The Missing Variable
Only 22% of workers worldwide feel their job is secure.1 Not because AI has actually eliminated most of their roles yet — it mostly hasn’t. But because something harder to name has already been taken away, and we don’t seem to focus on it.
While everyone is debating tasks, skills, and AI adoption, is anyone asking about the purpose of work?
There’s a paradox sitting in the middle of the future-of-work conversation that isn’t getting enough attention. Workers are reporting being more productive and more anxious — at the same time, in the same roles. The conventional response is to treat this as a communication problem. Leaders need to explain the transition better. People need more upskilling. The message isn’t landing.
But I don’t think this is a messaging problem. I think we’ve been trying to solve a meaning crisis at the task level.
And that’s the wrong level.
The future-of-work conversation focuses almost entirely on what people do: which tasks AI can handle, which skills will survive, which roles are exposed. What it almost never asks is what made work feel like it was part of a life, rather than just a transaction.
It wasn’t only the job description. It was the coffee shop you stopped at before logging on. The colleague you complained to in the hallway. The commute that gave you twenty minutes of unscheduled thought. The off-site where something real got said because the context was different. These aren’t perks or inefficiencies. They were the social and spatial scaffolding around work — the infrastructure that made the whole thing feel like it meant something beyond the output.
That scaffolding came apart quietly. Remote work dismantled some of it. Hybrid half-replaced it. The 3rd spaces — sociologist Ray Oldenburg’s term for the places that are neither home nor office2 — started disappearing well before the pandemic and accelerated after. The coffee shops got quieter. The outside world got quieter. And nobody put ‘loss of ambient belonging’ on the transformation roadmap.
So when you strip that scaffolding away, and then ask an LLM to make people more productive, you’ve accelerated them toward what, exactly?
Here’s what I’d argue is actually happening: the productivity gains are real, and so is the anxiety… because they’re measuring different things. Efficiency is going up. Meaning is going down. And we don’t have a metric for meaning, so it doesn’t show up in the briefing.
This is what ‘being optimized through, not with’ actually feels like from the inside. Not that your job was taken. That the thing your job was attached to (the rhythm, the place, the people in between the work) got removed. And you’re still supposed to be grateful for the productivity.
The leaders who are paying attention to AI adoption aren’t wrong to do so. But if you retool the process without rethinking the why, you just get a faster process. And if the meaning was lacking in the first place, a faster way to produce crap work is just going to produce more crap.
The real question isn’t whether these models reshape jobs. It’s whether we’re building the conditions — spatial, social, organizational — for work to remain something people can find dignity in. That’s a design problem. And right now, it’s not on anyone’s roadmap.
If dignity in work is on your roadmap, let’s chat. Really, I want to learn from you.
I’m not sure what the answer looks like at scale. I doubt anyone does. But I do think the current conversation is missing the variable. The anxiety isn’t irrational. It isn’t a failure of communication. It’s a coherent response to a real loss that not enough people name yet.
We’ve spent the last several years debating which tasks AI will take. Maybe the harder question is what we quietly took away first — and whether we intend to replace it with anything at all.
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ADP Research, Today at Work 2026 — survey of 39,000 workers across 36 countries.
Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place (1989). The book that named and defined the concept of third places as essential social infrastructure.