The era of jobs is ending

Summary

Morning again.The alarm pleads. The phone lights up. For a second you’re no one. Then the memories rush in: the commute, the plain desk, the boss’s irritating face hovering in the back of your mind.You do the math you always do, have to do:Eight, nine hours a day.Forty, fifty years.If you’re lucky, you get a little retirement at the end before your body disintegrates.Yet quietly, another life is booting in the background.(Sorry for not writing much recently. My job wore me down. But this essay is a long one and took a lot of work. Enjoy, maybe?)Let’s get the tech bit out of the way, because it’s not the main point, but it is the accelerant.Most people met “AI” in late 2022 or something, poked ChatGPT once like it was a digital fortune cookie, got a mediocre haiku about their cat, and decided: ah yes, cute toy, overhyped, wake me when it’s Skynet. Then they went back to their inbox rituals.They have no idea what’s happening now.They haven’t seen the latest models that quietly chew through documents, write code, design websites, summarize legal contracts, and generate decent strategy decks faster than a middle manager can clear their throat.They haven’t seen a model hold a complex conversation, remember context, suggest workflows, generate visuals, write scripts, and debug itself in one continuous flow. They haven’t watched it do in twenty minutes what a whole team used to bill a week for.They haven’t looked closely at the humanoid robots on factory floors and in warehouses—still a bit awkward, still uncanny, but moving with that unsettling, patient inevitability. First they lift bins, then they do the “unsafe” tasks, then they do the “boring” tasks, then they do the tasks that were your job description last year.We don’t know what’s in one year.We have absolutely no idea what’s in five.Anyone who talks with certainty about 2030 is either lying or selling something.But this much is obvious:The system we built around jobs—as moral duty, as identity, as the only path to...