You may be right, but I don't think experience is what makes people prioritize stability over anything else. I'd be so depressed at a real job like the one described, it would be irrelevant that it was stable and gave me extra time. Some people are ambitious, some just like variety.

Perhaps his aspirations had nothing to do with his day job?

Only if you don't have other aspirations in life. My day job is solely to fund my personal projects that I actually enjoy. Not everyone is out to be insanely rich.

This view may change as you get older and "unpredictability" starts to mean more negative experiences.

Your imagination is lacking.

Having no job or income and having to worry about how to afford food or rent is surely much worse than "just" having a stable job.

Or how about a super stressful job, like the Japanese salarymen who are literally killing themselves?

Nothing in the article said Arthur lived in the Bay Area.

They worked the same year 15 times, or maybe the same two months 90 times.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc. They aren’t incompetent because they worked the same job for 15 years. And they probably weren’t even laid off because they were deemed incompetent.

You just got unlucky enough to interview them instead of someone who got laid off after 15 years and were amazing at their job and could pick up a new tech they’d never heard of and immediately be off to the races.

It was from when there was a time when cat/dog food was wildy cheap. So people would eat it. It is just a leftover from the 60s/70s.

I met a thru-hiker on the Appalachian Trail that carried a few pouches of cat food. You need to carry emergency rations and they need to have decent nutritional content. But how do you stop yourself from eating it when mildly hungry? His theory was, it should be so gross that you wouldn't possibly eat it except in a true emergency. He made in from GA to CT without dipping into the forbidden slop.