1. The Status‑Game Around “Being Busy”

In the educated, coastal‑US environment I grew up in, replying “Honestly, slammed. Two product reviews, a board deck due, client dinner tonight” is high‑status.^[1] The script signals (a) I’m important enough for people to demand my time and (b) I have a socially approved purpose: knowledge work. Activities that can’t be narrated as “productive” are binge‑watching Squid Games 3, playing Call of Duty online, even spending an afternoon in the sauna with friends are quietly classed as distractions.

Behind that script sits a deeper proposition:

Premise A: A worthy adult life is structured primarily around work.
Premise B: If AI automates a large share of white‑collar tasks, many of us will lose the central pillar of meaning in our lives.

Goldman Sachs recently estimated that large‑language‑model automation puts the equivalent of ~300 million full‑time positions at risk worldwide.^[2] If you accept Premises A and B, that forecast feels existential.

I’m not convinced we should accept them.

2. A Historical Reality Check

Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins called hunter‑gatherers “the original affluent society”: field studies of !Kung groups show total foraging + food‑processing time of roughly 15 - 20 hours per week^[3].

These bands were not measured against OKRs. They told stories, produced intricate art, played, fought, flirted, raised children, invented religion, and did so on an energy and information budget tiny compared with ours.

Fast‑forward to 2024: the American Time Use Survey reports that full‑time employees still average 8.4 hours of work on weekdays they work, leaving ~7 waking hours a day for everything else, plus large blocks on weekends^[4]. Even under capitalism‑on‑hard‑mode we already spend thousands of hours annually outside formal employment yet most office workers do not describe those hours as their core source of identity. Something other than raw hours worked is doing the psychological heavy lifting.

3. Where Does the “Meaning” in Work Actually Come From?

Organizational psychologists point to three ingredients:

Purpose / significance: “I’m advancing a goal that matters.”
Self‑connection: “The work expresses who I am.”
Beyond‑self impact: “Someone else benefits.”^[5]

Notice: none of these require 40+ paid hours or a corporate Slack account. They do require structure, feedback loops and often o...

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