A barista finds out in four minutes whether she did the job well:
You hand over the cup.
You watch the face.
You just know.
Corporate has no such loop. You live in a labyrinth of numbers and PowerPoints, and at the end of the day you don’t save lives. You save PDFs. Many of us don’t even get that far.
Let whoever has never spent months on something that never saw daylight cast the first stone.
That distance is why so much white-collar work feels hollow and (sadly) the hollowness doesn’t stay at the office, no matter how hard you try to believe in work-life balance. Once the basic needs are met, an itch sets in that money can’t scratch. It’s a first world problem and I am fully aware of that. Plenty of people I know have lost the thread of what any of it is for, and they’re the ones with the good titles.
For the context, this isn’t just a mood or midlife crisis type of situation. In a well-known field study, Adam Grant put university fundraisers face to face with a student their calls had helped fund. A month later, they were spending 142 % more time on the phone and bringing in 171% percent more revenue. Many of them dismissed the idea that the meeting had made any difference.
They couldn’t actually feel what the distance had been costing them.
Most of us can’t.
AI only sharpens that hollowness. If a machine can do almost anything, why are we still needed? Of course it can’t. It lacks judgment. But who says human judgment is the right one? The tasks we’re paid for start to run without us, and we become semi-obsolete in our own process. The anxiety about changes we can’t stop is real.
Maybe human judgment isn’t always right. But it’s the part someone has to sign.
Execution is what a model does now. It also happened to be the part that made the work feel real.
Nothing it produces arrives finished. Every output still needs direction, checking, editing, a decision, and all of that lands in the invisible-work bucket, next to everything else nobody counts. The work moved from making to judging, and judging can’t be rushed.
Judgment is built by making. You can’t judge what you’ve never made, which means a whole generation is being asked to supervise a craft they never got to practice.
So the work doesn’t get lighter. It gets more abstract.
The ugly beauty of social media is that it hands you what the barista has: feedback that’s instant, visible, and almost has a face. But a like isn’t a consequence. It tells you whether you were seen, not whether anything changed because you were there.
Every platform asks the same question (how did that look?) while the barista, the plumber and the nurse ask a different one:
Did that help?
Put the two together and you get a strange condition: watched all day, useful never. AI feeds it from the other side, with more decks, more posts, more output, and no one at the end of any of it.
I write in public, so I know the pull. We built ourselves a small, loud, well-lit room and started mistaking applause for meaning.
What ultimately survives is judgment, the signature you carry when it goes wrong, and the habit of noticing what’s missing. All three depend on one thing: a line of sight to the outcome.
It’s a way to find out where your own line of sight is missing.
Here’s an exercise I discovered some time ago and I keep coming back to:
it is called an Odyssey Plan, built by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans at Stanford. The concept is simple: describe three versions of your next five years:
Life one: If nothing changes, what does your work look like in five years?
Life two: If your job disappeared tomorrow, what would you do instead?
Life three: If money and image didn’t matter, what would you do?
A model can answer all three for the average professional, but it has never met you. Doesn’t know your deepest desires.
What do you want when nobody is watching? If you can’t say, who will say it for you?
Algorithm already has an answer built from what you clicked.
You don’t save lives. You save PDFs.
But the distance between a PDF and a life isn’t fixed. Some of it is built into the job. The rest is a decision: whose call you take, which document you follow past the last approval, how close you let the outcome get.
That part is yours.
Fin
While you’re here:
Lucy, the line about saving PDFs instead of lives made me laugh, though there's something rather sad about it too. I especially liked your point about younger people being expected to judge work they've never had the chance to do themselves. How are they supposed to develop that judgment? And that third question in the Odyssey Plan is probably the hardest. We spend so much time worrying about what others think that we sometimes forget what we actually want.