The Last Job on Earth

Back in the 2000s, I was a tight-ass meditator. My wife still teases me about the first time she saw me meditating. There I was, in the front row of the retreat where we met—sitting ramrod straight, my posture out of a magazine, my eyes locked on the teacher's words with an intensity that reeked of desperation. I needed to find myself way too badly.

Back then, my struggles were mostly self-made. It was the end of the era before smartphones, YouTube, and Instagram. The stories I told myself about who I was supposed to be and how I was supposed to get there were just that—stories in my head.

By the 2010s, everything had changed. The digital world became an inescapable mirror. Social media rewired our collective consciousness, turning every thought, every action, every ambition into fodder for comparison, disagreement, and, of course, outrage. Outrage at things and people we've never met, about ideas that are deliberately put in front of us to evoke those reactions. We became entangled with a new technological presence—the algorithm.

This digital construct doesn't ask for your soul; it's much more subtle than that. It slowly but surely rewires your brain instead. It whispers that your worth lies in doing more: more content, more achievements, more optimization. Meditation? Do it better. Productivity? Hack it. Fulfillment? Follow these five steps. And how do you get there? Just watch this next video. We've become spectators to our potential, endlessly scrolling, endlessly consuming, caught in the myth of the optimized life.

And now, standing here in the mid-2020s, another wave is rising: Artificial intelligence. Unlike the social media algorithm that captures our attention, AI's impact runs deeper—it's not just about engagement, but about fundamentally reshaping how we work and understand value. While it's far from the end, the next wave of AI will be defined by what are called Agents, which are nothing more and nothing less than a piece of software doing a job that is currently being done largely or entirely by a human.

If you're not terrified, you're not paying attention. But, and this is what I hope to convince you of, the equally terrifying thing might also be—hear me out—your salvation.

It seems to me that the first AI wave is just starting to crest, and like the early days of any new big technological shift, the next few years may feel underwhelming. But don't mistake that for a lack of progress. It will simply be the companies, including my own, hard at work pushing through to the future that we can see as possible. We're working on being ready for the moment when the underlying technology catches up to our dreams of scalable whatever.

The result is inevitable: Within a decade, AI will outstrip your ability in many if not most of the ways that currently justify your paycheck. It will write better than you, analyze data faster and more accurately, it will make quicker decisions, and it doesn't need health insurance, vacations, or an office with natural light. It follows instructions, doesn't fight with its colleagues, and, I don't know how else to say it: but it doesn't have unresolved childhood trauma, bad bosses, heartbreak, and all the other bruises that make it difficult for you to listen to honest feedback and make changes as a result. In short, AI doesn’t have any emotional needs at all which will make it efficient and productive to a level impossible in humans. 

But this doesn't represent a threat to humanity -- it represents a threat to the current way you probably derive value out of your human existence -- how you "produce value" for the world and get paid. It threatens your job. Not your authentic self. So while it may be scary, it's not existential in any proper meaning of the word. Because of all the things that AI can and will do, there's one thing that it can't: It can't feel. It doesn't have intuition. It doesn't have a soul. It can't 'go inward', because there's no inner landscape to explore. In other words, it is a manifestation, an incredible awe-inspiring, and yes terrifying realization of the brain. But the brain is only a fraction of the mind. The mind is only the tiniest of windows into the heart. The heart only catches glimpses of the soul. To be blunt; nobody who has ever taken psychedelic mushrooms would take seriously the notion that AI can replace them, what makes them who they are.

So careers and industries will vanish. The professions we once defined ourselves by—doctor, lawyer, coder, creator—will first become shadows of their former selves and then if not disappear be completely unrecognizable to us.

Every job on earth that exists today will go through the same process: everything about that job that requires 'doing' will be done by AI. What will remain is the 'being' part.

You see, I believe AI is not merely a tool or a threat, but a mirror—reflecting our deepest longings and our most profound questions. Not sent here by some divine being but emerging from our collective unconscious, out of our desperate longing to be free. We want to be free of our current way of life, the monotony, the screens, the divisiveness. And with AI, we are introducing a potential pathway to reimagine how we live and work.

This begs the question that has been on our lips for some time now, that you've been dodging personally for a while and we've been dodging as a species for longer than that: If you're not a machine—if you are not your ability to do things, if you are not a logical, mechanical completer of tasks—then who are you? And more to the point, what job is left for a being like that?

What is, in the end, the last job on earth?

For years, I thought I would find it by adding things to my personality, new habits, new routines, new ways to be better. I tried all the hacks. It wasn't until I hit a wall in my journey that I was forced to confront the sham of it all. There was nothing I could add that would make me feel better, that would make me feel more like myself. That it was only in subtracting things, it was in the zero not in the one, that lay my liberation. I began a process of deconstruction, of dismantling my conditioning. It was a grueling process that took years—my relationship to money, my relationship to sex and intimacy, to being a man, to my parents, and to my pictures of reality itself. Each layer subtracted was a letting go. As the Sufi would say, "Die before you die".

The job left is to stop adding and start subtracting. To dismantle the self you've been conditioned to believe you are, the one you've constructed that has allowed you to get by in life. The curated version of you that you want other people to believe is true and that costs you your energy to maintain. You simply can not afford that expense anymore. AI is coming too quickly. You need your energy to get ready.

This is the last job on Earth: discovering who you truly are, and then being that in a world that we can not yet see. Today's version of you, and me, is simply not real enough to thrive in a fully digital world.

When all the spreadsheets are automated, when Mars colonies are thriving, when every not just technical skill but professional one has been digitized, the only value left will be the kind that can't be replicated: you. The true, authentic, irreplaceable you.

Is there a chance that AI is something else, that it is an existential threat, and that it will darken the skies and turn us into batteries in a dystopian nightmare? Well, I can't entirely rule that out. Betting that it isn't that is the biggest and potentially last bet we ever get to make.

It's going to take the best of us.

Jonathan

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