In an essay about Gen Z, human dignity and meaningful futures, the philosopher Rachel Robison-Greene describes a conversation with one of her students. The student is bright and creative, someone whose teacher believes the sky should be the limit. Yet she does not experience the future as open. She sees meaningful jobs being cut by governments or handed to AI, and wonders whether the sensible response is to find work she can leave behind at the end of the day, saving her real attention for the hobbies and interests that still belong to her.
I have spent much of my working life in learning and development. For more than twenty-five years I have stood in rooms with people talking about possibility, growth, capability, change. Beneath all the models, exercises and conversations sits an assumption we rarely state aloud: if you develop yourself, more of the world will become available to you. You learn, you grow, you become more capable, and doors open.
But what happens when a person develops and the doors continue to disappear?
What happens when we keep telling young people to become adaptable, resilient and employable while the institutions using those words are busy reducing the number of places they might enter?
The student’s response did not sound like laziness to me. It sounded like someone reading the terms and conditions.
The broken promise of potential
My generation was handed a fairly durable story about work. It was never equally true for everyone, and it contained plenty of exploitation, but the broad outline held enough power to organise a life. Study hard. Acquire skills. Find your place. Build a career. Become useful. Your usefulness will purchase security, identity and some measure of belonging.
We have spent decades adding more instructions. Build a personal brand. Maintain a network. Keep up with technology. Become a lifelong learner. Prepare for jobs that do not yet exist. Make yourself visible. Make yourself indispensable.
Now the same culture tells young people that many entry-level roles may be automated before they get a chance to enter them. The first rung of the ladder is being removed while they are still being coached on how to climb.
The damage is not only financial. It is narrative. The inherited story said that effort and development would open the future. When that story stops convincing, the person who withdraws belief may be responding rationally to a broken bargain.
We are quick to diagnose younger generations when they stop performing hope in the approved manner. We call them disengaged, entitled or fragile. We reach for another workshop on resilience. It is easier than asking whether their pessimism contains an accurate perception of the world we have built for them.
A closed future is more than a prediction about the labour market. It becomes a way of seeing. You stop imagining what you might become and start calculating what can still be protected. You lower your exposure. You keep the job at arm’s length. You save your love for somewhere else.
The life outside work
There is wisdom in refusing to give an employer your whole identity.
Perhaps we asked paid work to carry too much. Income, status, friendship, purpose, identity, belonging, self-expression, growth: we piled nearly every human need onto the job and then acted surprised when redundancy felt like a small death.
There is nothing second-rate about finding meaning in friendship, art, walking, gardening, music, family life, voluntary work or the private pursuit nobody intends to monetise. These may be the places where a life is most fully lived. A hobby does not become trivial because nobody is measuring its output. An interest does not need a business model to justify the hours given to it.
The refusal to hand work every part of the self can be an act of sanity.
And yet I cannot quite accept the settlement being offered: eight spiritually vacant hours in exchange for enough money to become human afterwards.
There is a difference between freeing life from the tyranny of work and surrendering the possibility that work itself might be worth doing. Paid employment does not need to provide a complete philosophy of life, but the hours still belong to a human being. Attention is being spent. Abilities are being exercised or allowed to decay. Relationships are being formed. Consequences are entering the world.
If we agree that work is simply the dead zone through which a person must pass to reach their actual life, we leave an enormous portion of human existence inside systems designed around extraction and endurance. The job may not be the meaning of a life, but it should not require the suspension of one either.
When usefulness becomes identity
The arrival of generative AI has exposed a confusion that was already present.
We have spent years describing people as human resources, human capital, talent pipelines, knowledge workers and productivity units. We tell people to market themselves, optimise themselves and demonstrate their value. The language turns a person into an economic object so gradually that the change can be difficult to notice.
Then a machine appears that can produce text, code, images, reports and presentations at remarkable speed. If I have learned to understand myself primarily as a producer of those things, the machine does not merely threaten my employment. It threatens the story I have been using to explain why I matter.
But the task was never the person.
A person is not a bundle of tasks waiting to be automated.
I write that as someone who is deeply involved with these systems. I use AI every day. I work with agents that search, retrieve, organise and help me think. I have felt my own capabilities expand through the collaboration. I am interested in what becomes possible when we stop using new tools merely to do old work faster. I have written before about the identity displacement hiding beneath the question What are we becoming?, and about the danger of becoming a spectator of our own cognition.
I do not believe the only possible relationship between humans and AI is competition. But these tools are entering a culture already obsessed with speed, scale and reduced headcount. They can release people from repetitive work, making more room for judgment, creativity, care and thought. They can also make the old arrangement more ruthless: fewer people producing more output while the time saved flows upwards as profit rather than outwards as freedom.
The technology does not decide which future arrives. That is a question of ownership, power, culture and design.
If AI gives us more capability while leaving more people with less sense of possibility, what exactly have we improved?
Camus and Frankl at the same table
Robison-Greene turns to Albert Camus and Viktor Frankl for help with her student’s predicament.
Camus begins with the moment when the scenery collapses and the question why? breaks through the repetition of waking, travelling, working, eating and sleeping. The universe does not hand us a written explanation. There is no cosmic careers service waiting to reveal the position for which we were made.
There is freedom in this. Meaning does not have to arrive stamped and authorised by an employer, an institution or the universe itself. A person can stop waiting for permission to live.
Frankl carries a different lantern. Writing from his experience in the concentration camps, he insists that external circumstances, however brutal, cannot completely exhaust the human capacity for love, attention, beauty and moral choice. The value of the person is not granted by comfort, productivity or success. Human dignity is unconditional or it is not dignity at all.
I do not feel the need to choose one of them and send the other away. Camus protects us from waiting for an external authority to issue our lives with meaning. Frankl protects us from confusing the absence of guarantees with the absence of value.
Together they offer something stronger than another piece of career advice. There may be no predetermined role that will complete us, but this does not make us disposable. There may be no cosmic promise that our plans will work, but our worth does not rise and fall with the labour market.
Still, Frankl’s insight becomes dangerous when institutions borrow it too easily. The fact that human beings can find meaning under terrible conditions does not absolve anyone from changing those conditions. Resilience can become the spiritual technology by which people are trained to tolerate the intolerable. A sunset seen from a prison camp reveals something astonishing about the human spirit. It is not an argument for preserving the camp.
We should be careful not to answer structural abandonment with private meaning-making alone. Telling young people that they can always find purpose in love, art or attitude may be true. It can also become a way of leaving the machinery untouched.
What kind of future are we asking them to enter?
The usual question is how young people should prepare for the future of work. It appears in conferences, reports, school strategies and corporate presentations. Which skills will they need? How should they adapt? How can they become AI-ready?
I wonder whether the question points in the wrong direction.
What kind of future are we asking them to adapt to?
A meaningful future cannot be created by teaching each person to manufacture a private sense of purpose while the public world becomes increasingly hostile to human participation. Meaning is personal, but the conditions in which it grows are shared. People need time, material security, room to experiment, places to contribute, and some experience of their judgment having consequences.
They need forms of education that do more than prepare them to compete with machines. They need work in which efficiency is not the only recognised good. They need institutions that allow them to participate in decisions about the technologies shaping their lives. They need permission to make things that are not immediately useful and to develop abilities for which the market has not yet invented a price.
This is where the AI conversation becomes a design question rather than a forecast. We are not standing beside a finished future waiting to discover what it will do to us. We are making choices now about which tasks machines should perform, which decisions require human judgment, who receives the value created, and what the saved time is for.
In After the Keyboard, I wrote that the disappearance of elaborate prompting will not make articulation irrelevant. We will still need to know what we mean. The same is true at the scale of a society. Greater technical capability does not relieve us of the need to decide what kind of life that capability is meant to serve.
Before we design the future of work, we need some idea of the future of being human.
Keeping the future open
I keep returning to that student and the future she cannot experience as open.
I do not want to tell her to improve her attitude. I do not want to offer resilience as a polite name for accepting less. Nor do I want to insist that she find her one true calling in paid work and give the company everything she has.
Her dignity does not depend on finding a role the machine cannot perform. Her life will contain sources of meaning no labour market can issue or revoke. Love, friendship, attention, creation, service, beauty, refusal, play: none of these become worthless when they fail to appear on a balance sheet.
But she is also entitled to ask more of the future than a private life rescued from the edges of work. She is entitled to enter a world in which her growing capacities have somewhere to go, where participation means more than remaining useful to a system until a cheaper substitute arrives.
A meaningful future is not a vacancy waiting to be filled. It is a world in which a person can enter, contribute, change direction, make something unnecessary, care for someone who cannot repay them, and discover capacities nobody knew to measure.
If young people can no longer feel that openness, the task is not to correct their perception. It is to ask what we have closed, who benefits from keeping it closed, and whether we are willing to open it again.
The future has to be more than a slot someone has not automated yet.