On a deep level? I once worked at UPS loading trucks for a winter season just because I was in between jobs. It was just about the hardest I ever worked and was an interesting experience. Are you implying that I should be forced to work tech jobs for the rest of my life just because I qualify for them? Should I view my specialized skills as chains?
It's a free country (the U.S. is at least) and by working in one job you are always implicity creating an opening in whatever other jobs you have opted not to take. I do understand your argument, and theoretically you are right: he perhaps took a job from someone who needed it more. But I can make the same argument about the service economy: if I mow my own lawn, am I taking money away from landscapers? If I cook at home, if I learn to fix my own bike, etc. etc. That kind of think is deeply disturbing to me. We each have to live our own lives at the end of the day.
I didn't mean it at all in the sense that he's stealing those jobs, but that he is seeing it as personal development where most people in this situation have little choice but to bear this sort of profession over the course of their lives. He gleefully recounts how he now saw takeout food in terms of the manual labor he had to do, but sees it as a fun life lesson as opposed to the crushing realization that your life-force is seeping away with every bill. The poverty tourism is what I find sick. He can, and did quit the experience as soon as he was tired with it.
I think intention matters here and his was not to demean or "sight-see" the life of poor people. _You_ are choosing to view this from the most unfavorable angle.
It's a free country (the U.S. is at least) and by working in one job you are always implicity creating an opening in whatever other jobs you have opted not to take. I do understand your argument, and theoretically you are right: he perhaps took a job from someone who needed it more. But I can make the same argument about the service economy: if I mow my own lawn, am I taking money away from landscapers? If I cook at home, if I learn to fix my own bike, etc. etc. That kind of think is deeply disturbing to me. We each have to live our own lives at the end of the day.