The New Human Purpose: Rediscovering Ourselves in an AGI World

Dave Morrow spent 31 years doing other people's taxes. He was good at it — the kind of accountant clients called by first name, whose waiting room had a coffee machine and a bowl of hard candies and a framed photo of his kids at Niagara Falls. Then, in the spring of 2024, his firm switched to AI-assisted filing software that could process in four minutes what Dave used to spend an afternoon on. By the following January, his position had been "restructured." He was 58 years old, financially comfortable, and completely, bewilderingly free.

"I didn't know what to do with my hands," he told me. "Literally. I'd wake up at 6:30, make coffee, and just... stand there."

Dave isn't a cautionary tale. He eventually found his way to a woodworking class, then to teaching it, then to something he describes — a little sheepishly, like a man confessing to a second marriage — as happiness. But those first months? Those were something nobody had prepared him for. Not his employer, not his financial advisor, not the decades of cultural messaging that had told him, implicitly and explicitly, that what he did was who he was.

Here's the thing: Dave's Tuesday morning moment of standing in his kitchen not knowing what to do with his hands? That's coming for all of us. Maybe not this year. Maybe not this decade. But the economic shift that restructured Dave's career is accelerating, and the question it's placing on humanity's doorstep isn't really about employment at all.

It's about identity. It's about meaning. And it's one of the most profound questions our species has ever had to answer.

We Have Always Been What We Do

Go back far enough and the question barely existed. In Mesopotamia, in medieval Europe, in the early industrial cities that filled the sky with coal smoke, survival was purpose enough. You farmed because your family needed to eat. You worked the line because the rent was due. The meaning of your life was self-evident: stay alive, keep the people you love alive, repeat.

Work wasn't just economic. It was social architecture. It told you where you stood, who your people were, what time to wake up. Sociologists have a term for this — ontological security — the deep background certainty about who you are and where you fit. For most of human history, work provided that almost automatically.

Then came the industrial revolution, and work got more complicated. It became something you commuted to, something separate from home, something that required a resume. And somewhere in that transition, an idea quietly took root: your job isn't just what you do. It's what you're worth.

By the 20th century, the first question at any party — anywhere in the Western world — was "so, what do you do?" Not "what do you love?" Not "what are you curious about?" What do you do. As if the answer to the second and third questions could be inferred from the first.

That equation is now being stress-tested in ways that would have seemed like science fiction a generation ago.

The Machines Came Quietly

Nobody announced the day the first wave of white-collar jobs went to algorithms. There was no ceremony, no mass protest, no dramatic headline. There was just, gradually, less work to go around — and what remained required a different kind of human.

Oxford economists Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne dropped a number on the world in 2013 that nobody has quite been able to shake: 47% of U.S. jobs were at high risk of automation within two decades. (The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?, University of Oxford, 2013) The study has been debated, refined, and challenged — some researchers put the real figure closer to 9–14% once you account for task variation within occupations — but the direction of travel has not been seriously disputed by anyone paying attention.

A decade later, McKinsey raised the stakes. Their 2023 analysis found that generative AI alone could automate tasks accounting for 60 to 70% of a typical worker's day — up from their previous estimate of 50% before large language models entered the picture. (The State of AI in 2023: Generative AI's Breakout Year, McKinsey & Company) That's not science fiction. That's a consulting firm telling its Fortune 500 clients to start planning.

What is surprising — genuinely, delightfully surprising, in the way that NatGeo sometimes uncovers something that flips your assumptions — is which jobs are surviving.

It's not the prestigious ones. It's not the corner-office ones. The jobs proving hardest to automate are the ones that require what researchers are now calling irreducible human presence: the grief counsellor who sits with a family that just got a terminal diagnosis. The kindergarten teacher who notices that one child hasn't spoken in three days. The hospice nurse who knows when to talk and when to just hold a hand.

For decades, these roles were undervalued, underpaid, and overlooked in "future of work" conversations obsessed with coders and entrepreneurs. Turns out, the thing that made them easy to dismiss — the fact that they run on empathy, on presence, on the messy and unquantifiable experience of being human — is precisely what makes them irreplaceable.

The machines, it turns out, can do almost everything except show up.

What Happens to the Self When the Job Disappears

Psychologists have a name for what Dave experienced in his kitchen. Researchers studying early retirees and displaced workers describe a consistent pattern: the first emotion is often relief, followed by a honeymoon period, followed by something that looks uncomfortably like grief.

Not for the work itself, necessarily. But for the structure. The identity. The answer to "what do you do?"

Dr. Kenneth Gergen, an emeritus professor of social psychology at Swarthmore College and one of the foundational theorists of social constructionism, has argued for decades that modern Western identity is fundamentally relational — we understand ourselves through the roles we play for others. In his landmark book Relational Being (Oxford University Press, 2009), he proposes that the self is not a fixed internal thing but something that emerges through interaction. (Relational Being: Beyond Self and Community — Swarthmore College) When the primary role disappears, the self can feel genuinely destabilized. Not broken. Not permanently lost. But genuinely, uncomfortably at sea.

This isn't weakness. This is what 300,000 years of human evolution looks like when its operating conditions change overnight.

Here's the more uncomfortable truth: for many of us, busyness was a hiding place. When you're exhausted and overworked, nobody — not your partner, not your friends, not the quiet voice at 2am — expects you to have figured out the meaning of your life. The job was an alibi. A perfectly socially acceptable reason not to ask the bigger question.

Abundance, it turns out, removes the alibi.

The Two Paths Forward

Look at what's already emerging among people who've had to navigate this shift early — the early retirees, the laid-off professionals, the pandemic-era career changers — and you start to see two broad responses.

The first group throws itself into creation. They paint, compose, build, teach, write. They start community gardens and neighbourhood orchestras and open-source software projects nobody asked for that turn out to matter enormously. These people discover something that the philosophers of every era have pointed toward but that prosperity somehow kept hidden: that humans, given the time and freedom, are generative by nature. We make things. It's one of the most distinctively human things there is.

The second group does something that initially looks like retreat but is actually something more deliberate. They choose friction. They learn to bake bread — not because they have to, but because the slow, tactile, smell-and-touch reality of it satisfies something that screens and algorithms don't. They take up woodworking (Dave, again). They grow tomatoes in impractical conditions. They are, in some intuitive way, insisting on the value of effortful, embodied experience in a world that increasingly offers the frictionless version of everything.

Both groups are working on the same problem from different angles. Both are asking: what makes a human life feel real?

The answer — and this is the part that the great philosophers kept circling without quite landing — seems to be something about chosen difficulty. Not suffering imposed from outside. But the particular satisfaction of attempting something hard, failing, trying again, and eventually making something that didn't exist before. A good loaf of bread. A finished bookshelf. A kid who finally learned to read. A song nobody else would have written.

This is what work, at its best, actually provided. Not the paycheck. The stakes.

What the Machines Can't Do at 3 a.m.

There's a list that researchers at leading AI labs refer to, only half-jokingly, as the soft frontier — the set of capabilities that decades of effort have not successfully replicated in silicon.

The machines can now diagnose cancer more accurately than most radiologists. They can write passable legal briefs, generate convincing marketing copy, compose music that technically follows every rule Bach followed. What they cannot do is sit with someone at three in the morning and simply be there while that someone cries.

Presence, it turns out, is not a feature. It is not a capability that can be added with a better model or more training data. It is something that arises from shared vulnerability — from the fact that the person sitting with you also knows what loss feels like, also fears death, also has lain awake in the dark wondering if any of it meant anything.

The machines don't lose anything. And because they don't lose anything, they cannot, in any meaningful sense, understand the things that matter most.

This is not a consolation prize. It is, if you sit with it long enough, a profound reorientation. What makes us irreplaceable is not our intelligence — machines have surpassed us there in measurable ways. It's our fragility. Our capacity to care about each other precisely because we are all temporary. Our need to be seen. Our terror of being forgotten.

Abundance doesn't make us gods. It makes us, perhaps for the first time in history, free to be completely, authentically, irreducibly human.

The Question Nobody Can Answer for You

Dave Morrow teaches woodworking on Thursday evenings in a community centre in Mississauga. His class has seventeen students, ages 19 to 74. A retired nurse, a software developer on a four-day week, a teenager who wants to build guitar bodies. They are all, in their different ways, working on the same thing he is.

"I thought I'd be bored," he says, smoothing a piece of walnut with his palm. "I thought I'd feel useless. Instead I feel like I'm — " he pauses, searching for it. "Like I'm finally paying attention."

That is, in the end, what this transition asks of us. Not to be productive. Not to justify our existence through output. Just to pay attention — to what we love, to who needs us, to what we could make that would matter to someone somewhere, even if that someone is just ourselves on a good morning with a cup of coffee and something beautiful taking shape under our hands.

The question AGI is putting to our generation isn't "what will you do when the machines take your job?"

It's the question Socrates kept asking, that every philosopher worth reading has circled back to, that your grandfather maybe wondered about in retirement and never quite found the words for:

What would you do with your one life if you finally had the time to choose?

Dave is building a blanket chest. It's for his daughter. He figures it'll take about three more weeks.

He can't wait.

Maurice Joseph writes about technology, humanity, and the future at inthacity.com/blog. Got a story about navigating purpose in the age of AI? He'd genuinely like to hear it.

Sources & Further Reading

Frey, C.B. & Osborne, M.A. (2013). The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation? University of Oxford. Read the original paper →
McKinsey & Company (2023). The State of AI in 2023: Generative AI's Breakout Year. Read the report →
Gergen, K.J. (2009). Relational Being: Beyond Self and Community. Oxford University Press. About the book →

Conclusion: Rediscovering Human Purpose in the Age of AGI

As we stand on the precipice of an AGI-driven future, we find ourselves faced with a profound question: How do we redefine our purpose when the roles we have long identified with become automated? Rather than allowing fear and uncertainty to govern our response, we should embrace this moment as an unprecedented opportunity for growth and creativity. By turning to AI not just as a tool, but as a partner in our self-discovery journey, we can cultivate environments that nurture our inherent desire for meaning. The era of AGI doesn’t signal the end of human significance; instead, it invites us to delve deeper, explore our creativity, and engage in the communities around us. Together, we can forge a new path—a journey to understanding ourselves beyond our jobs and limitations, remaking our lives into one of passion, connection, and purpose.

Your Questions, Answered Plainly

What exactly is AGI, and why does it matter for regular people? Artificial General Intelligence is AI that can handle a wide range of tasks the way a human does — not just one specific job, but many. It matters because unlike earlier automation (which mostly replaced physical or repetitive work), AGI is moving into knowledge work, creative work, and professional roles. It's the first technology that's come for the jobs we thought were safely human.

Will AGI take my job? Probably some of it. The honest answer is that most jobs will change significantly before they disappear entirely. The tasks most at risk are structured, repetitive, and rule-based — even in professional settings. What tends to survive is work that requires genuine human judgment, emotional presence, or creative originality. Which is a good prompt to ask yourself: what parts of my work actually require me?

What do people actually do when work disappears — what does the research show? The research on early retirees, displaced workers, and people who've navigated major career transitions shows a consistent pattern. After an initial adjustment period that can feel like grief, most people land in one of two places: creative engagement (making things, teaching, community involvement) or deliberate, embodied experience (crafts, gardening, physical skills). Both seem to activate the same underlying human need: to attempt something hard and see it through.

Is it normal to feel lost without work? Completely. Identity and work have been wired together in Western culture for generations. Feeling disoriented when that structure disappears isn't weakness — it's an entirely predictable human response. What matters is recognizing that the disorientation is temporary, and that on the other side of it, most people find something they describe as more genuinely themselves than their job ever allowed them to be.

Where do I start if I want to figure out my purpose beyond work? Start smaller than you think. Not with "what is my life's meaning" but with "what have I been meaning to try?" A class. A project. An hour a week doing something with your hands or your voice or your curiosity that has no output, no deliverable, and no performance review. Purpose, it turns out, isn't something you find. It's something you back into, slowly, by paying attention to what makes you forget to check your phone.

Wait! There's more...check out our gripping short story that continues the journey: The Aether Dream

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