Why Is Treating a Job as Your Purpose a Mistake?

Salim Ismail says treating a job as your purpose was a basic mistake, because employment got conflated with purpose. 79% of corporate workers do not have a connection to their work and do not find meaning in it. The gap is a longstanding challenge, and people faked themselves into treating employment as purpose.

The industrial world taught that value comes from productivity. Value is going to come from other things. As AI does more of the work, there is an unbelievable opportunity to spend more time being, spend time with kids, build communities, and do scientific exploration. A massive transformative purpose matters because it gives a direction to point yourself and a place to point intelligence.

Nobody has to work to survive in the world he describes, and everybody still has an opportunity to contribute.