AI, Work, and the Fear of Losing Ourselves

I see a weird kind of schizophrenia in the way people talk about AI and jobs. On one hand, there’s this huge fear that AI will take all the jobs. On the other, we live in a culture where not having to work is considered success. Like, if you make enough money to quit, that’s the dream, right? Work is something we have to do, not something we want to do.

And if you look at meme culture (which, as absurd as it is, I think reflects deep truths about society) work is basically a joke. Every other meme is about how much we hate our jobs, how we’re just barely surviving the 9-to-5, how weekends are the only time we actually exist. If aliens landed today and studied our memes, they’d probably assume we were some kind of slave species, forced to labor against our will.

So why the panic when AI threatens to take that burden away? I don’t think people are afraid of losing their jobs. I think they’re afraid of what happens after. If your job disappears, and you suddenly have no structure, no purpose, nothing telling you what to do every day, then what? I think a lot of people would fall apart. Not because they love their work, but because without it, they don’t know who they are. Change my mind.