Credits
Aaron Horwath is the director of AI operations at a creative technology company where he is focused on implementing AI in a way that supports both humans and business.
On a recent morning commute, I sat on a train in one of those awkward four-person configurations with a shared table. Across from me sat a typical commuter: early 30s, slacks, dress shirt, dirty white sneakers, hair a little disheveled, AirPods in, basking in the glow of an open MacBook.
For over half an hour, I listened to this young man as he was on a call explaining, in painfully monotone detail, EBITDAs, margin expansion opportunities, cost structures, ARR, etc. On and on he went until the screeching of the train’s brakes signaled our arrival at the final station. But as everyone else around us began shuffling to disembark, I watched the man begin digging frantically through a leather bag at his side. Intriguing! I wondered what he’d pull out. A copy of “Atomic Habits”? A framed portrait of Gary V? A Mac mini running OpenClaw?
None of the above. Instead, he took out two long knitting needles. Between them dangled a mound of pink yarn. He explained to me that he was making a winter hat for a niece. And for the first time that morning, I noticed a glint of pride and excitement in his eyes.
The hat was a project born from a desire, as he put it, to do something.
Among my Knowledge Worker peers, I am hearing this more and more often: people who want to pick up pottery, painting, crochet or other old-timey analog hobbies. 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. Perhaps you too have felt such a feeling, a rising tide of overwhelming, indescribable melancholy, slowly threatening to envelop you in your Ikea office chair.
“Among my Knowledge Worker peers, I am hearing this more and more often: people who want to pick up pottery, painting, crochet or other old-timey analog hobbies.”
“Among my Knowledge Worker peers, I am hearing this more and more often: people who want to pick up pottery, painting, crochet or other old-timey analog hobbies.”
This disillusionment is infectious. One person speaks of it and others begin nodding: They too have felt it, the drop in motivation, the sense of being distant from their work, the lack of sleep, the concerns about the future. These conversations inevitably turn to fundamental questions about careers: What the fuck are we actually doing? What the fuck is the point of all of this?
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. But this sweeping disenchantment begs a fascinating (or terrifying or sad) set of questions: What is this angst plaguing Knowledge Workers? And what happens to a society and its industries if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers overnight?
Workism: Praise Thee
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.
A vocation emphasizes skills, values and the desire to contribute something beneficial. Vocations have traditionally referred to careers that are challenging, socially impactful, often rewarding in ways other than financial. These are your teachers, nurses, firefighters, social workers, paramedics or even service providers with direct connections to the communities and customers they serve, like mechanics, plumbers or electricians. Even on bad days, deep down, most of these folks find their work rewarding in important and intangible ways.
But those aren’t the careers young people have dedicated their lives to. Instead, graduates are overwhelmingly taking jobs in finance, consulting or technology. There’s no doubt that getting these jobs is competitive, and that they are demanding, complex and require navigating layers of politics and bureaucracy, a ton of ass-kissing, long work hours, heavy cognitive workloads, advanced skillsets and the emotional burden of a near-constant threat of layoffs. But so much of the work lacks any altruistic upside.
“Perhaps you too have felt such a feeling, a rising tide of overwhelming, indescribable melancholy, slowly threatening to envelop you in your Ikea office chair.”
“Perhaps you too have felt such a feeling, a rising tide of overwhelming, indescribable melancholy, slowly threatening to envelop you in your Ikea office chair.”
In “Bullshit Jobs,” David Graeber cataloged people who admitted their jobs serve no meaningful function. Slide decks built for projects that will never launch. Heated debates over the minute details of software features nobody asked for. Agonizing over administrative processes to help money move from one rich person to another. Optimizing every word of an ad no one will notice for a service no one needs. Resting and vesting — when engineers and other highly paid workers get to sit around and wait for their stock to vest — and promotion-driven development, where developers ignore what’s good in favor of what appears to be good when they’re up for a promotion.
The altruism in these careers, then, is hard to find. So how does anyone do it without losing their mind?
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.
Popping The Workism Bubble
Knowledge work has always been inherently abstract. Plenty of these jobs, particularly at larger organizations, are structured like Russian nesting dolls: roles designed to support other roles, which support still other roles, layer after layer, until it’s no longer clear where there’s a solid center to be found. It’s easy to see how, to a plumber, a carpenter or a line cook, work of this nature can appear like exactly what David Graeber called it: bullshit.
Knowledge work’s one saving grace, until recently, was that it was still executed by humans. We were needed. It was flesh-and-blood humans who sat down to work through a challenge, built the slide deck, wrote the customer response and developed the strategy. Even if it was existentially meaningless, there was human thought, collaborative work and creativity poured into that work, giving it life.
Now, AI agents are increasingly executing much of that work for Knowledge Workers. It is common for people responsible for integrating these tools into their organizations, myself included, to describe the future of work as one in which all humans will essentially be managers of armies of AI agents. That seems pretty great. Let the software compile the reports, chase down the data, format the deck, draft the first pass of documentation and handle the dozens of small, repetitive tasks that used to quietly eat an afternoon. But in many cases, employees under pressure from leaders to produce more are using AI agents for far more than grunt work: formulating complete business strategies, generating full marketing campaigns, building entire websites, drafting strategy for whole divisions of an organization. From a single email to an entire corporate strategy, the outputs of individuals, teams and organizations are increasingly generated in an instant by AI.
But does this power — this additional level of abstraction — take people too far, in some sense, from their work? Does something feel … off … about having someone, or something, else execute nearly all the work, even if the end product didn’t feel very meaningful to begin with?
Debord’s Spectacle: I Don’t Wanna Do This Anymore
“In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.”
That’s the opening paragraph of Guy Debord’s “The Society of the Spectacle.” I will fail to summarize the book adequately. It is simultaneously exciting and impenetrable. But the main thrust of Debord’s argument is this: Spectacle is a feature of late capitalism in which life, rather than being directly lived, is perpetually mediated. There is always something between us and the thing we are supposed to be experiencing. I don’t talk to my mom; I text her. I don’t travel; I watch other people travel on YouTube. I don’t have sex; I watch porn. In late capitalism, the medium replaces the experience.
Workism is a microcosm of the larger spectacle: a world where appearing busy, important and uniquely knowledgeable is as valuable as actually being any of those things, and where work needs only to appear impactful rather than actually be impactful. As Debord writes in Thesis 12: “The spectacle presents itself as a vast, inaccessible reality that can never be questioned. Its sole message is: ‘What appears is good; what is good appears.’” This is Workism’s most convincing argument: The work must be important because, well, we’re all here, aren’t we? Signing in. Staying late. Every week.
“The questions today are not just economic but existential.”
“The questions today are not just economic but existential.”
Adding AI to the spectacle feels existentially daunting because it moves us even further from the work we do, and its value. I don’t build the pitch that wins the client; I write the query that tells the AI to write it, and then I check the work afterward. I don’t gather the materials and write the industry newsletter; my agent does it. Before, that work might’ve felt cheap and unsatisfying, deep down, but it was still ours. Now AI is being forced on organizations in ways that call the value of the entire enterprise of Workism itself into question.
And this is where things get particularly interesting. I don’t think Debord imagined something so seismically paradigm-shifting that it could abstract work to an extent that it would shake the working class, or, in the case of Knowledge Workers, enough to rupture a spectacle like Workism. But with the introduction of AI, it is as if, over the past 30 years, we have been slowly taking steps away from the direct experience of life and work, and AI risks pushing us far enough that the illusion becomes entirely visible.
Organizations find themselves in a pickle. They want to integrate AI into their operations, as do their shareholders. And they will. In the short term, the potential efficiency gains are too good to pass up. And, done right, it can offer benefits to both businesses and employees. But what makes many executives most excited about AI — less collaboration, fewer people — risks dismantling the structures that hold the very organizations they lead together.
What if the enlightenment from Workism, ironically, is delivered by Workism’s most revolutionary product? And what does that mean for the employees who have spent their careers praying at the Workism altar?
What’s At Stake: The Value Of The Messy Middle
To understand why AI threatens to kill Workism specifically, we have to understand what has kept faith in Workism alive.
In Thompson’s article, he states that one thing people look for in Knowledge Work jobs is community: to spend time with like-minded people with similar interests, to collaborate with others to solve problems. Relationships are the foundation of the human workplace, and Knowledge Work’s redeeming value. None of us will make it to Knowledge Work’s pearly gates, but at least we will make our false journey together.
Ironically, it’s a growing dream of executives that an organization of employees armed with a swarm of agents and powerful LLMs no longer need to collaborate with one another to gather information, ideate or execute a project. In their vision for the future, work goes from a messy experience of learning and exploring to something more akin to assembly-line production. As Debord wrote back in 1967, “This proletariat is being objectively reinforced by the virtual elimination of the peasantry and by the increasing degree to which the ‘service’ sectors and intellectual professions are being subjected to factory-like working conditions.”
But sometimes messy inefficiency is a feature, not a bug. In a recent episode of Bill Simmons’s podcast, the writer Chuck Klosterman argued with Bill about the role of technology in sports, particularly when it comes to refereeing. Consider tennis. The days of Johnny Mac blowing up at a referee over a bad line call are over. With Hawk-Eye technology, the judgment is right 100% of the time. In the NBA, the challenge system now helps to ensure that bad calls do not change a game. The MLB has integrated an automated ball-strike system. These technologies have been implemented with very different levels of success, but the goals are the same: Get officiating right more often — maybe always. Who could complain? It’s so efficient!
“What would happen if Knowledge Workers awoke from the spell of Workism with no financially viable alternative? It seems AI might offer us the pleasure of finding out.”
“What would happen if Knowledge Workers awoke from the spell of Workism with no financially viable alternative? It seems AI might offer us the pleasure of finding out.”
Klosterman argues that bad calls are a natural and fun part of games. In fact, bad calls have created iconic sports moments that people still talk about. Sports are human constructs and the messiness of human error, whether by player or referee, is part of them. Getting calls right 100% of the time may be objectively better, but it is subjectively less interesting and entertaining. And entertainment is the goal of sport.
Knowledge work is strikingly similar. Sure, an AI that can produce in minutes a spot-on project that would have taken hours is cool. But the rate of slide deck creation isn’t what is going to retain talent. Employees overwhelmingly choose to remain or leave their roles because of their colleagues and/or bosses, and the quality of the experience of the messy middle a workplace offers. Those are the elements that make work fun—and valuable.
But not everyone feels that way. In my experience, there are two broad categories of Knowledge Workers. The first are outcome-first workers. Their focus is on the business, on winning, on efficiency. Human needs and faults and emotions are an obstacle to be overcome.
The second group has an experience-first perspective. These workers love the messy middle. They value the journey. They want their organizations to perform well but as a natural consequence of collaboration, debate and shared struggle with people they actually like. Many experience-first people are artists outside of work. Photographers, directors, screenwriters, sculptors, painters, poets, writers. Many are active volunteers. For these people, to be pulled away from their economically unviable passions requires something in return: a company experience with freedom for exploration, creativity, problem solving and cool colleagues.
Research suggests this group needs that environment to do their best work. Harvard Business School’s Teresa Amabile spent decades studying what produces genuinely creative, high-quality output. Her Intrinsic Motivation Principle determines that people do their most creative and innovative work when motivated by the work itself — the interest, the challenge, the enjoyment — not by outcomes or metrics. The environments that kill creativity are political, risk-averse and relentlessly outcome-focused. The environments that stimulate it are collaborative, idea-driven and free. The messy middle, in other words, isn’t inefficient. It’s the condition under which genuinely valuable work gets produced.
“Workism is a microcosm of the larger spectacle: a world where appearing busy, important and uniquely knowledgeable is as valuable as actually being any of those things.”
“Workism is a microcosm of the larger spectacle: a world where appearing busy, important and uniquely knowledgeable is as valuable as actually being any of those things.”
It’s important to note that the impact of removing the messy middle from the work experience of these two groups is asymmetrical: For outcome-first people, it is a victory. For experience-first people, it undermines the foundation of work.
As I’m writing this essay, big companies are on a layoff bender. Thousands of people are being fired all over the place. Executives are often claiming these headcount reductions are a result of AI. They aren’t. At the moment, AI automation is not creating anywhere near the increased efficiency necessary to justify hundreds of thousands of lost jobs.
We’ve been through waves of hiring and firing a thousand times before. But this time might be different. In the past, there was always a fresh cohort of workers waiting to be brought in. But what if talent stops coming back? What if the AI transformation gone wrong makes top talent — particularly those who are experience-first by nature — lose faith in Workism en masse? What if, when companies go to replenish headcounts, talent freed from the Workism spectacle has turned to different versions of their lives? What if their side projects suddenly became profitable? The talent pool increasingly doesn’t own homes and doesn’t plan on having kids, so it has perhaps never been easier to make a career pivot toward something that is genuinely satisfying in ways corporate life isn’t.
What would Debord say? Well, he had serious doubts about the possibility of leaving the spectacle behind.
Post-Workism: Escaping The Inescapable
As Debord puts it, “Complacent acceptance of the status quo may also coexist with purely spectacular rebelliousness—dissatisfaction itself becomes a commodity as soon as the economy of abundance develops the capacity to process that particular raw material.”
At some point, in other words, the spectacle will put economic pressure on you that you’ll need to meet. In today’s world, that might mean starting a YouTube channel and a Substack about how you abandoned your tech career to start a horse rescue farm, ultimately turning yourself and your life into a commodity that feeds the larger societal spectacle. Or it might mean starting a company of your own, thereby suddenly needing to create a spectacle attractive to potential employees. Either way, you are doomed to exit one version of the spectacle only to be absorbed into another one. That’s the logic of the spectacle: It reabsorbs even the dissatisfied in order to sustain itself.
Debord believed escape from the spectacle was impossible. He went on to dissolve his own movement rather than watch it become institutionalized, and then drank himself to death in the countryside.
Some will certainly leave Knowledge Work — the most disillusioned, the most artistically talented or motivated, the most existentially sensitive to a sudden moment of enlightenment, the financially able. But many more will remain, either by choice or necessity, to face a work experience where the humanity of work is eroding away. Are those who chose to remain, or who simply cannot leave, doomed to spend their careers existentially distraught?
“The environments that kill creativity are political, risk-averse and relentlessly outcome-focused. The environments that stimulate it are collaborative, idea-driven and free.”
“The environments that kill creativity are political, risk-averse and relentlessly outcome-focused. The environments that stimulate it are collaborative, idea-driven and free.”
Debord also believed the spectacle could be undermined through deliberate acts: hijacking spectacular images and turning them against themselves, drifting through urban space in ways that resist its geography and constructing moments of genuine, unmediated experience that the spectacle cannot metabolize. At work, that might mean jumping on a call to talk through a problem with a colleague instead of querying an agent for the answer. Or executing work the old-fashioned way — meandering, exploratory — with the understanding that it may be slower but might produce something more genuinely human. Or simply deciding that certain work is best left to human hands entirely. Anything that preserves the elements of work that have made it worth doing in the first place.
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.
And once freed from the false satisfaction of believing we are changing the world with our day jobs, perhaps we will be inspired to fill that hole with something real — true altruism, not its artificial Workism substitute — by actually trying to impact real people, in our communities, in real ways.
Even if it’s just one knitted hat at a time.