Live a Life of Meaning by Being 5 Things
Infinite possibility
As I begin to write this, the Google Docs AI gives me 5 options to do some wild shit I never thought a word processing software would do. In a time where you can never read your phone, all the way to the end, we are inundated with choices that get posed as micro-decisions on us, every single day of our lives.
On my desk, I have 5 screens around me which I can seamlessly switch from, each performing a certain task in optimizing this writing session of mine. Sometimes, within a moment, I feel struck by how high tech our lives have become, enabling a sense of infinite possibility.
Infinite possibility is a feeling that technology generally, and AI particularly, is now bringing to every little task in our lives. You could argue you don’t need that feeling for many of the things that such a feeling has become associated with, creating unnecessary hype for mundane tasks – like making your morning coffee. In such an environment of advanced artificial intelligence and the tech-ification of everything in our lives, it is natural that the applications of human intelligence we’ve accepted as norm so far, must also evolve.
The basis of job creation is changing
I spent 11+ years at Google across India, Ireland, Singapore and the US in a myriad of roles. I was laid off as a part of the #Google12k in July 2023. Every tech company has had subsequent rounds of layoffs, even while Mag 7 companies have operating margins between 40%-70%. Job creation, which, according to Economic theory, was always accepted as a necessary by-product of economic expansion, is being challenged.
Since the end of the Second World War, the world had clear economic objectives, and a plan to employ its labor, through industrialization, corporatization and free market capitalism spreading across the world, moving farm labor to urban, organized, corporatized labor. It was driven by a post War order set in place primarily by the United States, through institutions like the United Nations, International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
The basis for individual economic progress itself became specialized, skilled labor, working for large corporations, and specialism was considered a hedge against becoming obsolete in the job market. However, everyone from Software Engineers to Ivy League MBAs are feeling the heat in the job market post 2023. With AI and automation, there is increasingly lesser demand for specialized labor.
Mckinsey estimates 400-800 million jobs will be lost to AI by 2030. This will hit entry level white collar jobs the most, something that has formed the basis of the corporate path. As Millennials and generations before us, we’ve been conditioned to think of a job or profession as a core part of our identities and life path. We grew up in a stable period of industrialization and specialization where you went to school, became X, Y or Z and embarked on a career in A, B or C.
That playbook worked well for a long time, bestowing the world with a stable period of economic conditions through the 80s and 90s, followed by a boom before the financial crisis. Those conditions were extended, primarily by a revolution in the tech sector for another decade or so. However, now, that playbook seems to be truly over.
Does that mean we are all doomed, in our K-shaped economies?
Why a focus on your corporate job might be hurting your future prospects
A corporate job, in general, disincentivizes broad learning, or engaging a diverse set of skills. In a job with a large corporation, your focus, rightly so, is usually on a niche process or set of tasks, within the context of the large corporation. Those tasks or niche processes you master within the context of your company becomes the basis of your economic progress.
In this AI ridden, unstable job market, one of the biggest challenges for many long time Googlers I knew who were laid off, was reintegration into ‘the real world’ – their skills so ‘Googlified’ over so many years. People struggled with everything from basic communication norms, project management in another context to tweaking their skills to it.
Increasingly, there are no guarantees in corporate paths anymore. I’ve seen everyone from VPs to entry level employees struggle in this job market, desperately trying to reinvent, become LinkedIn influencers and apply their skills to a context they never imagined living.
Thus, a diversification of your own skills, along with an understanding of their applicability in the wider industry and world, is going to be a hedge against this job market. It also helps for you to have options, especially if you’re someone in the early phases of your career.
A strategy, to future proof yourself, in my opinion, is to think of all your skills from the perspective of what engages you, and what’s monetizable – to being comfortable thinking of yourself as someone who does 3-5 things, removing your sense of identity from your job or current career path. Post my layoff at Google, I’ve used this strategy, to pivot my career in behavioral, cultural insights towards more meaningful work, for myself and for people I work with.
Find your career ikigai
A framework to help break this down for you could be the ‘career ikigai’ framework, which tweaks the Japanese concept of ‘ikigai’ or finding meaning in everything you do. Hector Garcia and Francesc Miralles adapted this to work in their book ‘Ikigai’. It helps you break down your skills into profession, passion, mission and vocation.
This framework will help you build clarity on your own North Star, what the focus of your work could look like and what could be back up skills you have in your back pocket. This will give you emotional stability, which is always a good base to build your work on, no matter the instability of your context.
In a world ridden by infinite possibility and instability, human intelligence and skills cannot conform to a myopic path anymore. Conforming to that myopic path might help in the short run, but, with the uncertainty workers of most large organizations face, it might not be a bad idea to start exposing yourself to ‘the real world’, through passions, interests or a mission that goes beyond your job.
Lean into a feeling of not grounding your identity in the lens of one thing or one job function you could perform. Your path may have demanded that identification but it doesn’t serve you beyond becoming more dependent to a particular path. Finding your career ikigai will give you a menu of skills that give your meaning. And, with the structure of what fits where, you create a more meaningful, balance life that weighs your work as one part of life.
With the AI economy, increasingly you will have to evolve work, to mean many things. So, why not find your 5 things?