Imagine spending twenty years learning to do something well. You have endured the awkward beginnings, developed judgment through mistakes, and acquired a feel for the work that is difficult to explain to someone who has never done it. Your competence has become part of how you recognize yourself.
Then you watch a machine produce a version of that work in seconds. There are flaws, and you know enough to find them. But the result is good enough for someone who needs the work completed quickly and cheaply. While everyone discusses what the technology makes possible, you find yourself wondering where this leaves you.
The first concern is practical. There is a mortgage, a family, a future you have been financing through a skill people were willing to pay for. Beneath those concerns, however, something more intimate has been disturbed. A place you occupied in the world suddenly feels less secure.
This is one of the human questions gathering beneath the debate about artificial intelligence. People are being asked to adapt to technologies that alter the economic value of their abilities. Many are also confronting the possibility that an ability around which they built a life no longer establishes their importance.
In a ** survey released** September 14, Elon University’s Imagining the Digital Future Center found that 64 percent of U.S. adults expected AI’s replacement of human tasks to undermine purpose and meaning. The nationally representative survey, conducted in May, also found that many users reported valuable experiences with AI. Anxiety about the future coexisted with appreciation for what the tools already helped them do.
These findings describe expectations, rather than establish what AI will ultimately do to human meaning. Still, they give us reason to examine what people fear losing. The prospect of technological displacement touches a question we have been answering, often without realizing it, throughout our lives: What makes me worth keeping around?
Long before artificial intelligence entered the conversation, many of us learned to establish our value through usefulness. We became the dependable child, the exceptional student, the person who solved problems before anyone noticed them. Approval arrived in response to what we contributed, and we learned to keep contributing.
Adult life gave that arrangement a more formal structure. Employment supplied income, but also a socially recognizable account of who we were. A profession offered a place in the world, a reason for the alarm clock, and an answer when someone at a gathering asked what we did.
There is nothing inherently wrong with taking satisfaction in work. Skill deserves cultivation, and contribution is a substantial source of meaning. The trouble begins when a source of meaning becomes the condition under which we grant ourselves permission to matter.
Under that arrangement, rest requires justification. Receiving help becomes embarrassing, and limitations acquire the character of moral failures. A person whose body no longer sustains a previous level of activity feels compelled to explain the shortfall, as though existence itself were an obligation they had stopped meeting.
We often call this ambition or a strong work ethic. Sometimes it is both. But beneath the admirable willingness to contribute, there is also a frightened negotiation: If I remain useful enough, there will be a place for me.
AI enters a culture already organized around that negotiation. It did not teach us to confuse human worth with output. It makes the consequences of that confusion harder to avoid.
When a person loses work, two losses sometimes occur together. One concerns the means of living. The other concerns the story through which living made sense.
The first demands concrete attention. Someone who has lost income needs material security, fair opportunities, and people willing to take the situation seriously. Telling them that their worth exceeds their employment does nothing to pay the rent. Existential language becomes evasive when it turns a structural injury into an assignment in personal growth.
Yet material support alone does not address everything that has happened. Work often organizes time, relationships, competence, and a sense of being expected somewhere. Its disappearance leaves an absence that a financial calculation does not fully describe.
Retirement reveals this even when the departure is voluntary and financially secure. Someone spends years anticipating freedom, then discovers how much of their identity was held in the ordinary fact of being needed on Tuesday morning. The calendar opens, but the openness feels different from what they imagined.
Parents encounter another version when children no longer require the same daily care. Chronic illness disrupts it when a body refuses the demands around which a life was organized. Aging brings it into view when others begin making decisions without asking for the judgment they once sought.
These experiences are not interchangeable. Each carries its own material conditions, grief, and possibilities. What they share is the unsettling discovery that a role provided more than an activity. It helped them know where to stand.
A useful response has to address both losses. People need conditions in which they are able to live, and they need room to understand who they are when a familiar form of participation has ended. Neither need disappears because the other has been acknowledged.
I came to this question through a different doorway. I was an evangelical megachurch pastor, and my life was organized around a role that joined identity, authority, community, and purpose.
Within that world, I knew how to explain what I was doing and why it mattered. There was an institutional vocabulary for my life. Other people recognized it, and their recognition helped sustain the person I understood myself to be.
Leaving required more than changing my conclusions about God. It meant living beyond a structure that had supplied answers to questions I had barely learned to ask for myself. Who was I without that role, and what deserved my commitment when the old account of purpose no longer held?
I would not equate leaving religion with losing employment to automation. The circumstances and consequences differ. But I recognize the disorientation of discovering that something you inhabited had also been holding your identity together.
An institution offers a powerful form of reassurance when it tells us who we are and why we are needed. It is harder to notice how much authority we have given that reassurance while it continues to arrive. Its withdrawal reveals the dependence.
My work over the past three decades has grown out of questions that leaving alone did not answer. Freedom from an inherited structure still leaves the work of learning how to participate in a life. You have to decide what merits your attention, how to trust your judgment, and where to belong without handing yourself over again.
That experience shapes how I hear the current anxiety about AI. Beneath the forecasts about occupations, I hear people wondering whether the world will still have a place for the person they spent years becoming.
The familiar response to technological change is to encourage people to acquire new skills. There are circumstances in which that advice is practical and necessary. People deserve access to education and support that make adaptation possible.
But retraining does not answer the entire question. A culture that tells people to preserve their value by staying ahead of a machine leaves the original bargain intact. Their worth remains attached to an advantage they must continually defend.
Even reassuring claims about uniquely human abilities risk accepting that bargain. We identify qualities machines supposedly will never possess and use them to establish our continuing importance. The argument leaves human dignity dependent on the outcome of a technological contest.
There are serious questions about what machines do, what their outputs mean, and where human judgment remains essential. Those questions deserve careful inquiry. They are a poor foundation, however, for deciding whether a human life deserves regard.
A child does not acquire dignity by outperforming an adult. Someone living with dementia does not lose it as memory and independence diminish. We know this when someone we love needs care, although our institutions and habits do not always honor what we know.
That recognition asks something demanding of us. We have to extend it beyond the people whose history and affection make their worth obvious to us. No one needs an impressive biography, an economically valuable skill, or an indispensable role to have a legitimate place among other people.
AI intensifies the question because it threatens some of the distinctions through which people have secured recognition. The task is larger than finding the next distinction to defend. We need forms of life in which recognition survives changes in usefulness.
There is another difficulty hidden in our attachment to usefulness. Being needed provides a place in someone’s life, but that place does not necessarily allow us to be known.
An individual might be indispensable to everyone around them while remaining profoundly lonely. Others rely on their competence, patience, money, or care. The dependence is real, yet little attention reaches the person doing all the providing.
This is why the prospect of becoming unnecessary is sometimes so frightening. If usefulness has been our primary route into relationship, losing it appears to threaten relationship itself. We do not know whether anyone would stay if we stopped solving their problems.
Belonging requires something more generous than dependence on a function. It includes interest in a person whose needs, limits, and unfinished life are allowed to appear. In such a relationship, contribution remains welcome, but it is no longer the price of admission.
This also complicates the idea that we should respond to displacement by finding people who need us. There is value in volunteering, mentoring, caregiving, and other forms of service. But service becomes another fragile arrangement when we use it to prove we deserve to exist.
An adult child’s growing independence, for example, is not a rejection of the parent’s life. It invites a relationship that is less organized around necessity. Learning to enjoy one another beyond the work of raising a child requires a different capacity from the one that sustained the earlier role.
Some of the most important development in a human life occurs here. We learn to remain in relationship when we are unable to control our importance to someone else. We discover whether affection has room for us beyond what we provide.
I use existential health to describe our relationship to being alive: how we meet the realities of being human and participate meaningfully in our lives. Those realities include meaning, mortality, insatiability, isolation, uncertainty, and suffering. I address these more substantially in, ** There Is No Cure for Being Human**. Technological change alters the circumstances in which we encounter them, while leaving us responsible for how we live.
The arrival of a powerful tool does not settle our relationship to uncertainty. Having more efficient means of producing something does not establish what deserves to be produced. Access to fluent advice still leaves a person with the responsibility of choosing and living with the consequences.
This is where the relationship between capability and capacity becomes especially important. Capability concerns what we are able to do. Capacity concerns what we are able to hold and respond to without abandoning ourselves or losing contact with the situation.
A society might acquire extraordinary capabilities while leaving people poorly supported in the capacities their lives require. Its tools grow more powerful while its citizens struggle to bear uncertainty, receive help, tolerate disagreement, or remain present through grief. Technical achievement does not automatically produce human development.
For someone whose role is changing, existential capacity includes allowing the loss to be real without turning it into a total judgment on the self. It involves asking for support while resisting the shame that says support must first be earned. It also means examining an inherited account of worth without pretending that examination will immediately make the future clear.
Self-authorship belongs here, but it does not mean inventing a new identity in isolation. We become ourselves in relationship with other people and with conditions we did not choose. The work is to participate in that formation with increasing honesty, rather than let an employer, institution, audience, or algorithm supply the final account of who we are.
There is no guarantee that this work feels liberating at every stage. Sometimes it begins with grief and a period in which familiar answers stop working. Existential health concerns the capacity to stay engaged with life through that period, supported by relationships and conditions that make engagement possible.
It would be convenient to treat this as an individual problem. We could encourage people to detach their identities from work, discover other interests, and develop greater resilience. Institutions would then continue making decisions while individuals assumed responsibility for absorbing the consequences.
A serious account of existential health has to refuse that convenience. People do not develop a secure relationship to being alive while their basic needs are treated as expendable. A society that declares human worth unconditional while making survival contingent on economic usefulness contradicts its own declaration.
If technological gains are concentrated among owners while displaced workers bear the costs, we are confronting decisions about power and distribution. Calling the resulting distress a crisis of purpose leaves too much unexplained. People are also responding to the experience of being discarded.
The public question is therefore about the conditions under which technological change takes place. Who participates in the decisions, who receives the benefits, and what support exists when a livelihood is disrupted? These choices shape whether people experience change as a shared transition or an injury they must survive alone.
We also need places where participation is possible beyond employment and consumption. Community requires time, access, and continuity. It weakens when every gathering costs money, every person is exhausted, and every activity has to justify itself through measurable returns.
The Center for Non-Religious Spirituality is one place where I have tried to make room for a different kind of participation. People arrive with questions, histories, losses, and convictions that do not fit neatly together. The work involves learning how to share a human space without requiring a common doctrine or asking anyone to betray themselves to remain.
No single community solves the economic consequences of technological change. Yet communities shape what those consequences mean in a person’s life. Somewhere to be known, to contribute within one’s limits, and to receive care offers a foundation that employment alone was never able to guarantee.
As a writer, I have reason to take these questions personally. Writing is a craft, a livelihood, and one of the ways I participate in the world. Watching technology enter that work raises legitimate concerns about authorship, compensation, and the conditions under which human creative labor continues.
I also have to ask what happens when I measure the life of the writer entirely through the response to the writing. Publication makes numbers visible, and visible numbers invite judgment. It takes attention to remember tha…
