What is your life’s work?
What is the big question, for you, that keeps coming back year after year?
Artificial intelligence is only a disruption to your work if you have not realized what your life’s work is all about.
There are, have been, and will be, far greater disruptions and transitions in your life than AI.
Death of those we love, major illnesses, and other calamities send a shock to our system. Yet, we must find a way to keep going.
The transitory milestones of life: graduating into adulthood, relationships, failure after failure until we learn who we are as our own person, alone and afraid in this world until we muster the confidence that binds us to others in friendship and love.
Our responsibility to the world shines through our children, nieces, nephews, students, and every young face we encounter.
Friends will come and go, jobs will come and go, politicians will come and go, but we are still here. Every day offers the potential for hundreds of beautiful moments, one after another.
As a college professor, I’m surrounded by hundreds of young people embarking on their careers. Few, I suspect, have a developed a notion of what drives their work through life. I certainly did not at age 22 or at age 32.
I encounter many students whose life’s work seemingly appears to be to help people with more money than themselves to make more money. After all, we all must find a a way to support ourselves and our families.
We may have careers that bring us satisfaction in many forms. Only in my forties, while living in Buenos Aires, after having a child, and thinking about the age of my child at the midpoint of this century, did I recognize a common thread that ran through every aspect of my life. That day, I sat in a café and scribbled thoughts into my notebook. Over the last 13 years, I revisit these words—with a tweak here and there—as a touchstone as to why I do what I do.
Fundamental to my professional interests—as a professor, as a software developer, as a writer, as a reader—is understanding how we tell and read stories (both fiction and non-fiction) in digital media. The future of my child’s life is the lens through which I view the changing shape of creativity, learning, and leisure in the twenty-first century.
At age 59, as I retire from this university, I’m entering another transitory phrase of life where I go away from these comfortable surroundings that have nurtured (and traumatized) me over the years. By going away from this place, my life’s work crystallizes into guiding thoughts and actions that I will pursue for the rest of my life.
I am healthy today and hope for thirty more years of intellectual engagement. We are never guaranteed time. I know that as well as anyone. My father died in a car wreck when he was 37. Unless I succumb to an accident in the next twenty years, the probabilities are high that I will have more time than my father had in his entire adult life.
Waste not a moment of life.
I could go sit on a beach in Thailand and never work again. But, the enjoyment of life and work are not mutually exclusive.
I am simply one person working on a problem. Reminding yourself that you are one person working on a challenging problem provides a frame for your endeavors year after year.
As artificial intelligence decimates what we have known as knowledge work, we must recover our individuality. Our contributions to society will be augmented by AI, our capacity to accomplish more will be expanded by AI. Do not race to keep track of every new development in AI. Do not fear missing out. What you are seeking is within yourself. Let the questions of your life emerge. Build your work around your unstoppable ideas.
In the words of Theodore Roethke:
A lively understandable spirit
Once entertained you.
It will come again.
Be still.
Wait.