🍃Work is dead
VERTIGO 🍃#6 Employment as we know it is a thing of the past?
Menu of this edition⌛VERTIGO OF THE WEEK - Our quest for time will eventually make us better humans by making us irrelevant?
💚 EMOHACKS - Bias, the now method & your holiday mantra!
⚖️COACHING STORIES - Before/After
🗞️ BREAKING NEWS / HOT LINKS - Client ratings & 1 coupon
⌛VERTIGO OF THE WEEK
You can’t escape it.
When I began my coaching master’s degree in 2020, I remember many questions going through my head as I read the Dell/Institute for the Future study: "85% of the jobs of 2030 do not yet exist".
This was before the advent of generative AI.
Our working landscape is being constantly reshaped.
A tech entrepreneur friend of mine recently longed, disillusioned:
“Tech was supposed to simplify our life and give us more time.”
Made me wonder about this everlasting quest for more time.
My country, France, has a fascinating history of social struggles. Paid vacations, non worked sunday, then saturday, machines, automatisation... I grew up with debates surrounding the 35h work week. Today it’s about the 4 day work week, with all the ideological considerations and biases, usually causing the topic to be approached with opprobrium rather than curiosity. Add to that AI and uberisation. The big leap in the emptiness of our freetime.
💡 As a very naive 2016-me read with sparkling eyes the Tesla masterplan and explain to my mother how "autonomous cars are amazing, they're gonna save us tremendous amounts of time", her answer leaves me speechless.
"TO DO WHAT EXACTLY?"
John Maynard Keynes, writing in 1930, thought we’d be working 30 hours a week by 2030. Our problem would be too much free time.
Let’s push it a bit further. What if work was to simply disappear?
In 2017 long before generative AI, Nick Falkner (from the Australian Smart Cities Consortium.. yep, the cool thing at the time were smartcity and emerging blockchain) was already writing about how
We need to work out how to support people in a post-work economy.
Avital Balwit lives in San Francisco and works as Chief of Staff to the CEO at Anthropic*. People who know a thing or two about vision of the future.
In an article published in may 2024 My Last Five Years of Work, she elaborates on a simple theory:
We stand at the edge of a technological development that seems likely, should it arrive, to end employment as I know it.
Automation-induced unemployment will make most of jobs irrelevant. 2 things caught my eye in her nuanced analysis:
Unemployment and Well-being: There is a “shameful element of feeling set apart from one’s peers.” Unemployment tends to make people sadder, sicker, and more anxious, but this may be influenced by shame and financial stress rather than unemployment itself. Automation-induced unemployment might feel different, potentially resembling retirement, where well-being depends heavily on how people use their time.
Changing Perceptions of Work: “It is worth noting up front that even today, work is far from the only way to participate in society.”“Regardless of how one enters unemployment, one still confronts empty and often unstructured time. Is this, in and of itself, bad for people?”
So… we’re clearly not mature enough as a society but should look that reality in the eye. The employment storm is coming.
A perspective I liked: In a future with material needs met and no need to work, people would need to find joy and purpose in activities despite not being the best at them, emphasizing relational and personal fulfillment.
“Although a trained therapist might be able to counsel my friends or family through their troubles better, I still do it, because there is value in me being the one to do so. We can think of this as the relational reason for doing something others can do better. I write because sometimes I enjoy it, and sometimes I think it betters me. I know others do so better, but I don’t care—at least not all the time. The reasons for this are part hedonic and part virtue or morality. Our future where we will have to do things from joy rather than need, where we will no longer be the best at them, but will still have to choose how to fill our days.”
Makes me wonder why we do what we do. Why do I write this newsletter.
Maybe because each time I cast a vote for the identity I seek.
Because it structures my ideas.
Because it makes me feel I created something.
Because… message in a bottle?
If it’s not anymore about being the best, the most qualified, since AI would anyway be better, maybe Post AGI world might force humility upon us humans.
Marlon Brando tells it better:
💚 EMOHACKS
What can you do about it?
First of all, if you’ve raised your shoulders to the article above, face your biases. The end of work as we know it???? Naaaaaah…..
Avital Balwit states
“The general reaction to language models among knowledge workers is one of denial.”
That’s why we humans actually see this instead of the graphe above:
Now, what’s the answer to all that?
Well for now,if you still have work… take some holidays!! :)
So, A few tricks:
Remember who you used to be. What you longed for when things were more simple. I recently looked up at my 2009 summer photos. Time was not an issue then. I did not make lists… Freedom.
Empty your mind with the NOW Method
1- Write down all tasks floating in your mind (5 minutes). 📝 QUANTITY
2- Separate them into three categories: Need, Ought, and Want (NOW). ⏱️QUALITY
3- Ought to do tasks often get in the way and add no value during holidays. Turn them into Want or Need tasks or get rid of them. 🚫 REALISM
Be aware of your HOLIDAYS BELIEFS. Master your HOLIDAYS MANTRA.
"I am already freaking out about when I come back"...
I've been chatting with friends & clients about their pre-holiday mantras:
🗣️ "I'm trying to close out everything and slow down before my vacation so I can truly enjoy it."
🗣️ "I need to book something, but I just don't have the time. Too much work!"
🗣️ "I need this break desperately. I plan to do nothing and just disconnect."
It seems we all have our pre-holiday mantra. The way we approach them. “This year it’s gonna be different.”
For me, this year, it's: “I’ll spare myself 30 min to read a book after lunch.”
And there’s already a little voice in my head laughing :) 😈
💡 An understanding of the patterns that emerge in our heads holds the key to changing them. Master your holiday mantra.⚖️COACHING STORIES
💡 Confidentiality is one of the two pillars of my coaching. I elaborate coaching stories to reflect changes that happened during sessions. Names and contextual elements are changed to guarantee anonymity.🌟 Before: My client, Steph, a busy manager and mother of three, felt it was the perfect time to tackle all her personal projects during her upcoming holidays. She listed every wonderful thing she wanted to do. The list was overwhelming and unrealistic. It was just the sum of all her frustrations, not an actionable plan.
Steph was suffocating, stuck in her own brain. Her mindset was all or nothing: every idea had to come to life, and if not, she had to work harder.
😵💫 No room to breathe. No clarity. Just a never-ending cycle of stress.
🌟 After: In just one coaching session, she realized how unrealistic her approach was. She needed a fresh perspective. Together, we narrowed it down to a couple of feasible projects for her holidays.
It became easy to let go.
Be present.
Enjoy.
Real coaching is about bringing clarity.
🧘♂️ Slowing down thoughts.
🔄 Changing perspectives.
🛑 Shutting down that long-lasting voice in our brain.
Or simply becoming aware that the voice is there.
You might still think, “I don’t know what that’s all about.”
It’s like talking about a movie vs. spending 2 hours chilling in a dark room. 🎥
Don’t just talk about it. Experience it.
🗞️BREAKING NEWS / HOT LINKS
I’ve put online my client reviews, quite proud of that! So far 100% 5 star votes :) Take a look!
Enjoy your SUMMER COACHING COUPON: with code summer24, 10% OFF on all the boutique!
In the next edition i’m launching the ABCD, personalized dashboard for my coaching clients!!!
*Heard about Claude? The AI LLM model created by Anthropic, a U.S. AI company,led by fascinating couple Dario and Daniela Amodei, with a fascinating organisational model, centered around safe and responsible development. In 3 years they secured funding up to $8.36 billion, including major deals with titans like Amazon and Google, and a post-money valuation of $18.4 billion
Anthropic could deserve a Vertigo edition all by itself!!
PS: Have you taken this 8 question test? You’ll get a free personnalized feedback?
Or even better, why don’t we have a chat? I’d love for you to be listened to like never before.
Last thing, I would not want you to leave without a good playlist you can listen to while reading or just chilling.