Published on June 30, 2025 3:03 AM GMT
1. The Status‑Game Around “Being Busy”
In the educated, coastal‑US environment I grew up in, replying “Honestly, slammed. Two product reviews, a board deck due, client dinner tonight” is high‑status.[1] The script signals (a) I’m important enough for people to demand my time and (b) I have a socially approved purpose: knowledge work. Activities that can’t be narrated as “productive” are binge‑watching Squid Games 3, playing Call of Duty online, even spending an afternoon in the sauna with friends are quietly classed as distractions.
Behind that script sits a deeper proposition:
Premise A: A worthy adult life is structured primarily around work.
Premise B: If AI automates a large share of white‑collar tasks, many of us will lose the central pillar of meaning in our lives.
Goldman Sachs recently estimated that large‑language‑model automation puts the equivalent of ~300 million full‑time positions at risk worldwide.[2] If you accept Premises A and B, that forecast feels existential.
I’m not convinced we should accept them.
2. A Historical Reality Check
Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins called hunter‑gatherers “the original affluent society”: field studies of !Kung groups show total foraging + food‑processing time of roughly 15 - 20 hours per week[3].
These bands were not measured against OKRs. They told stories, produced intricate art, played, fought, flirted, raised children, invented religion, and did so on an energy and information budget tiny compared with ours.
Fast‑forward to 2024: the American Time Use Survey reports that full‑time employees still average 8.4 hours of work on weekdays they work, leaving ~7 waking hours a day for everything else, plus large blocks on weekends[4]. Even under capitalism‑on‑hard‑mode we already spend thousands of hours annually outside formal employment yet most office workers do not describe those hours as their core source of identity. Something other than raw hours worked is doing the psychological heavy lifting.
3. Where Does the “Meaning” in Work Actually Come From?
Organizational psychologists point to three ingredients:
- Purpose / significance: “I’m advancing a goal that matters.”Self‑connection: “The work expresses who I am.”
Beyond‑self impact: “Someone else benefits.”[5]
Notice: none of these require 40+ paid hours or a corporate Slack account. They do require structure, feedback loops and often other human beings.
Paradoxically, surveys show we over‑index on work for meaning and over 90% of employees would trade pay for jobs they feel are meaningful.[6] But that willingness doesn’t imply that paid work is the only domain capable of supplying meaning; it often just feels like the most reliable, pre‑packaged option available.
4. Automation as a Liberation Constraint, Not an Existential Loss
The real scarcity isn't labor or capital, but meaningful structure or frameworks that give activities purpose and social connection. While many believe that AI threatens to hollow out our lives, it may instead remove the artificial constraints on human flourishing.
When routine cognitive work gets automated, attention gets liberated from spreadsheet maintenance and email triage, creating space for deeper pursuits: second careers, citizen science, better parenting, or building tools that matter to you.
What could emerge isn't idle utopia but something better: less drudgery, more purposeful engagement, as friction costs of money, coordination, and gate kept expertise dissolve.
5. Why “Just Watch More Netflix” Won’t Cut It
Objection: If we shrink paid workloads, won’t people slide into passive entertainment and get depressed?
Passive entertainment isn’t new; the !Kung had trance dances and elaborate story cycles. The key variable is agency. Self‑Determination Theory tells us well‑being grows when activities satisfy:
- Autonomy: I choose this.Competence: I get better with practice.Relatedness: people I care about are involved.
Joining a pick‑up Padel league, predicting the next NBA MVP, volunteering at EA Global, or assembling legos for an F1 car all score higher on those axes than the infinite TikTok scroll. The supply of high‑agency leisure is limited mainly by imagination and coordination which both problems software is unusually good at solving.
6. Countermoves for a Purpose‑Positive Future
Narrative shift inside elite culture
Make “I work 25 hours a week so I can run a community bio‑lab the other 15” a status marker.
Institutional design > individual heroics
Reduce default full‑time hours (e.g., Iceland’s 35‑hour pilot, France’s 32‑hour experiments). Divorce health insurance and retirement from 40‑hour employment. Fund public option meaning‑infrastructure: community maker‑spaces, libraries open until 10 p.m., stipends for civic projects.
Leisure engineering
Treat leisure as it's own user design space: with its own cadence, feedback, skill trees/score. Video‑game designers are world‑class at this; bring those mechanics to fitness clubs, local politics, mutual‑aid groups.
Personal experiments
Try a Season Off: 90 days at 20 hours/week, Track your subjective well‑being, skills, relationships, impact; publish the data.
7. Conclusion
Our ancestors’ lives were not hollow because they lacked expense reports, nor will ours be hollow if AI eats half of today’s slide‑making. Meaning is synthesized from purpose, agency, and relationship, resources that expand, not shrink, when automation lowers toil.
The real risk isn’t that we’ll have nothing to do; it’s that we’ll keep playing the “work is life” status game long after it stops binding us, sleepwalking through a civilizational opportunity for greater play, study, love, and collective projects.
When the bots come for spreadsheets, let’s greet them the way the !Kung greet a successful hunter: by throwing a communal feast and then telling more, better stories around the fire. The work of building those stories together will still be ours.
Discuss
