You Are Not Your Job

Saying "I am a software engineer" is beginning to feel like saying "I am a calcultor" in 1950 now that digital machines can use electrical circuits to count, add, multiply - it's not long until they'll be able differentiate a non-continuous function... You're beginning to feel less-than-useful.

This bothers a lot of people for a reason (I think) that has nothing to do with the technology. The fear isn't really about losing a job title, it's about losing the story you tell yourself about who you are.

It's worth reminding ourselves of how narrative plays a role in this transition. We're the storytelling species. We wake up and narrate ourselves into existence. "I am a software engineer". "I am a doctor". "I am a teacher".

These statements feel like facts, but they're fictions we've constructed and believed so thoroughly that we can't separate them from our actual selves. Our ability to believe our own stories is called the secret of our species' success. Collectively we use our stories to build societies, culture, religion — on our own, we use our labor to build identity.

Half your life is spent working. It's reasonable that we build a self around it. In fact it's effortless. At its core, identifying by our labor is a silent assertion that "I am what I do" which is no more true than "I am what I eat".

I like Susan Fiske's research on how humans judge each other shows something worth sitting with. When you meet someone, you assess them on two dimensions. The first is warmth - do you believe they mean you well? The second is competence - do you believe they're capable?

The order matters. You evaluate someone's warmth first to gauge their intent before ability. Before you even care whether someone can do something, you need to know "will this person hurt or help me"?

My technical skills are being disrupted by machines - that's fine I'll go do other things. Being replaced is what is "supposed to happen". We don't mourn the telephone operator. We don't build statues for bank tellers.

Capitalism is a machine for maximizing the allocation of money to extract resources to produce value - automating away human labor happens in the process because human are expensive and inefficient.

Thus far we have automated away "wasteful" or "unnecessary" jobs. Perhaps the elevator operator was your friend, someone you saw everyday. I'm not certain their purpose was "useless". They're gone nonetheless.

This is the whole point of the system. Yes, we don't want humans hand-churning butter forever so unemployment numbers are at zero - hooray?

Your material needs and wellbeing are important, make no mistake. Whether or not you are taken care of is entirely in the realm of the social contract, politics, and human governance. We possess the means to care for everyone -- yet choose not to. It is hard for humanity to look in the mirror.

Whether you do well through an economic transition or not has little to do with the cause (AI, digital technology, industrialization, coal), and more to do with the social and political structures which exist around you (which is a blog post for another day).

But warmth. Empathy. The ability to sit with someone in their confusion and make them feel understood. The ability to crack a joke at exactly the right moment and remind someone that they're not alone. The capacity to be fully present with another person, to see them not as a role they're playing but as a whole human being… that cannot be automated away and hopefully never will.

Your existence is a measurement of your relationships to the poeple and world around you. Buber wrote about "I-It" and "I-You" relationships, (Ich-Du in german). An "I-It" relationship treats the other person as an object, a function, something to be used. A doctor in an I-It relationship with their patient is fixing a broken thing. A software engineer in an I-It relationship with their coworkers is just executing tasks. An I-You relationship is mutual and real. The other person isn't a role or a function. They're a whole self. Buber said human life finds its meaningfulness in those relationships. It is in how you relate, not in what you produce, which has meaning.

When Bronnie Ware interviewed people at the end of their lives, she asked them about their regrets. The clearest pattern wasn't hard to see. Nobody was lying on their deathbed wishing they'd earned more money or accomplished more.

The regrets were about relationships. Not staying in touch with friends. Not expressing what they felt. Working too hard. Not living true to themselves. The people who were dying weren't grieving their lost productivity.

You could read all this and think, okay, relationships matter, I should be nicer to people. That's not quite the point. The point is that your value to the people around you - the actual people in your life - has nothing to do with your job title. It has nothing to do with your technical skill or your ability to produce or your career advancement.

The people who love you don't love you because you're good at your job. They love you because of something else entirely. Maybe it's your humor. Maybe it's that you actually listen. Maybe it's that you remember things about their lives and ask about them. Maybe it's simply that you show up. You're present. You don't extract a conversation and then disappear.

I can automate my job (honestly it feels great for now I'm getting so much done). I can't automate my presence. I can't outsource my attention. I can't delegate my capacity to sit with someone when they're confused or scared or just need to feel known. That's the thing I'm actually built for.

If you've built your entire sense of self around technical skill, the disruption happening in AI feels like existential threat. And it should be. The skill that which you exchanged for money and stability is being replaced, you are being replaced just shuffled around. The machine doesn't replace you. It replaces part of what you do. It does nothing for the actual thing that makes you valuable in your life.

Start practicing presence. Notice the people around you with astonishing effort. Notice when you're giving someone your divided attention and pretending it's presence. Notice the difference between listening so you can respond and listening because you actually want to understand. Being alive is drinking from a sacred and finite source while flying through space on a rock - isn't alone that worth your attention?

The harder version is asking yourself: if my job title disappeared tomorrow, would I still be me? Would the people who matter still love me? If the answer is yes, you're in the right place.

If the answer is no - if your identity is not cleanly separated from what you do for money - your relationship to yourself may need an update.

You are not your job. You're a person first. Your ability to connect, be present, and make people feel understood is what makes you irreplaceable to the people around you, which is the only market that counts.