among the many new careers that have sprung up recently none is perhaps as curious as that of a water sommelier whose job it is to understand different kinds of bottled water and guide presumably confused consumers about which kind of water to drink with what kind of food nobody in their right minds could have foreseen the possibility of this being a legitimate job and few perhaps still do even a traditional sommelierthe one that helps us choose the wine in a fancy restaurantperforms a function few would have thought of as a function and yet not only is it a profession it is very highly paid and comes accompanied by pomp a touch of hauteur and a lot of reverential selfregard underneath the apparent strangeness of these kind of careers lies a principle that needs to be examined that what we call work is not fixed and that with time and context new careers spring up around us all the time the meaning of work has become increasingly arbitrary or at the very least culturally constructed because of our ability to naturalise whatever our current reality is this seems like an organic development that is not worthy of too much thought or comment work is whatever we agree to call work and pay for and what we are choosing to call work is changing one pattern that can be seen quite clearly is the growing energy around the act of consumption as against the historical centrality of the act of production as production becomes relatively routine and automated the excitement is shifting towards developing the ecosystem around consumption earlier we worked hard to make things so that we could consume them production was the credit side of our life and consumption the debit there was a science to production there were important sounding professions that involved doing things that looked like work consumption on the other hand was either an indulgence or a chore we earned money through production which was spent by acts of consumption that has been changing for a while and is poised to change much more dramatically over the years the service sector has been the fastest growing part of economies in most parts of the world the idea of service is really about catering to the many intangible and often inexplicable needs that human beings have given that human needs take new forms and shapes all the time new hitherto undreamt of jobs have a good chance of being born and going forward this movement is only going to intensify increasingly we are seeing the rise of jobs that were not thought of as jobs till recently apart from sommeliers today we have personal trainers event managers wedding planners beauty advisors at retail outlets fashion bloggers life coaches djs at parties app developers data miners gadget reviewers all jobs that have come into being recently in a digital world consumption becomes a kind of production that easy separation between production and