One reason I think so many of us are feeling disconnected from work is that work itself is disconnected from our lives.
For most of human history, work was literally and directly tied to living our lives. We hunted and gathered to feed ourselves, our families, and our tribes.
After the Agricultural Revolution, we worked the fields and raised animals to directly support how we lived. At the same time, the idea of markets developed, and we began selling the surplus and byproducts of our work. But the selling itself was still directly tied to the work we’d done previously.
Then the Industrial Revolution hit, and humans went to work in factories. And for the first time in our history, our work was separate in every way from our lives.
We left our farms and our cottage industries (aptly named). We stood at assembly lines for 10 or 12 hours a day, away from our “tribe,” moving or assembling widgets that had nothing to do with our day-to-day.1 We didn’t make the parts, build the factory, or come up with the ideas for what we were making.
But it was also physically separate from the rest of our lives. No longer did we work fields on or near our homes or in little shops in the town square.
Instead, we commuted away from home to work in an alien environment in the most anti-human way possible, literally putting our lives on hold for our shift. And the only things we had to show for it were little bits of paper or metal at the end of the week.
And once the Information Age hit, the disconnect became absolute. Now, most of us are completely disconnected from production altogether. We often don’t “make” things anymore. We administer, we meet, we talk about work through digital (no longer tangible) communication methods. And occasionally, we do something like sort of feels like actual work.
Few of us are close enough to the end product of what’s made, sold, and consumed to actually feel what it is we’re doing.
And now we have generative AI, and we’re steadily offloading what’s left of our work to a little homunculus that does everything for us.
So where does this leave us?
We’re heading toward another revolution, but I think it’s different from what all the AI pundits predict.
I think this disconnect is going to become so severe that we’ll push back and seek to return to the roots of human production.
More of us will step out on our own, or join together in small groups to make things that matter for people who care.
I think this AI revolution will end up becoming a revolution of meaning.
- Sure, Ford made sure that every American eventually had an automobile of their own. But it’s highly unlikely that you would have made the very same car that you, yourself, were driving. ↩︎
