In a recent Noema essay, Aaron Horwath asks a deceptively simple question: what happens when knowledge workers stop believing their work matters? With AI increasingly capable of doing the work itself, he argues that many professionals are not just worried about losing jobs. They are questioning the purpose of the careers they built. Horwath writes from inside this transition as the director of AI operations at a creative technology company.

Here are the Key Points from Horwath Essay:

• A project born from a desire to do something. Horwath begins with a commuter in his early thirties, spending more than half an hour on a monotonous call about EBITDA, margins, and costs. When the train empties, the man pulls knitting needles and pink yarn from his bag. He is making a winter hat for his niece. For the first time that morning, Horwath sees pride in his face. He says he is hearing more stories like this from his peers: people taking up pottery, painting, crochet, or dreaming about farms and lives off the grid. Beneath these fantasies is a growing desire to do something tangible and meaningful.
• The anxiety is existential. Knowledge workers have lived through recessions, outsourcing, and earlier waves of automation. What feels different now, Horwath argues, is that the anxiety goes beyond jobs and salaries. People are questioning the point of the work itself. Even highly paid executives and experienced professionals are uncertain about what their careers will look like. Horwath also recognizes the irony: these are often the same workers who once told everyone else to learn to code and are now building AI that threatens work across industries.
• Workism: when a job becomes a religion. Horwath draws on Derek Thompson’s idea of “Workism,” the tendency of educated professionals to seek meaning, identity, community, and fulfillment through their careers. He contrasts this with a vocation, where the work itself has a clear connection to service, purpose, or community. Drawing on David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs, Horwath suggests that Workism can help people tolerate work whose social value is difficult to see. Like religion, it requires a degree of faith.
• AI pops the Workism bubble. Knowledge work was already abstract. People often perform roles that support other roles, which support still more roles, making it difficult to see where the actual value is created. But at least humans were still doing the work. Now AI agents can produce strategies, campaigns, websites, reports, and other substantial outputs. Horwath wonders whether AI removes the last thing that made abstract knowledge work feel meaningful: the experience of actually doing it.
• The messy middle matters. This is perhaps Horwath’s most interesting point. The value of work is not always in the final output. It can also be found in the messy middle: conversations, disagreements, experiments, mistakes, collaboration, and relationships with colleagues. Yet many executives see AI as a way to reduce exactly those things by requiring fewer people and less collaboration.
• Horwath divides workers into two broad types. Outcome-first workers prioritize efficiency, results, and winning. Experience-first workers value the process, collaboration, creativity, and the people they work with. AI may be a clear win for the first group, but it could make work much less meaningful for the second. Research by Teresa Amabile supports this concern: creativity tends to flourish when people are motivated by interest and challenge rather than metrics and external pressure. Horwath then asks a bigger question: what if the people who leave because of this disillusionment simply do not return? Companies may eventually discover that the talent pool has moved on to more satisfying lives and projects.
• Post-Workism: escaping the inescapable. Horwath turns back to Debord, who believed the spectacle could absorb even attempts to escape it. Today, that might look like leaving tech to start a farm, then turning the farm into a Substack, YouTube channel, or business. You escape one system only to create another version of it.

So what can people actually do? Horwath suggests small acts of resistance: call a colleague instead of asking an AI agent, do some work slowly and experimentally, and preserve tasks that are better handled by humans. Most importantly, remember that Workism is a spectacle. Our spreadsheets, launches, and campaigns are rarely as important as we pretend they are.

People may not remember the work. They may remember who we were, the relationships we built, and how we treated each other.

And perhaps that is the real opportunity AI creates. Once we stop expecting our day jobs to give our lives meaning, we may have more room to do something that actually matters to other people and our communities.

Even if it begins with one knitted hat at a time.

Acknowledgement: This summary was generated using AI writing tools as part of my AI exploration process. For more information, check out the original article listed below.

Related Resource Link

Why Is Everyone In Tech So Sad? | Noema