the thing that always gets me about the US and jobs it considers 'essential' is those roles are always treated like/expected to be temporary, and you both get talked down to and it is made extremely difficult to live if you don't want them to be (temporary, that is).
i frequently miss previous food service jobs, not because i don't enjoy what i do now, but because i did genuinely enjoy those jobs too. the reason i left is because the expectation was that i either sell 40+ hours of my week to the job, regularly be physically injured with no support, either no or abysmal workers comp, inconsistent scheduling so it meant i had little to no life outside of work... and still, the actual labor of the job, i enjoyed. i enjoyed the people. i liked working with my hands and making people happy.
and you know, people often bring up customers as the reason to leave food service - this was part of my reason as well, but how much of that - like the unsustainability of working food service itself, bodily and monetarily - is manufactured? many of the people who were terrible to me working food service were often people working office jobs only marginally 'above' mine in pay and support, miserable with their own work, looking to exert some level of power they could over someone else.
this is a bit long winded, but i think its a perfect cultural example of how capitalism does not actually incentivize 'progress' or 'growth' as much as a constant state of desperation, discomfort and dehumanization - you arent actually encouraged to do what it is you excel at, but whatever you can just barely tolerate, all at the risk that at the current stage your body might give out and you will not have worked hard enough to have 'earned' the right to be care for when it does. and someone will be right behind you, desperate enough to immediately replace you.
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