, Mr. Wordsworth, there are no more libraries. And of course it follows that there is very little call for the services of a librarian. Case in point: A minister would tell us that his function is preaching the word of God. And of course it follows that since the State has proven that there is no God, that would make the function of a minister academic as well."

— The Chancellor, The Twilight Zone (1959), "The Obsolete Man"

Not to say that the job market is good, but usually no matter what your occupation is, there's someone out there who needs it. Then you've got the character with the Obsolete Occupation.

In most circumstances, their occupation would be pretty useful, but in theirs, not so much. Maybe the relevant technology is obsolete now, hasn't been invented yet, or simply doesn't function in a way that needs those services. Why they don't just find another job isn't always addressed. Maybe they feel they were Born in the Wrong Century.

This can also come up in a post-apocalypse setting. Many modern jobs depend on a certain level of technology and/or infrastructure. If Apocalypse How means there's no one left who can operate a power plant, a computer programmer will have a great deal of knowledge and no use for it.

Compare to Obsolete Mentor (whose skills, rather than their profession, are obsolete), The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything (who simply don't bother with performing their job), and A Degree in Useless. If a job has become obsolete as a result of technological process and automation, see Job-Stealing Robot. Often the case with robots in the case of Humanity's Wake, leading to Unfulfilled Purpose Misery. May also include a heavy dose of Ludd Was Right. Related to Lightspeed Leapfrog (space explorers on a Sleeper Ship discover that FTL has been invented while they were out, making them useless). See also Expert in Underwater Basket Weaving, when the skill never had any practical use in the first place.

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Examples:

Advertising

• The home appliance company Maytag built a long line of commercials out of this trope. Their claim was that Maytag appliances are so well-built that no one would ever need to call the Maytag repairman.

Anime & Manga

• An episode of the Young Animators Project concerns a salesman of oil lamps, lamp oil, and oil lamp accessories who became prosperous by being the first to bring oil lamps to his rural village. Twenty years later, the newly invented electrical lights come to Japan, and he faces instant ruin because no one needs his inventory or specialized skills anymore. He resolves to change with the times, and moves into another sales field.

Comic Books

• ElfQuest: Winnowill was a healer who went insane because, among other things, her people became so safe that she had no purpose anymore.
• In Superman Family #200, a story set in the then distant future of 2000 has the owner/operator of "Miller's New Cars" who has sold exactly one of his gasoline-powered automobiles in the last year; everyone else drives the new electrics. (And the buyer turns out to be someone who hates all modern things.)
• Watchmen:
  • Hollis Mason retires from the superhero business so he can dedicate himself to repairing cars — only to find out that Dr. Manhattan can use his superpowers to synthesize massive quantities of lithium for batteries in electric cars, rendering the internal combustion engine obsolete. When the story opens, Mason is managing an auto repair shop specializing in vintage cars, which is fast going out of business.
  • Jon Osterman (Dr. Manhattan) was going to follow his father in the watch repair business until his father read about the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Osterman Sr. decided then and there that watch repair is an obsolete profession and insisted that his son go into something with a future. Ironically, after Osterman loses his humanity, he decides to become a Celestial Watchmaker (i.e., a god to some people he's going to go create).

Fan Works

• Rocketship Voyager. Tom Paris was raised in the Unemployment Barracks after his father, an air force pilot, found himself obsolete after the invention of interceptor rockets and orbiting A-bomb platforms.

Films — Animated

• In Frozen (2013), Elsa's sudden winter puts Kristoff, an ice harvester, in quite a bind.
• Shark Tale: One of the places in the city that the movie briefly focuses on is a sushi restaurant that doesn't get any customers since most of the citizens are fish.

Films — Live-Action

• Children of Men: One of Theo's companions, Miriam, used to be a maternity nurse before people stopped having children. Naturally, she had plenty of time on her hands afterwards, and with her past experience, became a natural candidate to help shepherd Kee, the world's last known fertile girl, to the Human Project.
• Jurassic Park:
  • In the original Jurassic Park, Alan Grant muses on what the creation of cloned dinosaurs means for his field of paleontology:
    Ellie: So, what are you thinking?
    Alan: That we're out of a job.
    Ian: Don't you mean extinct?
  • However, this is later subverted in Jurassic Park III, in which Alan declares that the Jurassic Park dinosaurs are "theme park monsters" that contribute nothing to genuine paleontology. Jurassic World Dominion shows that Alan and Ellie are still in paleontology and are consulted on both fossilized organisms and their de-extincted living clones.
• Other People's Money: Discussed. "You know, at one time there must've been dozens of companies making buggy whips. And I'll bet the last company around was the one that made the best goddamn buggy whip you ever saw."
• The Sound of Music: Captain Georg von Trapp (as in real life) was a celebrated submarine captain of the Austro-Hungarian imperial navy, but at the time of the film Austria is a landlocked country, causing his retirement. When Nazi Germany annexes Austria they offer him a commission in the German navy but he refuses on principle.

Literature

• American Gods: Shadow goes to work for Mr. Wednesday, an American aspect of the Norse god Odin, and discovers an entire subculture of ancient gods living in America. Brought over by various immigrants who eventually stopped believing in them, the gods now scrape by with mostly regular jobs.
• In The Android's Dream, Dirk Moeller's father was a butcher at a time when science had perfected synthetic meat, thus rendering him nearly obsolete.
• Animorphs: Rachel's mom is a lawyer, and once she's kidnapped from her house and left in safety in the Hork-Bajir colony, she starts drafting up laws and constitutions for them. Unfortunately, the Hork-Bajir have no need for such things because they operate on the level of small children, looking to the seers for guidance.

• Dragonriders of Pern: The foundation of Pernese society, the dragons and the weyr system, was developed to fight the fall of Thread. In All the Weyrs of Pern, the dragonriders alter the course of a satellite to permanently end the fall of Thread, and spend the next book (The Skies of Pern) trying to figure out how to cope with their self-inflicted obsolescence.
• Discworld:
  • The Light Fantastic: Rincewind advises Twoflower not to explain how his almanac works to druids who've spent years creating a calendar out of giant lumps of rock, because they probably wouldn't take it well.
  • In Feet of Clay, Colon has a conversation with a former wick-dipper for Carry's Candles, now redundant due to a golem that makes more candles than Mr Carry knows what to do with.
  • In The Truth, after Goodmountain brings movable type to Ankh-Morpork, and he and William de Worde create the Disc's first newspaper, the Guild of Engravers and Guild of Town-Criers are both unhappy that their jobs are threatened. (The engravers adapt to the new normal by becoming the Guild of Engravers and Printers, and according to Mrs Bradshaw's Guidebook, the coming of the railway in Raising Steam means the town-criers also find a new niche doing station announcements.)
• Most Belters from The Expanse make a living from mining asteroids, and the Martian Congressional Republic likewise keeps people together largely through the prospect of turning Mars into a garden world, so when a Portal Network shows up connecting the Solar System with over 1300 worlds —many of them hosting planets rich in resources and breathable atmosphere— those two groups suddenly find themselves in quite a bind.
• According to Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, The Ministry of Magic in the Harry Potter universe maintains a Centaur Liaison Office that no centaur has ever used on account of their inherent mistrust of humans. As a result, "Being sent to the Centaur Office" has become a euphemism amongst ministry employees for being sacked.
• Gone has pretty much the exact computer programmer example mentioned in the description - Jack is an expert at computers (though it's not his job, given that he is a kid like everyone else), in a Domed Hometown shut off from any possible internet access. He almost manages to get the internet working anyway until the event of the second book leads to the local power plant failing, making his job completely useless as everyone's computers just slowly run out of battery.
• In Mack Reynolds' novella Mercenary, America has adopted a hereditary caste system in the future that has resulted in vast numbers of people unemployed because of advancing technology and not allowed to retrain unless they enlist in one of the limited corporate wars that serve as mass entertainment. Protagonist Joe Mauser was born into the cobbler caste, shoe repair division, after mass production made it cheaper to buy new shoes.
• The Jean de La Fontaine fable "The Merchant, the Noble, the Shepherd, and the Prince" has the titular men washed up on the New World after a shipwreck and decide to start earning money so they can get home. The merchant says he'll teach arithmetic, the prince legislation and politics, and the noble heraldry. The shepherd points out that even if they did find people willing to pay them to learn such things, they'd still only get paid at the end of the month, and promptly go into the woods to gather firewood for sale.
  From this adventure we, I think, may learn
  That for life's daily needs much learning is not wanted;
  But that to every man the power to earn
  Food by his labour has been freely granted.
• A Million Adventures: Alice meets a chimney sweeper who complains he had to spend the last eighteen years training mountain climbers - not a single working chimney is left on Earth.
• Paris in the Twentieth Century by Jules Verne has poets and artists become useless in a society entirely devoted to science (even music has fallen to it, one piece is called "Ode to the decomposition of chloride" or similar).
• The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: Subverted when the inhabitants of Golgafrincham believed that telephone sanitization was a useless profession and exiled all of their telephone sanitizers, only to be wiped out by an infection contracted from a dirty telephone.
• Jessie's father in Running Out of Time is a talented blacksmith in the mid-1990s, an era where there is literally no use for one outside historical recreation villages like Clifton. This is why he's so keen to uphold The Masquerade of the village still being in the 1840s; he's afraid of losing his source of identity.
• An interesting variation in Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein: full citizenship rights are only granted to those who serve the Federation, but everyone has the right to serve if they so choose. Contrary to popular belief, "federal service" isn't restricted to military service, as various civilian jobs also count, and the government is required to find duties every applicant can physically perform and allow them a reasonable opportunity to earn their citizenship, even if it's something as pointless as having a blind person "count the fuzz on a caterpillar by touch."
• The Tale of Two Bad Mice features two sentient dolls named Jane and Lucinda. It notes that Jane was allegedly the cook, but she never got a chance to do any cooking, since the dollhouse came with toy food, and they never needed to eat it (being wooden dolls) anyway.
• In the Worldwar series, the Race's empire has been unified for millennia, so not only are most military professions obsolete there (aside from those sent in the conquest fleet against Earth) but so are jobs like ambassador and interpreter (as their empire's political unification also resulted in linguistic unification).
• World War Z: After the Zombie Apocalypse, the United States government classify several professions such as lawyers and entertainers as F-6, to be retrained.
  The first labor survey stated clearly that over 65 percent of the present civilian workforce were classified F-6, possessing no valued vocation. We required a massive job retraining program. In short, we needed to get a lot of white collars dirty.

Live-Action TV

• 30 Rock: Jack once asked Liz (a TV writer) what use she would be in a post-apocalyptic world. She said "traveling bard", he came back with "radiation canary".
• Babylon 5 recounts the story of the guarded flower from Mythology and Folklore in the episode "A Tragedy of Telepaths" but with an in-universe event where Londo was the one who discovered the pointless sentry.
• In the first episode of the 1976 American Sitcom Ivan The Terrible (about a family living in Soviet Union-era Moscow) Ivan loses his job as a hotel waiter. He goes to the Moscow Unemployment Office, only to be told that they can't help him - since nobody is unemployed in the Soviet Union they have no precedent, no leads, no nothing. Ivan asks, if there's no unemployment why have an unemployment office? They tell him that if there was no unemployment office everyone who now works there would be unemployed.
• Parodied on The Kids in the Hall in a sketch where a group of factory workers is paid to hold their arms in a tank full of dead fish until they are replaced by a robot that holds three pairs of mannequin arms in the fish tank.
• One episode of New Amsterdam (2018) sees Max searching through the hospital's staff to locate employees whose jobs have become outdated, promising to reassign anyone who comes forward.
• In Quatermass II, one of the characters is a mathematical genius who can calculate any equation in his head, a skill that's superfluous now that computers are used for the task. While he's still employed as a scientist, he worries that he's become redundant.
• In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Neutral Zone", a 20th-century financier is awakened to find that his profession is worthless in the Federation's post-scarcity economy. Subverted in the Star Trek Expanded Universe novels, in which he has become the ambassador to the Ferengi (who appreciate his financial savvy), and later on becomes the Federation Secretary of Commerce.
• That Mitchell and Webb Look: One sketch featured a stone chiseler worried about the upcoming Bronze Age.
• The Twilight Zone (1959):
  • "The Obsolete Man": Romney Wordsworth is a librarian in a dystopic future that bans books. Anyone "Obsolete" is sentenced to death, which sparks the plot.
  • "The Brain Center at Whipple's" has an entire factory's worth of workers declared outdated as the titular Whipple outfits his factory with ever-increasing amounts of automation until Whipple finds himself replaced by Robbie the Robot.

Myths & Religion

• There is a story of how a Russian Czar noticed a sentry guarding an empty space for no apparent reason. When he did some research, he discovered that hundreds of years ago, Catherine the Great ordered for a sentry to be posted at all times on that spot to guard a particularly beautiful flower. No one remembered or bothered to rescind that order even after both Catherine the Great and the flower are long gone. This story has undergone Gossip Evolution so much that there are different versions of the story varying on the people involved or when it happened. It even comes up in Christian sermons as An Aesop about either going through the motions of religion without understanding its purpose (therefore, pointless profession of faith) or being unable to move on.

Theatre

• In William Inge's play The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, Rubin Flood is a harness salesman in the 1920s, when the horse and buggy are fast becoming extinct.

Video Games

• City-Building Series: Once a city's economy is up and running, a lot of jobs become pointless as they're only meant to keep the unemployment statistic down rather than massively increase production (which in turn would require huge amounts of storage space), as trade is restricted to a certain amount of goods per year. It's actually a much easier problem to deal with than the feedback loop of a Critical Staffing Shortage (lack of workers means fewer services, meaning housing devolves, meaning fewer workers, meaning...).
  • In Pharaoh, construction guilds (stonecarvers, bricklayers, carpenters, etc.) disappear from the build list once all monument work is complete. Fortunately, work camps are always available since they also provide floodplain farm workers and can be used to provide lots of jobs in a relatively small space.
  • Zeus: Master of Olympus lets you choose when to muster troops, towers, and ships or demobilize them. This reduces unemployment even if there's no enemy to fight.
• Quest for Glory IV: Played for Laughs. A minor character named Ivan is a professional elephant herder... but the game is set in Mordavia, a wooded mountain valley smack in the middle of the Überwald. According to Ivan, at least, elephants were once endemic to Mordavia, but have migrated away during his lifetime due to supernatural calamities plaguing the valley. Once the curse on the valley is lifted, he mentions getting some elephants in "for old time's sake".
• In Surviving Mars, there are several ways for Specialists to become obsolete, especially towards the end of the game, although nothing's stopping them from continuing in their old jobs and just twiddling their thumbs:
  • Geologists are usually the first to go. A certain Breakthrough will give you fully automated mines, and the Borehole wonder gives you another metal source that's both automated and inexhaustible.
  • Botanists are only needed to run the farms; ranches can be staffed by anyone. So if you don't mind pissing off the vegans, you can have a pure carnivore colony. The Green Planet DLC adds the open-air farm, which takes some work to get up and running, but once you do you've got a fully automated, plentiful, and vegan-friendly source of food.
  • Scientists are essential for most of the game, but once the research tree is exhausted there's nothing else for them to do. Sure, there are some repeatable projects that give you more funding, but those are pointless at that stage of the game.
• Undertale: You meet Papyrus, a skeleton whose dream is to become the Leader of the Royal Guard. In one of the endings he indeed becomes the Leader, after the previous leader and the queen decide to disband the whole royal guard, making his position pointless. He doesn't seem to catch on to this, so he is still happy.

Visual Novels

• Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Trials and Tribulations: One of the witnesses in "Recipe for Turnabout" is Victor Kudo, the last of a family of kimono embroiderers due to kimonos either falling out of fashion (in the Japanese version) or never being in fashion to begin with (in the US version).

Webcomics

• Freefall: The Corrupt Corporate Executive Kornada was Kicked Upstairs to Vice President of Paper Clip Allocation... for a paperless company, on a partly-Terraformed planet where organic materials like paper are extremely rare. It still results in a disastrous Reassignment Backfire.
• In The Order of the Stick, the unnamed Shadowdancer has this problem. His class's special ability allows him to teleport between shadows, but because his universe is a stick-figure webcomic, shadows are only drawn when they'd be dramatically appropriate. Right after arguing with Redaxe about this, they are both caught in an explosion. Luckily for them, the explosion is dramatic enough to cast shadows, so the Shadowdancer is able to teleport them both to safety.
• Schlock Mercenary: Computers are officially not allowed on one planet under the Bureaucratic Employment Protection Act. Breya, who has better things to do than hand-sign 300 identical pages, gets Ennesby to sign them and gets Schlock to silence any protests.
• Tales of the Questor: Quentyn is the first Questor (a ranger for hire, basically) in Freeman Downs in a century; cultural and technological advances have made the position obsolete.
• One xkcd strip has Cueball in his role as "guy who knows about computers" explaining to his friend the weird reason Windows isn't working and the equally bizarre way of fixing it. The caption says he can't wait for this job to become obsolete.

Web Videos

• Glove and Boots: Discussed in the episode "Top 10 reasons why Time Travelling is no good" when Fafa points out how you can't get a job in the past or future with your current job skills. Then Mario goes on to provide an example.
  PAST
  Mario: Well, I write blogs for a living.
  Employer: Ha ha ha! You can't make a living doing that!
  FUTURE
  Mario: Well, I write blogs for a living.
  Employer: Ha ha ha! You still write?!
• Scootertrix the Abridged: Rarity runs a boutique selling pony clothes that she designs and sews herself. Unlike in the original show, it's an explicit plot point in Episode 20 that Rarity's business is struggling because the vast majority of ponies don't wear clothes. However, she's able to create demand (and save her business) by arranging a photoshoot of her friend Fluttershy modeling several of her dresses.

Western Animation

• The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius: In "Fundemonium", Jimmy's father said that he planned to move the family to another city. He explained that this is because he is a car salesman, but everybody in town already has a car, so he has no customers.
• In The Backyardigans' double-length episode "Robot Rampage", Austin plays a robot repairman... in a city filled with robots... that explicitly never, ever break. The first musical number of the episode is about Austin lamenting the situation.
• Dragons: Riders of Berk: Gobber finds himself out of work now that he doesn't have to make dragon-killing weapons anymore. He eventually takes up a job as a dentist.
• The Flintstones: In "Arthur Quarry's Dance Class", Fred and Barney join Joe Rockhead's volunteer fire department. Joe admitted that there was no need for an FD in Bedrock since there was nothing to burn in a community where everything is made of stone. But by staging alarm drills in the evenings, the guys were free to go bowling, play pool, etc.
• In the Christmas Special How Murray Saved Christmas, Murray used to be the mascot for National Milkman Day; when milk deliveries became obsolete, so did the holiday celebrating them, and Murray ended up running a diner at Stinky Cigars, the town where other, still relevant holiday mascots live.

Real Life

• Robert Sobel, writer of For Want of a Nail, once noted:
  "The British created a civil service job in 1803 calling for a man to stand on the Cliffs of Dover with a spyglass. He was supposed to ring a bell if he saw Napoleon coming. The job was abolished in 1945."
• Mongolia used to have one of the largest navies in the world when the Khans were in charge. Then their empire weakened and after foreign occupations, their country was already landlocked upon independence. It was reinstated during the Soviet rule with the relatively simple task of transporting oil in Lake Khovsgol, which takes less time than going around it. When communism fell, they stopped doing even that. In modern times, they only have sailors and ships in single digits. The lake they're guarding... is completely inland.^note Even though they have another lake that they share with Russia, which is their only international water border. Also, apparently only one of their sailors can swim. Though they don't fulfill the usual roles of a navy anymore, they now guide tourists instead. Read more here.
• Countries that suddenly become landlocked can see naval officers and technicians becoming this trope.^note Not all navies of landlocked countries are pointless. They can have rivers or lakes which they share international borders and therefore need guarding against foreign intruders or smugglers. Miklos Horthy used to be a decent admiral before Hungary became landlocked because of the Treaty of Trianon, along with Georg von Trapp, who had to live off his wife's inheritance.
• The Other Wiki has an entire category of obsolete jobs.
• The "extinct" line in Jurassic Park (see above) was a reference to stop motion animator Phil Tippett calling himself "extinct" when he found out that the dinosaurs were going to be created with CGI. However, Tippett was kept on as a consultant, leading to his memetic "dinosaur supervisor" credit. After Jurassic Park, his company, Tippett Studio, changed its specialty from stop-motion to CGI.

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