I went down a doom scroll this week. A real one.
Not casually killing time. Stuck. Watching post after post about AI layoffs, hiring freezes, entire career paths evaporating.
But somewhere in that scroll, I found something.
The truly unsettling part isn't that AI is replacing jobs.
It's the role those jobs have played in our society.
We've built a way of life that only functions if millions of people spend most of their waking hours doing work they'd abandon immediately if their survival didn't depend on it.
For a long time, we justified it by saying the work was necessary: Somebody has to do it.
But automation has dismantled that excuse. Now that computers can do tasks faster, cheaper, and without burnout, the moral argument is gone.
And that's the part nobody is talking about.
Younger generations see it. They're overworked, underpaid, priced out of homes, unable to afford children. The generations who got in earlier did less and got more. The returns are thinner now. It's no wonder we're all in the middle of a career crisis.
And here's the part that really stuck with me during that doom scroll:
Our economic system runs on expectations about future productivity and growth. The stock market doesn't rise because of optimism alone. It rises because investors believe companies will produce more value tomorrow than they do today.
Historically, that expectation has relied on expanding labor, expanding consumption, and steady productivity gains.
More people working. More people buying. More output each year.
AI changes that equation. It increases output without increasing human labor. That forces an uncomfortable question: if AI create more of the value, who captures the returns? And what happens to the people whose wages once drove the cycle of earning and spending?
The tension isn't that jobs disappear. It's that participation becomes less necessary to production, while still remaining necessary for survival.
And when participation feels less rewarded and more compulsory, belief erodes.
So here's what I realized, and before you stop reading, hear me out.
I might be an anarchist.
Not the angry or destructive kind. Anarchism, at its core, is simply opposition to centralized power and coercion. And I think I'm okay with seeing what happens when we start to decentralize power and liberate people from lives organized entirely around fear and obligation.
What kind of system is it, after all, if no longer forcing people to work is destabilizing?
I'm not against coordination or contribution. I'm against treating widespread unhappiness as essential rather than alarming.
So if it turns out I am, in fact, an anarchist, I'm at least a happy one. Curious what happens when compliance becomes optional. Not convinced the collapse is coming, but not particularly worried if some of it does.
So yes, avoid the doom scroll when you can. But occasionally, at the bottom of one, you might find something worth questioning.
