Aaron Horwath implements AI for a living, and in a good essay for Noema he asks why so many knowledge workers are losing faith in their careers:
In coffee shops and in the low-lit corners of bars, professionals are sharing dreams of “disappearing” or “living on a farm somewhere” or “going off the grid.” These aren’t fantastical daydreams; they are visions of escape shared in a tone that betrays an underlying existential angst, a fundamental doubt about work and careerism inspired by a seemingly increasingly common experience: waking up one morning at an existential precipice, struck with a sudden sense that knowledge work is, and perhaps always has been, pointless.
It’s definitely worth reading the whole thing if you find yourself in the same situation. He mentions two concepts that feel super relevant right now:
- Workism is Derek Thompson’s term for the way work has become the place we look for the meaning that earlier generations got from religion.
- The spectacle comes from the French theorist Guy Debord’s 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle. It’s his word for modern life lived secondhand, like watching other people travel on YouTube.
Horwath sees workism as a small version of the spectacle, where work only has to look important. He argues that as AI agents do more and more of the work, it gets even harder to keep pretending it matters.
His conclusion:
But perhaps the most powerful action of all is simply to maintain an awareness (and remind others) that Workism is a spectacle. For most employees, we owe it to each other to remind one another that this work is not, in the grand scheme of things, all that important. It is illusory. No one has ever died over a spreadsheet. The world does not wait with bated breath for product launches. A marketing campaign will not change the world. Almost no one will remember all the work we do. But they might remember the types of people we were, the relationships we had and how we treated the people we worked with.
I really need that last sentence to be true, because I’ve pretty much banked my whole career on it.