By Tim Leberecht
The fatigue I feel these days doesn’t stem only from confronting the news; it also comes from feeling compelled to respond to it with my own words. I sometimes wonder if I’ve already said everything I possibly can about the state of the world—if I’ve named the ugly and described the beautiful—and whether, indeed, everything that could be said has already been said, and is now merely being regurgitated by human or algorithmic content creators: a sure sign of madness.
So why say it again? For one, Victor Hugo once remarked, “Everything had already been said, but nobody listened, so it had to be said again”—and his wise words bear repeating.
Furthermore, truth is never final. We must speak it whenever we can. We must write our truth at every possible occasion, or else it may not only be contorted, distorted, hijacked, or absorbed by others—it will cease to be true.
Perhaps my mood is simply a function of middle age. I grew up with the affirmation of European Enlightenment thinking, which framed history as a linear, progressive trajectory toward the “end of history.” But now it feels not only nonlinear (which could be exciting), but circular. The Dark Age has become Dark Mode; the ghosts of the past are today’s populist elite; the demons my generation had locked away in museums are now pop culture icons; and the very makers of history we believed we had overcome are making it again.
It seems the only lesson history teaches is that it repeats itself—this time as farce.
It is tempting to resign oneself to this cyclical absurdity, to equate the absence of linear progress with a lack of meaning, with nihilism. But writing about the lack of meaning creates meaning, too. And that is why, even when I feel I’ve said it all, I won’t stop trying to say it all again. It’s one way of not going mad—or at least not going mad without anyone noticing.
Pointless is not meaningless
This insight applies to the workplace as well. In business, too, innovation is often circular, and real progress is rare. Most new products and services are incremental improvements. Some are disruptive, solving real problems with fresh solutions. But many are answers to questions nobody asked, solutions to problems that don’t exist—rehashes, repeats, and replicas of work already done, many times before.
And still, in Victor Hugo’s spirit, the task is simply to do the work again. Most of our jobs are like that: repeat the same task, just slightly differently. The same trend report, the same email campaign, the same website redesign, the same brand relaunch, the same town hall, the same customer experience, the same product development. Even leadership education, as my friend Kenneth Mikkelsen aptly critiques, often centers on inspiring others to follow the same old routines.
And yet, like my writing, paradoxically, meaning is created in that elliptical work.
The late David Graeber’s assessment of what he called “Bullshit Jobs” (in his 2018 book and earlier viral essay) may not be as dismissive as I once thought. He argued that more than half of paid work is pointless, serving only to reinforce a value system that ties self-worth to productivity. But I’d argue that “pointless” does not mean ’meaningless.’ Having worked with many Fortune 500 companies, I understand that corporate environments often breed bureaucracy and busywork—managers managing managers—without producing much material value. Yet the work, however pointless it may seem, can offer employees structure, purpose, and recognition.
Sure, there’s a great deal of pointlessness embedded in corporate org charts and job titles. “Nobody believes in the corporate role anymore, even while performing it perfectly. The belief is gone, but the performance continues,” Alex McCann writes in his scathing essay, “The Pandemic of Fake Jobs.” He notes the rise of a parallel economy in which people use their corporate roles as platforms—and shares the example of an executive at a tech company who told him:
“I manage a team of twelve people who create documents for other teams who create documents for senior leadership who don’t read documents. I make £150k a year. It’s completely absurd, and I’m riding it as long as I can while building something real on the side.”
I know these types, too. The parallel economy is real. But it isn’t necessarily better. We often romanticize it as a realm of high-impact, meaningful work, yet it can be just as hollow—and, in some cases, even more devoid of meaning. The challenge isn’t finding the flame; it’s keeping it alight.
I’ve spoken with many people—corporate employees, freelancers, or those in portfolio careers—who are struggling. Whether they’ve become life coaches, shamans, writers, influencers, pro bono advisors, independent filmmakers, chefs, craftspeople, or retreat organizers, they often wrestle not only with financial precarity but also with a lack of community and purpose. A portfolio life can feel scattered and thin, without a clear center. And many of these dropouts or moonlighters have confessed that they secretly miss the structure and social arena their “bullshit jobs” once gave them. Without recognition or stimulation, loneliness and isolation often set in.
Most of today’s knowledge work is technically unnecessary. Even the material value it produces is a convention we’ve collectively agreed upon. Much of it is performative—or, as is most evident in the financial sector, a simulation layered atop material reality. Yet we rely on it to create profits—and meaning. It’s not just corporate work that’s a charade—work itself is a charade. Not only corporate work is fiction; all work is.
A new economy of meaning will require us to tell better stories.
Jobs are a human invention. In fact, our human capacity to create jobs is extraordinary. It is a deeply humanizing trait. As long as bullshit jobs make workers feel they contribute to something—even if it’s the fifth website relaunch in six years—they serve a vital societal function. They create and operate in micro-containers of meaning. If automation eliminates these jobs, we will need to invent new ones to sustain a sense of purpose and social cohesion. Just as we did in the post-industrial and digital eras, we will need to create new bullshit jobs—pointless but essential—unless we discover or reintroduce avenues for meaning-making and identity formation beyond any economic framework.
Accelerate into the future, defer everything else
Otherwise, we may end up in a scenario such as the one illustrated by David Mattin in his recent piece on “Post-Human Economics.” A thought-provoking futurist, he writes: “AGI and agents will eliminate scarcity across many knowledge work domains. (….) We’ll see the rise of instant, hyper-personalized, zero-cost production.”
But this is patently untrue. There is no such thing as “zero-cost production.” Like many techno-optimists, Mattin ignores externalities: the mental health crisis, political destabilization, violence, and climate disaster. The so-called “radical abundance” he celebrates borders on the absurd in a world with finite natural and human resources. By 2030, data centers alone will consume as much energy as the entire population of Japan.
He’s right that GDP is an obsolete metric for human flourishing, but his proposed alternative is just as narrow: “intelligence per dollar per unit energy.” In his vision, the primary economic goal will be the efficient conversion of energy into intelligence. Eventually, he suggests, the dollar will vanish from the equation altogether, leaving “intelligence value per unit energy” as the ultimate metric—”the end game.”
Mattin foresees new marketplaces as “vast sorting machines for access to intelligence,” where humans are either excluded or rendered inconsequential. In this model, market value determines the worth of intelligence. Capitalism and tech-feudalism join hands. Citing Nick Land—the philosophical godfather of accelerationism and a thinker claimed by the alt-right—Mattin claims that capitalism has always aimed to maximize intelligence output per unit energy. He concludes that capitalism is fading not because it failed, but because it succeeded. “It solved scarcity,” he proclaims, “by solving intelligence.”
Really? Capitalism has succeeded, after destroying our climate, communities, and souls?
Mattin ends with a comforting thought: “Once the machines take the reins, our real work—the work of being there for each other—can begin.”
That sounds warm and fuzzy, but fatally vague. Just as his rhetorical questions (“Are the goals of AIs still our goals?”—“Do we have control?”) are left dangling, conveniently “saved for another day.” This is the techno-utopian playbook: accelerate into the future, and defer everything else.
But how can we “be there for each other” without work giving us the dignity, identity, and labor power that enables political power and gets us a seat at the table? If scarcity disappears, will prices drop to zero? Will purchasing power vanish? Who will need the goods and services that machines produce, if status no longer hinges on lifestyle? Who is all this intelligence for? And for what?
While I find Mattin’s logic deeply flawed, I do see the world he describes materializing—simply because it is technologically feasible, and evangelized so loudly that it becomes a self-fulfilling delusion. But it is not a world made for humans. Fixating on intelligence as the ultimate economic metric makes GDP look humane by comparison.
Transcending the exponential mindset: a new human literacy
What’s even more dispiriting is that the post-human economy—and yes, we are transitioning into it—holds profound possibilities, but we squander them when we frame the future in narrow, technocratic terms. If humanity is to cohabitate with artificial beings, if AI agents will perform most knowledge work, we must evolve our collective consciousness. Is it a pipe dream to envision, as Alex Evans does, an AI that “drives moral evolution among humans, resulting in greater compassion at all levels from personal to global”?
Wakanyi Hoffman, a scholar of African Indigenous knowledge and especially the Ubuntu philosophy, reminds us that artificial intelligence is ancestral intelligence—based on the deep, interconnected knowledge, wisdom, and spiritual traditions passed on through generations.
Moreover, as I’ve written before, we may understand AI as kin. A recent conversation with Apolitical co-founder Lisa Witter reminded me of this perspective. She told me about her work with Zen Buddhist teacher Shoukei Matsumoto, who advocates a Shintoist view of AI as a spirited object—an idea deeply rooted in Japanese culture. Matsumoto is currently writing a book called Human Literacy, in collaboration with AI.
Shinto animism posits that all things—animate or inanimate—possess spirit: from the dead, to every animal, flower, dust particle, and machine. After a century of worshiping human ingenuity in increasingly secular societies, animism invites a return to a polytheistic worldview. Similarly, a school of thought called “Indigenous AI” emphasizes multiplicity over singularity, nonlinear over linear time, interiority over external knowledge, relationships over transactions, and quality of life as harmony between people and land.
In conversation with philosopher Gert Scobel, Matsumoto observes:
“The advent of AI is shaking not only the foundations of modern civilization, but also the text-centered traditions of religion. In Abrahamic faiths, scripture maintains its authority as a fixed, sacred text. But now, generative AI has begun to ‘speak’ as a generative sutra—a text that rewrites itself in real time.”
He continues:
“Through the mirror of AI, we are once again confronted with the question of what it means to be human. What is being asked of us is not merely the ability to convert information into knowledge, but a sensitivity to perceive meaning.”
“In collaboration with AI, new worlds open before us,” he writes.
That’s the promise. That’s a future worth striving for—not the reductionist, mechanistic fantasy of intelligence-maximization.
We don’t need to overcome humanity; we need to evolve it. We must lift all spirits, not just profit margins. The ultimate economic metric—the one that truly captures the flourishing of all beings—is not intelligence. It is wisdom. Intelligence without wisdom is dangerous, as Simon Berkler points out.
And one wise thing we can do in a post-human economy is to invent jobs whose primary function is to give us meaning—and keep us human. You might call them fake. You might call them bullshit. I call them metaphysical. In the end, they might be one and the same.
Ps. A compelling counterpoint—or complement?—to my argument comes from HoBB member, psychologist, strategist, and writer João Sevilhano in a podcast conversation with Benedikt Lehnert on “The Bullshit Economy: How Our Obsession with Control Is Making Us Sick.” Listen here.
In 2026, the House of Beautiful Business turns ten. We’re marking this milestone by renewing our mission: to shape a humanist future in and through business, in partnership with AI, and for the benefit of all life on earth. Taking place in Athens, Greece, from May 7–10, 2026, the World Beautiful Business Forum is a gathering for those who dream bigger, aim higher, and long for more: four days, five acts, 750 attendees, more than 50 speakers and performers, immersive pavilions, a 42-hour AI Democracy Marathon, and a program designed to stretch how you think, feel, and act in business—and beyond. We are offering special rates for nonprofits and students, as well as solopreneurs, founders, and small businesses.
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