I'm not saying janitorial work isn't an honest profession, I'm saying nobody prefers janitorial work. Nobody in their childhood dreams of growing up and becoming a janitor. Your grandfathers can at the same time be someone who found dignity in that work and made the best of the hand they were dealt, and at the same time be someone who would prefer a different career path had a genuine choice been offered to them.
I think you overestimate how much "profession" plays a role here. I think people only really care about doing honest and worthwhile work. No one have any idea what they "want" to do in 5 to 10 years.
The problem that I see with work today is that the value from my work is so hard to derive that I can't help but see it as pointless. I mean what value have I generated from writing a bunch of code that is used to do some analysis? How is my company/industry providing value to society again?
I think IF people find genuine satisfaction from their work, then they are more likely to think that it is their "dream" profession. That is to say that what the profession is doesn't really matter as much as what the person think of their work, whatever that is.
For instance, if janitors is a highly respected and well paying job, would people still think less of sweeping floors and flushing toilets?
> I mean what value have I generated from writing a bunch of code that is used to do some analysis? How is my company/industry providing value to society again?
Does somebody pay money for your company/industry's product? If so then they're getting more value than the money they paid (unless they were coerced somehow into buying the product). All companies solve a problem for somebody, and indeed one of the reasons why a fully planned economy would be inefficient is because no planner can fully intuit all the problems in society which need to be solved (since the only way that question is not political is if it's reduced to the simple rubric of whether or not someone will pay money for a solution).
> For instance, if janitors is a highly respected and well paying job, would people still think less of sweeping floors and flushing toilets?
You're presuming that primary job satisfaction comes from external social validation. Time and time again we see that in cases where you would think that is the case, e.g. doctors who are well respected by society, children who are pushed into those careers by their parents can sometimes end up really unhappy because the internal motivation was never there, and many people who end up in that situation end up quitting and switching careers because life is too short to be in a career you hate just to make your parents happy.
Nobody is naturally internally motivated to pick up other people's shit. Societies with high levels of public cleanliness are that way because people in those societies clean up after themselves in public, not because people elect to spend their free time on a personal crusade to clean up after others.
