He had become a part of their mornings. So when he lost his job, without warning, hundreds decided..
Ten seconds.
Hassan Nezhadessivandi estimates that’s how long most of the interactions lasted between him and the people he saw each morning as they walked in and out of the Dupont Circle Metro station.
It was enough time to say, “Good morning,” and if they were earlier than normal, offer them a high-five for their punctuality.
It was not enough time for many to catch his name, ask whether he had a family or learn how he ended up, at an age when others were retiring, hawking copies of Express, the free tabloid that was produced by The Washington Post until it was shut down on Sept. 12.
If we pause and break down our days into minutes, so many are filled with these types of fleeting interactions with people whose names we may not know, but whose faces at some point became part of our daily landscape. People we saw yesterday and today and expect to see tomorrow. The parking attendant. The security guard. That woman behind the salad counter who already knows our order.
Jimmy Breslin, in a much-read column that surfaces every 9/11, wrote about a woman he passed for months each morning as he left a health club and she headed toward it. They never spoke, but after the attack, he realized he hadn’t seen her.
“She was not here in my morning,” he wrote.
When it was announced on a Wednesday that the last copy of Express would be handed out that Thursday, many of the commuters who passed Hassan every day realized that he would no longer be in their mornings.
They could have done nothing. They could have told him goodbye and wished him well. What they did instead has left him in recent days saying, “I’m so grateful to them.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/he-had-become-a-part-of-their-mornings-so-when-he-lost-his-job-without-warning-hundreds-decided-to-help/2019/09/20/1327f0fc-dbe8-11e9-ac63-3016711543fe_story.html
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The needs of the industrial age drove the current culturalism ideals of total worth being based on your job. The industrial age is over. The age of technology is upon us, and we have severe need to change our whole way of thinking.
Already so many industrial jobs are gone.. not due to "those gosh darn illegals taking our jobs" 
, only partially due to "outsourcing", and only in small part due to some manufacturing sectors moving some of their operations out of the US. The vast majority is due to technological innovation and automation. AND, it's only going to get better (or worse).
I already covered the obvious with manufacturing, but
Farming, agriculture, and livestock.. all becoming more automated and needing much less manual labor.
More and more stores are becoming more automated with kiosks, and machines that clean, some even innovate and reduce stockers.
Some stores going even further and moving most or all commerce online now. Don't even need the physical store to exist.
Restaurants, fast food - adding kiosks and machines that does most of the work for cooking, and what little food prep is left at the location.
Hospitals are reducing staff as computers and machines can now better do what people used to.
and very soon, cars will be driving themselves. I suspect this will be a REAL breaking point for industrial age work=worth mentality. Just look out at any highway for about 10 minutes.. all of those 18-wheelers, taxi's, haulers.. each one of those will be a job lost once that tech really takes off.
Personally, I LOOOOOVE our tech age and where it's going, but our government and our culture desperately needs to shift to get with the times and make it into the wonderful thing it can be. Get our school program curriculum updated for this. Move away from the base 40hr that for many is 80+ hour work weeks, and make it economical to hire more people do work share the jobs that remain, and stop shaming those who no longer have the capacity to work. Machines will take on the loading of what they are no longer able to provide labor wise.
