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Notes -
We can't. I was thinking recently of how the employment opportunities in my town have narrowed over the years - there's pretty much only one "main employer" left, and if head office back home in America decides it's no longer worth having a plant in my area, it'll be shut down or sold off and then probably shut down.
I agree about worker bees: we need them. But we seem to be in the middle of turning all our worker bees into drones, and expanding a few into queens. Where did the jobs in the coal mines or box factories or steel plants go? Right now, they're trying to shut down the coal mines under the aegis of climate change, but the writing was on the wall decades back - Maggie Thatcher didn't decide to break the power of the unions by going after the miners first despite it being a vital industry, it was inefficient, expensive and out-dated. Coal and steel were no longer kings, the old Industrial Revolution was on its last legs and being replaced, though few could see it, by the Information Economy where now the money came from financial services industries based in London: stock markets (the encouragement of the Sids to invest in newly privatised industries), investment banking, and the rise of new technology (leading to the dotcom bubble).
As for the box factories and steel plants? See the Rust Belt - manufacturing industries are moved overseas to cheaper countries with low-cost labour. And once those sources dry up, automation and AI will take over. Even white collar jobs are now not immune, as we see the prognostications about how AI will be able to do the jobs of X, Y or Z.
So the life script now is increasingly "success is for the very, very smart" in a more and more narrow definition of "very, very smart". You have to go to college because there's no hope of any kind of reasonable job without the piece of paper for a degree, and the kind of rewarding job is more and more "can you participate in the new Knowledge Economy - that is, are you able to work on the AI that is going to replace 90% of all other jobs?"
If you're a queen bee with the particular STEM skills that are currently in demand, you can have that life script sequence of success. If you're a worker bee, increasingly you're being turned into a drone. Hence all the pinning of hopes on both Fairy Godmother AI to produce post-scarcity Utopia, and UBI where it won't matter if you're a drone, everyone is a drone, and at least you won't starve.
(The alternative there may well be "live in the pod, eat the bugs, own nothing" instead of "UBI so you can be creative and artistic, meanwhile AI will run the world and create the magical cornucopia out of which endless prosperity flows").
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