Career Crisis and Meaningless Work
I sat on the train that morning surrounded by people scrolling through their phones, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were all in the same business: killing time before something more meaningful starts. What happens when an entire class of workers quietly realizes their jobs don’t actually do anything? Not the kind of existential dread that hits during a layoff—more like the slow, creeping suspicion that the thing you’re paid to do might as well be rearranging deck chairs. David Graeber documented this years ago in Bullshit Jobs , where people confessed to building slide decks for projects that would never launch, or shuffling data between systems with no clear purpose. Now, with AI threatening to expose just how much of knowledge work is busywork, we’re about to find out what happens when an economy runs on pretend productivity for decades. Introduction to the Problem The tension between digital saturation and analog reclaiming isn’t just a vibe—it’s showing up in t...