The era of jobs is ending

As it fucking should.

Morning again.

The alarm pleads. The phone lights up. For a second you’re no one. Then the memories rush in: the commute, the plain desk, the boss’s irritating face hovering in the back of your mind.

You do the math you always do, have to do:
Eight, nine hours a day.
Forty, fifty years.
If you’re lucky, you get a little retirement at the end before your body disintegrates.

Yet quietly, another life is booting in the background.

(Sorry for not writing much recently. My job wore me down. But this essay is a long one and took a lot of work. Enjoy, maybe?)

The machine is here. You’re still watching the trailer.

Let’s get the tech bit out of the way, because it’s not the main point, but it is the accelerant.

Most people met “AI” in late 2022 or something, poked ChatGPT once like it was a digital fortune cookie, got a mediocre haiku about their cat, and decided: ah yes, cute toy, overhyped, wake me when it’s Skynet. Then they went back to their inbox rituals.

They have no idea what’s happening now.

They haven’t seen the latest models that quietly chew through documents, write code, design websites, summarize legal contracts, and generate decent strategy decks faster than a middle manager can clear their throat.

They haven’t seen a model hold a complex conversation, remember context, suggest workflows, generate visuals, write scripts, and debug itself in one continuous flow. They haven’t watched it do in twenty minutes what a whole team used to bill a week for.

They haven’t looked closely at the humanoid robots on factory floors and in warehouses—still a bit awkward, still uncanny, but moving with that unsettling, patient inevitability. First they lift bins, then they do the “unsafe” tasks, then they do the “boring” tasks, then they do the tasks that were your job description last year.

We don’t know what’s in one year.
We have absolutely no idea what’s in five.

Anyone who talks with certainty about 2030 is either lying or selling something.

But this much is obvious:
The system we built around jobs—as moral duty, as identity, as the only path to survival—is about to collide with machines that can perform huge chunks of that “duty” without sleep, without boredom, without unions, without pensions.

You can treat this as a threat.
Or as a once-in-a-civilization chance to get out of a religion that has been breaking us, grinding us down, destroying us for centuries.

Jobs are a spiritual accident.

I don’t mean “work.”
Humans will always work. We will always make, fix, care, explore, tinker, and obsess over stupid little projects like they’re the axis of the universe. Work is older than the market. Work is older than money.

I mean jobs. The institutionalized bargain that says:

Give us your waking hours, your attention, your nervous system.
We will give you conditional access to food, shelter, and the right to not die in the street.

We’ve normalised this so completely that critiquing it sounds childish.
“Grow up. Everyone has to work.”
(Translation: everyone has to perform “usefulness” inside this very specific economic script or be treated as a malfunction.)

Jobs are not just time. They are an architecture for the soul.

• Socially, they determine who counts and who disappears. “What do you do?” is the password to polite existence. No job, no answer.

• Psychologically, they wire identity: you are a marketer, a teacher, a nurse, a whatever-the-hell “product evangelist” is. Lose the job and watch people fall apart because the noun they attached to “I am…” vanished.

• Spiritually, they define virtue: a good person is a hardworking person. An early-rising, inbox-zero, overtime-accepting human sacrifice.

Max Weber wrote about the “Protestant work ethic” and the “iron cage” of rationalized labor — the idea that worldly success became proof of inner worth, and soon the system ran on anxiety instead of faith. The cage is now global. The bars are job contracts.

You’re not allowed to just exist.

You have to justify your existence to a market that doesn’t know you, doesn’t love you, and doesn’t even particularly like you. It just… measures.

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“But humans have always worked hard!”

Yes. Humans used to work fields until their backs broke. They mined coal. They fished freezing seas. They fought wars by hand.

And? AND?!?

“People suffered before” is not an argument for preserving suffering now. That’s not history, that’s sadism with footnotes.

We are a technological species that launches telescopes beyond Pluto, runs simulations of galaxies, splices genomes, and builds language models that can impersonate human consciousness and soon, perhaps, surpass it.

We can automate away huge chunks of the drudgery that used to be biologically unavoidable.

And we’re still out here proudly defending the 40-hour week like it’s some sacred law of physics. Still tying healthcare, housing, and dignity to whether you can convince someone that your job should exist for another quarter.

Fuck the historical comparisons.
Evolution is not a guilt trip. If we have tools that let us live with less compulsion, we are not obliged to reenact the plow.

What jobs do to a person.

Try to look at your workday from the outside for a second. Not the LinkedIn story, not the “I’m so grateful to be part of this amazing team” hostage video. The actual day.

How much of it is:

• answering emails no one needed,

• sitting in meetings designed to prevent decisions,

• moving numbers from one rectangle to another,

• pretending to care about “OKRs” that will be replaced in six months,

• reading messages that were written by someone performing their own job anxiety back at you?

David Graeber called these “bullshit jobs” — roles so devoid of real necessity that even the people doing them felt a quiet shame. The tragedy is not just inefficiency; it’s spiritual.

You wake up and spend most of your conscious time doing things that do not feel like they should exist.

You smile while slowly dissociating.
You talk about “deliverables” while your inner child is screaming into a cushion.
You drag a tired self through mass-produced days until the weekend, which is just recovery from the week.

Psychologically, jobs teach you a very specific lesson:

Your value is conditional.
You are lovable if you are useful.
You are safe if you are busy.

Quit, get fired, or burn out and watch how quickly the floor vanishes.
Watch how people say “So what are you doing now?” with that subtle edge of worry, like unemployment is an infection.

Spiritually, jobs mutilate our relationship to time.

Instead of being a finite, precious thing we explore, time becomes a resource we sell in blocks. You don’t wake up into a day; you wake up into a timesheet.

How do you develop a sense of self when every hour must be justified to an external ledger?

How do you hear anything like an inner voice when Outlook dings every four minutes and your body is Masloved to respond like a lab rat to the bell?

The job as a bad god.

Jobs are a theology.

They promise:

• redemption through productivity (“Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” – worst curse ever written),

• afterlife through career progression (“keep grinding and one day you’ll make it”),

• community through coworkers (“we’re a family here,” says the company that will fire you via email).

In exchange, they demand faith. You must believe this is necessary, that this is how it has to be, that the alternative is chaos.

And if you stop believing?

Sartre said hell is other people. I think hell is the moment you realize you no longer believe in the job religion, but you still have to show up every day and pretend. Žižek would call this ideology: we know the system is absurd, but we keep performing it anyway.

You cannot be fully honest, because honesty would sound like sabotage.

“I’m here so I don’t starve.”
“This work does not feel meaningful.”
“I’m not thriving; I’m enduring.”

Try saying that at your next performance review and see how quickly the mood turns.

So you split: one self that shows up to the job, makes small talk, hits targets; another self that surfaces at 23:41 in the dark, scrolling, wondering what the fuck happened to your teenage dreams.

Apocalypse or just exposing bullshit?

Now the machines arrive, not as Hollywood villains, but as competent interns from another dimension.

Give them your report, they rewrite it.
Give them your code, they debug it.
Give them your marketing plan, they structure, analyze, optimize.
Give them your legalese, they summarize and flag risks.

Give them your job task list and watch, in slow-motion horror, how many items are just… text and routine.

This isn’t speculative. This is already true for a depressing percentage of office work, and the curve is pointing straight up.

Now add humanoid robots for physical tasks. At first they’re expensive, fragile, and PR fluff. Then they’re cheaper. Then they’re standard. Then they’re invisible, like the software that quietly did to call centers what robots will soon do to warehouses.

Capital will use this to cut wages and “streamline headcount.” Of course it will. That’s what capital does. Not because CEOs are individually evil (though many are definitely sociopaths), but because the system rewards whoever squeezes more output from fewer humans.

We should absolutely fight that. Unionize, regulate, tax automation gains, build public infrastructure.

But at a deeper level, something else is happening:
AI is exposing how much of our so-called “necessary” work was always a story.

The job religion is losing its monopoly because a machine can now perform the rituals.

The question that remains is very simple:

If the point is not to keep humans busy…
what is the point?

The transition will hurt like hell, and destroy some of us.

We’re not naïve here. Ending the era of jobs is not a long weekend and a TED talk.

Jobs, for all their cruelty, provide:

• structure (“I know where to be at 9”),

• community (office friendships, shared memes, gossip),

• identity (“I’m a nurse / teacher / carpenter,” for the lucky ones),

• a script (“I know what next year roughly looks like”).

Take that away and you don’t get instant utopia. You get a psychic freefall.

Imagine millions of people waking up one day structurally unnecessary to the economy, with no replacement narrative in place. Not “You’re free now,” but “The system doesn’t know what to do with you, please manage your own despair.”

That’s not liberation. That’s cruelty on a scale our nervous systems are not built for.

So yes, we need a transition, and it will be messy.

• We will need new rhythms for days and weeks that aren’t defined by clocking in.

• We will need new institutions of community – not offices, but workshops, labs, studios, clubs, care centers, gardens, research guilds, whatever – places where humans gather to do things that matter without a boss breathing down their neck for quarterly results.

• We will need new ways to recognize status: not “job title and salary,” but contribution, curiosity, care, creativity.

• We will need economic architecture: universal basic income, or even better, universal basic services (housing, healthcare, education, mobility) that are not held hostage by employers.

And we’ll need therapy. A lot of it.

Because when you tell people, “You no longer have to sell your life to survive,” you don’t get a Netflix montage of instant self-discovery. You get withdrawal symptoms from a drug called Productivity.

You get people asking: Who am I when nobody is grading me?

“But people will be bored and useless without jobs!”

Ah yes, the favorite argument of those who cannot imagine a life they didn’t outsource to their employer.

Look at history for a second—but properly this time.

The aristocrats and nobles, for all their obscene privilege and parasitic cruelty, did not spend their idle time staring at a wall. Many became:

• astronomers,

• composers,

• philosophers,

• inventors,

• patrons of art,

• obsessive collectors of everything from butterflies to languages.

They had time and security, and they filled that space with obsessions. We remember their names not because they had jobs, but because they had latitude.

The idea that most people, given time and basic security, would choose to do nothing is a slander invented by those who need you afraid.

Look around: it’s after work, and people are:

• writings obscure Substacks (I wrote this essay incrementally after work, exhausted and disillusioned, and still I wrote it),

• running community sports clubs for free,

• making fan art, writing fanfic, modding games,

• caring for kids, elders, sick relatives,

• fixing old cars, volunteering at shelters, knitting, coding, arguing on forums, learning obscure instruments.

This is what humans do even when exhausted.

Now imagine what they’d do if they weren’t mentally flattened by eight hours of bullshit first.

Multiple points of view, same conclusion.

Let’s be fair and walk around this thing a bit.

Point of view 1: The worker who loves their job.
They exist. The nurse who feels deeply called; the scientist who wakes up burning with curiosity; the craftsperson whose whole body sings when the piece comes out right.

For them, “ending the era of jobs” doesn’t mean ripping away their purpose. It means de-linking their purpose from coercion. You can still nurse, research, build, teach. But not under the permanent threat of destitution if you stop.

Point of view 2: The anxious middle-class office soul.
They fear automation because it threatens the one thing insulating them from the abyss: the job title. Ending jobs feels like ending self.

For them, the transition must come with a new story: you are not your position. Your ability to learn, care, create, and participate is portable. The safety net must be real enough that they dare to believe it.

Point of view 3: The owner of capital.
They love jobs, not because they love people working, but because jobs are the hose through which surplus flows upwards. Ending jobs sounds like ending profit.

But even here, there’s a hard truth: in a fully automated, hyper-productive system with no one able to buy anything because they have no wages, your profit is worth as much as a throne in an empty kingdom. Something has to give: ownership models, tax regimes, dividend structures, all of it?

Point of view 4: The global poor.
They might rightfully ask: “You talk about ending jobs; we never had good ones to begin with.” Any serious transition must not be a rich-country hobby. It must reckon with global injustice, not freeze it in place.

Ending the era of jobs must not mean: “We automate our bullshit while you still sew our clothes in unsafe factories.” It means automating dangerous, exhausting work everywhere, then using the gains to fund global floors of dignity.

Toward a post-job world.

I’m not offering a fucking policy platform. I’m not running for office. I can barely run my own life.

But some contours are obvious, I think:

1. Decouple survival from employment.

   • Universal basic services: housing, healthcare, education, public transit, internet access as rights, not products.

   • Income floors: UBI or negative income tax or whatever configuration works locally. The point is: no one should be blackmailed by hunger into pointless labor.

2. Shorten and soften the remaining work.

   • 20–30 hour weeks, distributed.

   • Rotating, voluntary participation in necessary but unpleasant tasks, mediated by tech and compensated fairly.

   • Labor law that treats burnout as structural violence, not individual weakness.

3. Democratize the machines.

   • Public or cooperative ownership of major AI and robotics infrastructure.

   • Taxation of automation gains, funneled back into the commons.

   • Open-source models, citizen labs, community computing centers.

4. Build new temples of meaning.
   Not religious temples (though those will exist too) but civic ones: libraries, makerspaces, research hubs, local observatories, theaters, clubs, gardens, game dev collectives. Places where prestige does not come from profit, but from contribution, invention, care.

5. Normalize non-productivity as a virtue.
   Leisure is not sin; it is the condition for thinking clearly. Time spent staring at the sky, at the sea, at a blank page, is not “wasted.” It’s where philosophy, art, and everything else that has a soul comes from.

Camus talked about imagining Sisyphus happy. Maybe the point now is to take away the rock and see what he does when he’s no longer condemned to push it. Does he climb the mountain just for the view? Does he build an observatory? Does he lie in the grass and finally sleep?

Whatever he does, it will finally be his.

A new era.

Ending jobs is not about making humans soft and idle and useless.

It’s about ending the compulsory theater where effort is only recognized if it fattens a ledger. It’s about admitting that tying basic dignity to wage labor was always a barbaric hack, only tolerated because we lacked the tools to do better.

NOW WE HAVE THOSE TOOLS, DAMMIT.

We have machines that can absorb more and more of the routine, dangerous, and boring work. We have networks that can coordinate massive projects without feudal hierarchies. We have enough historical hindsight to know which ideologies lead to concentrations camps and gulags and which lead to shareholder cults.

The only question that matters:

Are we brave enough to admit that the job is over?
And if we are, will we design a world for freed humans,
or for obsolete ones?

I don’t know what the next decade looks like. I know that clinging to jobs as sacred, when machines are clearly better at many of them, is spiritual cowardice.

Let the era of jobs end.
Let the era of lives begin.

Not lives as permanent vacations.
Lives as experiments. Lives as projects.
Lives where your worth is not a line on a resume,
but the ripples you leave in other people’s days.

We can choose to be the last generation that spent its best hours under fluorescent lights, pretending this was the height of civilization.

Or we can be the first generation that looked at the robots walking onto the factory floor, looked at the models spinning up in the cloud, and said:

“Good.
Take the work.
We’ll take the world back.”

Enjoy your time,

Antonio Melonio

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