A project will save you

How to respond to the AI job apocalypse

A project.

One year ago, I wrote a post entitled “Everyone I know is worried about work.” Unfortunately, it has aged very well. In the last few months, more and more people with white collar jobs — or perhaps it’s more accurate to just say laptop jobs — feel insecure in their positions, unsure of their value to our economy and what the future holds.

I had to do a double take the other day when I read a headline about software company Oracle’s last round of layoffs. “Three thousand people,” I thought, “that’s brutal.” But then I got halfway through the story and realized it was 30,000 people. All laid off with an email.

Amidst all this, I keep having the same thought: Those of us who have built non-traditional, creative, network-based, portfolio-style careers are — despite our financial precarity — paradoxically well-prepared for this moment. While it might look like we’re being left behind by AI, I suspect we might actually be ahead of the game.

Because to be self employed in some kind of creative career for the past two decades (and probably before that) has been to hear a repeating message: The market does not value your labor. In my 17 years as a professional writer alone, it’s been the tail-end of the pivot from print to online, the pivot to algorithmic social media, the pivot to video, the pivot to the creator economy. With every pivot, the ability to make a living gets more difficult. This latest iteration, AI, is not news to us. What is new is that the logic of extraction that drives it has accelerated. Now, it’s coming for all the safe jobs at places like Oracle, too.

It doesn’t feel like too big an imaginative leap to say that we’re entering an era where the idea of stable, full-time, salaried employment that has historically sustained a decent life is not going to be a given anymore. One possible response to this — which I first offered last year and build upon below — is simple: Stop trying to outrun it. It won’t work. The logic of extraction will come for you anyway. Build something better, more grounded, more networked, and resilient. Some will say that makes you a luddite. I’m here to offer the idea that it might actually make you a leader.

But what does that look like? How do you structure a day, a week, a year when no one is telling you what to do? What do you aim for when salary progression is no longer an obvious goal? How do you figure out your lifestyle when you don’t get paid the same amount on the same day every month? What do you do when you realize, as I wrote last year, that no job is coming to save you?

I offer some ideas below, based on nearly two decades of (mostly) self employment during which I’ve answered these questions for myself over and over. I don’t intend to suggest that this will be easy or like some kind of lifestyle enhancement. I also won’t deny that the future may come with a fair amount of economic hardship for many people. I should stress that I think it fucking sucks that we are all facing this, and it represents a profound failure of all the systems our world is built on.

It’s imperative to remind yourself, over and over, that the problem is not you. We’re living through an “uneven ending” of the systems that have historically brought success and stability, and we can’t yet see what’s going to replace them. But we do have some agency in shaping what comes next. And we can use all of our human capacities — not just intelligence — to do so. I think a slightly more hopeful picture emerges when we start to embody that.

The trifecta that makes a life

My career experience has taught me that a good life is made of three components: The way you make money, the way you find meaning or purpose, and the lifestyle all that unfolds in.

When you have a stable career path with a set progression, all three of those elements are sorted for you. Even if your job doesn’t bring you any meaning or fulfillment, it usually keeps you busy enough that you don’t have much time to think about all that stuff. If nothing else, it gives you something to get up and do everyday. It also provides your income. And based on that income, your lifestyle is decided for you.

In the absence of a career like that, all those three things become suddenly disentangled. Part of the terror I sense people feel in this moment is confronting that realization. There is now a lot more to figure out than just how you’re going to get paid.

Your life obviously needs all three of these parts. However, no one says they have to come from a single source. Your meaning can come from acts of service, care, or creative work you do in your free-time. Your income can come from a patchwork of jobs or part time gigs that mean little to you beyond money, or from something you did not study or even imagine yourself doing. Your lifestyle may need to adapt to this new reality, rather than to the size of your compensation.

The important thing is this: when you disentangle these three components, your potential sources of meaning, your possible contribution to the world, no longer needs to fit into a for-profit company’s objectives. If nothing else, that fact should be genuinely exciting to a lot more of us.

A project will save you

In December, my husband got made redundant from a role the company had created for him six months before. It was his second redundancy in the space of 12 months. It was a huge existential blow, and another massive injection of stress for our family. Like many of us, he falls under what Jenna Park smartly pegged the “too young to retire, too old to get hired” category.

In the days immediately following, my husband instinctively did something I now see as kind of miraculous: He went to the garage and started woodworking. Carpentry is something he learned informally from his dad, and he did it for money during the pandemic (the last time the writing work dried up) but he hadn’t really touched it for a few years.

In between a futile job search, he spent all of January making a beautiful record cabinet out of some leftover walnut wood he’d been hanging onto for four years. It was only once he’d finished it, with Abbey Road spinning in our living room, that I realized what he’d really done: He found a reason to get up everyday in the midst of all the other bullshit we were dealing with.

“A project will save you” is actually his line¹. It’s something he’s said to me over the years about writing. If you have something to come back to, something that’s yours, you can put up with a lot of other bullshit. He wrote his novel, Johnny Ruin, in 600 word increments every evening when he had a full time job working at Buzzfeed. I wrote two book proposals (one that failed, one that succeeded) on Saturday mornings at Starbucks and in tiny increments in between paid work during childcare hours. There was no guarantee these projects would ever see the light of day. But we did them anyway. Why? Because a project will save you.

That impulse to go to the garage and just start something is what differentiates us humans from machines. We need to feel we are making our way through the world, not just existing in it. We need to feel a sense of autonomy and progress that orientates us in time and space. And here’s the thing that all those people who are using AI to write their books and Substacks don’t seem to understand: The act of doing, creating, and plodding along is actually more important than the finished outcome. If you skip that part, you’ve just skipped the whole damn point.

Form a new relationship with time

If you’re un or underemployed, life kind of sucks. You can’t afford to do a lot of things. But what you do have is time. You do not need to spend all of your waking hours hunched over a laptop pretending to work, just because that is what you did in full-time employment. Use it to fully be in the world, and don’t feel guilty about it.

I’ll admit it took me years to do pleasant things within normal business hours and not feel like I should be doing something else. But I promise these moments are generative. They bind you to your own rhythm and nervous system. They help you access creative ideas and find solutions to problems that would never occur to you at a desk. So step away from your laptop for an hour or two. Sit in the sun. Move your body. Read a goddamn book. Tend to a project. Connect with friends. Lift heavy things. Grow a garden. Build your village. All of those acts will interact with and buttress everything else on this list. None of them cost money.

Do the next right thing

Creative freelancers don’t plan for promotions or five year plans. We put ourselves in the path of opportunity. We nurture relationships over time. We make connections, do good work, and see what happens. Some years are great. Some aren’t. But we know not to think too far in advance — the hinge points of our careers were often things we didn’t see coming.

If you’re staring down the abyss, it’s wise to actively stop yourself from looking too far ahead. Think about the next six to nine months, tops. Get a project to keep you sane. Make money however you can, even if it’s humbling. Write a list each week and do the next right thing each day. Stay tethered to the present and just keep going.

I can use myself as an example here. The truth is, I do not know if I will be making money as a writer or author in two, five, ten year’s time. (I do know, with great certainty, that I will still be writing.) But I know that the skills and outlook I amassed in the last two decades will be useful in other ways. At the present moment, I can see how the next 12 to 18 months of our family’s life and finances will play out. I can’t really worry about much more beyond that, and so I don’t.

Get out of the doom loop

There is an unseen opportunity cost of spending all day on the internet fruitlessly looking for a job: You don’t see the opportunity that exists elsewhere. I think a lot of people are in this space, and it gets even worse when the tenor of LinkedIn (at least in my algorithm) seems to get more and more desperate each day. Enter the doom loop.

Freelancers know the doom loop well. Nothing is happening. Everything is a rejection. People keep ghosting. When this happens, there is only one thing you can do: Shift the energy.

This is hard to explain if you’ve only ever been in full time employment. When nothing is happening, you have to make something happen somewhere else. Turn to new or off-the-wall ideas, new revenue streams, do cold-outreach to someone who has a problem you think you can solve. These opportunities or ideas can be unexpected, random, or humbling — selling stuff, walking dogs, the gig economy — but in the short term, that doesn’t matter.

These shifts in energy are truly palpable when you work for yourself. The amount of times I’ve manufactured some small amount of income elsewhere in my life, only to find all my original work offers move forward (and end up with way too much work at once) has been far more than I can count.

My husband is still technically unemployed. Except he’s not. He’s working with a local carpenter who he reached out to on Instagram. The hourly rate might be low compared to his other skillset, but he’s out of the house and off his laptop, meeting people, making connections, learning. This is not what he started the year thinking he’d be doing, and it’s been a scary transition at times. But he’s no longer looking for a job to be a perfect replacement for the one he lost because that’s not where the opportunity seems to be.

Build things that cannot scale

We’ve been trained by the modern economy to think place doesn’t matter. Only scale does.

I think we’re set to see a reversal of that in the coming years. More and more of us are going to divert our efforts to things that are constrained by place, rather than those that are promised to scale. And the perfect example of that, of course, is the topic of my book: the village.

Many of the lessons of the village are surprisingly helpful for your work life, too. In fact, the number one piece of advice in this emerging economy is simple: invest in your relationships, not companies. Leverage the people you know and the place you live in. It is the surest kind of resilience and sustainability.

And even outside of the way you earn money, look for ways to collaborate. Make something! Help someone for free! The reason to do these things may not be financial, but they provide another kind of security. Consider that so many of the things we work jobs to pay for these days — childcare, food, entertainment, therapy, single-family homes — exist because we lost the village along the way.

Get used to spending less money

You may be thinking: this all sounds nice but how are you going to pay the bills? This brings us back to the lifestyle part of the trifecta. Central to everything here is that you have to get used to spending less money.

Most people in a consumer economy spend money in a speculative way, assuming that the money they earned this month will be there next month, next year, next decade at a predictably increasing rate. If you’re convinced by the viewpoint I lay out in this piece, then you also have to stop living at the margins of what you can afford and save money whenever you can. Life is expensive and there will be many people reading this that have already done that. My advice is geared towards those who perhaps feel stuck in a pattern of spending that they feel panic about maintaining. The answer is: Stop trying to.

I find there is a weird joy in de-leveraging my lifestyle in this way. You may also find you need less money than you used to. You may not need the boutique fitness studio. The de-stress of manicures and facials. The expensive dinners with friends you haven’t had time to see in months. The excessive travel that is both carbon and energy intensive. We crave the convenience, immediacy, and novelty of these things when we are ground down, overworked, and disconnected from our purpose. It’s truly remarkable how expensive it is to participate in capitalism at its highest levels.

Make sitting with uncertainty a practice

I’ll finish by saying that I know how profoundly difficult it is to live with this level of uncertainty. Some days, the most practical thing I can do to prevent myself spinning out is to go to a free 15 minute lunchtime meditation offered by local Buddhist monks. Building that muscle — that ability to sit with how difficult this all feels — is a big part of this work. Remembering that I can surrender to it all, even for a few minutes, especially in the presence of other humans, has the strange effect of giving me a tiny bit of agency back to do the next right thing.

I think this is a conversation that more of us need to be having. Beyond the doom and uncertainty, how do we practically respond to this moment well using all of our human capacities. So fellow freelancers, polymaths, creatives, and scrappy folk — please add your ideas in the comments.

Thank you for reading. All of my writing here is offered free to all readers, but if you want to support my work further, the cheapest way is to do that is to upgrade to an annual paid subscription here. Thanks to those of you who already pay to support my work — it gives me the time, childcare, and headspace to write essays like this one.

1. Close readers will note that this is the second time in 2026 I have headlined a piece with a quote from my husband. He says he is pleased with how wise he sounds in this newsletter.