Day 344: Who Will You Be without Work?

We don’t yet know how AI will change the world of work, but experts predict this to be the first technological revolution in history that will eliminate, rather than just redistribute, paying jobs.

First, the good news: Work may be less necessary. AI may create materials abundance and raise living standards for many without the need to work. No more need for that mind-numbing 9 to 5 or that backbreaking manual labor? That’s a deal many people would gladly take.

But there’s a flip side to all this, and one that poses a big challenge for lawyers. According to the Pew Research Center, 55 percent of workers with postgraduate degrees in 2023 said that their work was central to their identity.

Will AI leave us feeling ‘workless’?

Lawyers at Risk

AI will certainly change lawyers’ jobs, as computers automate the collection and processing of legal information. This might free up lawyers to handle the human interaction and empathic advocay for a larger number of clients. For example, I can imagine the 2 million case backlog in immigration courts getting resolved if lawyers could spend most of their time on high-touch tasks like understanding the client’s perspective and telling their story empathetically to the immigration judge.

But it will likely also mean fewer lawyers in some sectors. If the work of first- through fourth-year associates becomes largely automated, law firms may still train an elite cadre of young lawyers in more complex tasks, but they won’t need an army of researchers and brief-drafters anymore.

Who Would You Be Without Work?

The legal profession will be among the first white-collar professions to be disrupted by AI, so we’d better start thinking about this now.

If you’ve followed the advice of the happiness gurus, you’ve managed to hold onto one or two hobbies that you enjoy even as your law practice has grown. Those hobbies may or may not become a repository of personal meaning, depending on how you view them.

If they function mostly as ways to unwind after a long day, that may not translate into a strong sense of purpose once the pressure of the work day disappears. If those hobbies represent pursuits for self-esteem or self-actualization, however, more time might mean more fulfillment.

If work disappears as a source of meaning, people may also be driven to deepen their spiritual lives. Pew research also found that people with an active religious life were, in many countries, considerably happier than those with inactive or no religious life. This research raises questions about correlation v. causation, of course, but betting on a spiritual life still looks like smarter money than, say, looking for fulfillment through addictive substances or behaviors.

Another potential source of happiness is that people — in the presence of all these computers — might connect more deeply with other people. In 2023, more than seven out of ten people worldwide said they felt “very” or “fairly” connected to others. Perhaps the AI era could bring about a renaissance in human social engagement in voluntary (non-work-related) communities such as families, neighborhoods, sports and outdoor recreation, affinity groups, and religious groups.

Ask the “Old Coots”

As it turns out, we have an excellent well of experts to turn to on these questions: They’re called retirees.

As the baby boom generation has moved out of the workforce, many of them still with years of energy and vibrancy to offer, they’ve learned a thing or two about how to find meaning in life without paying work.

In this TED talk, Riley Moynes talks about the secrets, based on his interviews with retirees, for “squeezing the juice” out of retirement.

Moynes observed a four-step process:

(1) The first year or so, Moynes says, is the “vacation” phase — sleep late, play golf, every day’s a parade.

(2) But that wears off. Then comes a season of loss: loss of routine, relationships, identity, purpose, and maybe status.

Photo by Edu Lauton on Unsplash

(3) After a while, people move into a season of discovery. They try new things. Not all of them work. Sometimes it’s painful, but all growth is painful. It’s kind of like a second adolesence.

(4) Eventually, many people find a sense of meaning and purpose beyond work. The answer isn’t the same for everyone. (Moynes shares a group that But those people who struggle through and reach this fourth phase, Moynes observed, are the happiest people on the planet.

So if this is all of our future, we likely have some work ahead — but it just might pay bigger psychic dividends than we’d ever hoped for from our work.