A lot of people seem to be realizing that knowledge work is mostly pointless. AI might give us the pleasure of finding out what happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers.
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We are, it’s true, living through a time of disruption. But what seems to differentiate this period from those of the past is the nature of the angst itself. Yes, AI is threatening jobs and disrupting industries. But Knowledge Workers have faced recessions, outsourcing, new technology and automations of many kinds before. Recent graduates always worry about breaking into the job market. Millennial professionals have navigated economic uncertainty their entire careers. What’s different about this moment is that the questions are not just economic but existential, the kind of questions that cause high-earning technical professionals to contemplate throwing it all away to start a goat farm in Washington or become a surf instructor in Costa Rica.
It strikes me as significant that the people who are usually the most insulated from economic upheaval, and seem to be well-positioned to ride out AI’s near-term impacts — highly paid executives and senior professionals with decades of institutional knowledge — are also uncertain about the future of their careers amid the rapid change nearly every industry is undergoing.
Some will say: good, fuck ‘em. In the 2010s, Knowledge Workers told everyone to learn to code while they sipped kombucha and played Xbox in beanbag chairs. Then, Knowledge Workers sat inside during the pandemic while frontline workers risked their health to make Amazon and Uber Eats deliveries. Now, those same Knowledge Workers are building AI that threatens to eliminate work for humans across industries and make a very few people wealthy beyond imagination. And these same assholes want pity now?
To that I say: fair enough...
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In 2019, Derek Thompson wrote in The Atlantic about “American Workism” where he described a trend among Knowledge Workers, particularly in the U.S., of increasingly seeking fulfillment, community and a sense of meaning from work that previous generations had garnered from religion. As Thompson wrote, Workism is “emotional — even spiritual. The best-educated and highest-earning Americans, who can have whatever they want, have chosen the office for the same reason that devout Christians attend church on Sundays: It’s where they feel most themselves.”
People have long held careers from which they’ve derived a deep sense of meaning. Traditionally, we’ve referred to those careers as vocations: a calling, a way of life. More than a job: a purpose.
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That’s the true beauty of Workism: It is manufactured to distract people from the hole in their souls that a vocation would otherwise fill. It is the opiate of commuters in quarter zips. And it works. It keeps talented people showing up at the office to argue over reports and strategy documents and rebrandings with the seriousness of pediatric heart surgery.
But Workism has a weakness. Like religion, it relies on faith’s triumph over logic. What would happen, then, if something threatened that faith? A paradigm shift that broke the spell of Workism? A sort of enlightenment that caused Knowledge Workers to start asking tough questions of their organizations and themselves. And what would happen if Knowledge Workers awoke from the spell of Workism with no financially viable alternative?
Well, it seems AI might offer us the pleasure of finding out.
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