This series began with a question: what makes the “human obsolescence” debate legitimate in the first place?
In Part 1, we began untangling the unspoken assumptions around “obsolescence”.
Today, we’ll continue pulling the thread to explore: why does the idea of obsolescence feel so totalizing?
Here’s what I mean: one moment, we voice job loss concerns. The next, we seem to contemplate complete and utter human irrelevance.
This distinction matters. We now know that the economic concerns around FOBO are justified—multiple sources report job displacement at scale.
But that existential dread surrounding obsolescence?
That’s a manufactured cultural phenomenon.
So what caused it?
I came to call this “the entanglement of work and meaning”.
In this process, workers are increasingly encouraged to derive a sense of purpose, identity and self-worth from their professional achievements.
And the result?
A bizarre “existential rug pull” that feels profoundly cynical: get workers to identify with work to boost their performance, then dismiss them and leave them questioning their self-worth as enchantment with automation takes center stage.
To understand how we let our self-worth get tangled up in spreadsheets (or is it prompts now?) and quarterly metrics, we have to look at how work was transformed from a daily chore into a spiritual duty.
From working for sustenance to working for salvation
In a seminal work “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”, Max Weber observed that the concept of a calling “in the sense of a life-task, a definite field in which to work” was first popularized among the Protestants, especially in Calvinism, which propagated the doctrine of predestination.
Believers who were unsure if they’d been destined to be saved, and suffered from “unprecedented inner loneliness,” began using the performance of “good works” as a way to demonstrate the surety of salvation. This led to a more understanding attitude towards the “accumulation of wealth”, which became morally sanctioned.
Weber explained how the process contributed to a dramatic reversal in the relationship between an individual and money. In a “traditionalist” approach to work, “the opportunity of earning more was less attractive than that of working less”, which meant an employer struggled to incentivize greater efficiency. A prospect of accumulation beyond one’s needs simply lacked appeal.
In the new order, the attainment of wealth “as a fruit of labour in a calling” signified God’s blessing. This, in turn, provided the bourgeois businessman with
“sober, conscientious, and unusually industrious workmen, who clung to their work as to a life purpose willed by God.”
Weber illustrated this with a quote from Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, which invokes a biblical warning from his strict Calvinist father:
“Seest thou a man diligent in his business? He shall stand before kings.”
Weber concludes by noting how a Puritan wanted to work for a calling, while his contemporaries are forced to do so. The idea of duty towards one’s calling lingers “like the ghost of dead religious beliefs”. Meanwhile, the newly established “victorious capitalism (. . .) rests on mechanical foundations” which no longer require justification.
Five hundred years later, this ghost continues to haunt our modern work ethic.
Soft capitalism: working for self-improvement and self-expression
Not many of us today would say we work in order to prove our salvation. In the late 20th century, capitalism pulled off an even slicker trick: it convinced us that work was the ultimate avenue for growth and self-discovery.
Sociologist Paul Heelas links it soft capitalism and a particular kind of work ethic, related to the worker’s self-concept. Heelas saw work ethic as a necessary link between the economic and the cultural, noting
“it is difficult if not impossible to think of people working without ascribing some value to what they are doing”.
But soft capitalism takes this further. For Heelas, soft capitalism placed increasing importance on culture, knowledge and creativity, rather than just straightforward technological or cost advantages, and increasingly relied on “self-work ethic”. Within this ethical orientation, “work (. . .)is taken to provide the opportunity to ‘work’ on oneself; to grow; to learn; to become more effective as a person”.
The motivation to work is enhanced by “virtue of the fact that personal development is involved”, with work acquiring meaning, “serving as a ‘source of significance’ and providing opportunities for ‘inner’ or psychological identity exploration and cultivation”.
This shift is not accidental: Heelas sees the emergence of soft capitalism as linked to the so-called “problem of work”. In the 1960s, scholars such as Peter Berger and Daniel Bell warned about work losing its value as a source of significance due to modernity’s two separate spheres: private, where “real life” happens and where the “authentic self” is situated; and public, relegated as pseudo-reality where one is “not really oneself”.
Bell diagnosed “the cultural contradiction in capitalism”, in which the norms within the economic realm (public sphere) and the norms of self-realization (the private sphere, which became the site of meaning) “lead people in contradictory directions”. The focus on the self, personal or familial, led to the diminished commitment to the ‘public’ workplace. This turn was seen as undesirable and even dangerous at the time, linked to “strikes, unrest, the criticism or forthright rejection of mainstream work by counterculturalists”.
The proposed solution? An “injection of culture” into work, with a goal of “developing meaning, value and motivation”. Soft capitalism operated under a slogan of “bringing life back to work”, promoting the idea of work as a space where one can exercise, express and develop personal life, and work on “being all that they can be”.
From then on, life shouldn’t be lived outside of the workplace, but instead, actively “explored and expressed at work”. Sounds familiar?
A couple of decades later, this culture morphed into even more extreme “ecstatic capitalism” with work aiming to become a central site of meaning. Nothing illustrates this better than a quote from a 2000 interview with billionaire Michael Saylor, talking about his approach to hiring:
“’Who are we competing with in order to capture your hearts and minds?Other software companies? Other employers? What else?’ (. . .) ‘Anything else you could do with your time,’ came Saylor’s response.
‘You could stay at home, raise the kids, go to college, write the Great American Novel, or slit your wrists and end it all.
My job is to make sure that I’m providing you with a combination of economic, psychic, and emotional benefits that makes working for Micro-Strategy better than anything else you can do.’”
Saylor illustrates the corporate drive for work not just to be meaningful, but to become the ultimate site of meaning.
Meaningful work or the management of meaning?
Given a choice, many of us would choose work where we can grow and express ourselves over the dreaded “bullshit job”.
But researchers Lips-Wiersma and Morris offer an important distinction, asking: is your work meaningful, or is the meaning of your work being managed?
In “Discriminating between ‘Meaningful Work’ and ‘Management of Meaning’”, the authors describe meaningful work as grounded in an understanding that humans naturally possess a “will to meaning”: for meaning to be authentic, “it has to be made, not received or found.”
In turn, management of meaning operates on the assumption that meaningfulness can and should be supplied by an organization. It treats the worker as an empty vessel that must be filled with meaning through management techniques, ultimately with a goal of extracting more discretionary effort.
The management of meaning tends to elevate symbolic corporate values, visions, and missions while refusing to address the actual material realities of workers: challenges such as power sharing, profit sharing, equitable wages, and job security.
The authors are clear: when organizations try to address values symbolically without addressing material reality, they actually enhance the employee’s experience of meaninglessness.
Why is “management of meaning” worth understanding today? Because it’s rampant during the AI transition. Researchers say:
“As meaning gets lost (. . .) motivation has to be invented. Through motivation the lack of meaning of work becomes substituted or converted into the question ‘how does one get people to act and produce under conditions in which they normally would not be ‘motivated’’ to work’?”
An unsettling internal memo sent by the CEO of Shopify is a textbook example. Lütke said:
“We are all lucky to work with some amazing colleagues, the kind who contribute 10x of what was previously thought possible. (..) And what’s even more amazing is that, for the first time, we see the tools become 10X themselves.
I’ve seen many of these people approach implausible tasks, ones we wouldn’t even have chosen to tackle before, with reflexive and brilliant usage of AI to get 100X the work done”.
But Lütke doesn’t stop at inspiration. His memo warns:
“years ago, I described Shopify as a red queen race based on the Alice in the Wonderland story–you have to keep running just to stay still. In a company growing 20-40% year over year, you must improve by at least that every year just to re-qualify.”
Believe it or not, many thought leaders praised Lütke’s leadership, but for me, something essential is missing: any mention of a payoff in exchange for ever-increasing productivity (unless you count the privilege of not getting fired).
The memo is all stick, no carrot – which is what a lot of narratives around automation feel like today.
That’s management of meaning at its purest: attaching moral value to a constant increase in output, while staying silent about the possibilities of distributing the productivity gains and improving material conditions of workers along the way.
From ecstasy to fear: a breaking point, or an opportunity?
Lütke’s memo, as well as the emergence of companies such as Artisan, with its “Don’t Hire Humans” abomination of a marketing campaign, signal a shift: capitalism is not “soft” anymore.
Automation strips down the promises—of achievement, or becoming your best self at work—using raw fear to instill compliance.
But the cracks already begin to show.
The Meta CTO admitted morale is “almost the worst it’s ever been”, as sources add Applied AI unit is “on the verge of revolt,” with engineers describing the work environment as “soul-crushing.”
Elsewhere, a Millennial career strategist Janel Abrahami observes how more and more people who get laid off just opt out of the job search process altogether. She explains:
“people are more willing to bet on themselves than fight for the chance to work for someone else”.
I keep reflecting on the early Facebook motto “move fast and break things!”
Because when automation moves faster and faster, things breaking is exactly where hope lives.
By stripping away the cozy fiction of workplace “purpose” and forcing us into a race we cannot win, hard capitalism is accidentally breaking the tie between work, meaning and identity.
While painful and destabilizing, this shift is a collective revelation: when the system stops pretending to care about our personal growth, we are finally free to stop looking for salvation in a spreadsheet.
The corporate grip on our identity has loosened, the illusions have shattered, and we are left with a strange, defiant gift: the space to redefine a sense of meaning and self-worth on our own terms.
Questions worth asking:
Do I freely create and discover meaning at work, or is the meaning being “managed” for me?
Where do I professionally over-give based on false premises?
What skills and abilities am I proud of, regardless of how today’s job market perceives them?
If I never had to work again, what would give me a sense of meaning?
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Tuesday, July 7
Authentic Intelligence: Reclaim Your Brilliance in the Age of Algorithmic Burnout [LIVE WORKSHOP]
This is for anyone who’s unsure or overwhelmed by the ever-present pressure to adapt, or “get left behind” (and become obsolete).
Drawing from my PhD research and interdisciplinary perspective on intelligence, we’ll explore: If AI stands for Artificial Intelligence, then what’s Authentic Intelligence?
What if this season isn’t about frantic “upskilling”, but mapping existing skills and abilities that AI will never replace?
Tuesday, June 30
Resist[AI]nce Book Club: “Feminist AI”
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