AI will blow the cover on our most sacred productivity rituals, revealing that our jam-packed calendars and email floods are just elaborate stagecraft. We will finally have to admit that the ‘busy’ badge we’ve been wearing is just theater.
The late David Graeber, in his book Bullshit Jobs, called this a long time ago. In a YouGov survey he highlighted, 37% of people thought their jobs were, in a word, pointless. And now we’ve got AI stepping out of the wings, threatening to replace not us but the tedious tasks that let us pretend we’re essential in the grand play of corporate life.
Having discussed the role of AI with several people there is a deeper fear is that we’ll be forced to get creative again. Without the safety blanket of “busywork,” we might actually have to do the stuff we claim to be too “busy” for: creating, inventing, writing, or innovating. Are we ready for a world where we can’t hide behind the endless grind and instead have to face the challenge of doing something that matters?
But hey, that might just be some of us. The truth is, for many, the boring gig was the perfect alibi against becoming artists, writers, inventors, or poets. And perhaps what we really fear isn’t being replaced by AI—it’s being exposed by it.