Chapter 3 - "Work" Is a Language Game
On Letting Go of "Jobs" and Learning to "Play"
In 2030, at a July Fourth celebration, someone asks the usual icebreaker: “So, what do you do?”
I pause. “Honestly?” I say. “I may have to stop answering that question.”
It isn’t dramatic—more like someone who’d developed a dietary restriction. “It just doesn’t metabolize well anymore,” I add.
“I work (*makes air quotes*) more than ever,” I say. “But I feel less employed than ever.”
My interlocutor smiles—not bitter, not proud. Just slightly... untethered. Bemused.
And I realized: we’ve all become a little less legible to each other. And especially to ourselves.
There was a time—not long ago—when “what do you do?” served as a reliable shorthand for identity. The answer wasn’t just about how you earned a living—it encoded worth, conferred status, stabilized self-understanding. Occupation functioned as an ontological anchor. But that framing—labor as a stable proxy for value or self—is cracking. Slowly at first, and now with visible fault lines.
It’s not just that work is being automated, outsourced, or algorithmically optimized. That’s just the surface tremor. The deeper disturbance is semiotic: labor no longer means what it used to mean. We're living through a kind of semiotic drift, where the signs we once trusted—“job title,” “hours worked,” “skills,” even “career”—are shedding their referential stability. They no longer point to anything durable. They no longer point reliably to anything durable.
You can see it in the dissonance between effort and reward, credential and capacity, output and outcome. A Twitch streamer might out-earn a teacher. A former middle manager rebrands as a “fractional integrator.” A founder “builds in public” by narrating more than making. All of them may be working hard—but on what? And for whom? Work has always had performative elements, but now the performance is detaching from the plot.
Wittgenstein called language a “form of life.” If that’s true, then labor—like language—isn’t merely a utility but a shared ritual. A socially constructed rhythm that makes the world legible. Which raises an unsettling question: what happens when we stop agreeing on the rules of the game? When the shared script dissolves, what’s left? I think we’re standing at the edge of that question, globally.
We’re approaching a phase where embodied AI agents—copresences in the digital-physical stack—won’t just assist our labor, but inhabit it. Not tools, but actors. Negotiators. Simulacra of authority. The kind of "work" they perform won’t align with our legacy categories. They will write, sell, support, advise—not only more efficiently, but often more persuasively. The disruption won’t just be economic—it will be semantic. A rift in what labor means, and what it signals.
We may need to remember—or re-learn—that not all human activity was ever telic to begin with. Some of it has always been atelic: done not to get somewhere, but to be somewhere. This is the terrain of serious play, of the autotelic and the ludic. Camping, dancing, meditating, music-making, fly fishing—not as idle diversions, but as rituals of coherence. We may soon discover that the new identity-anchoring practices we need will look less like professions and more like games. Not trivial ones, but Huizinga's kind—bounded, rule-rich, participatory worlds that generate meaning through enactment. If embodied AI compels us to let go of labor as identity, it might also nudge us to reclaim the ludic as freedom. Or at least as rehearsal. Expect the ludicrous too—it always follows close behind.
Perhaps, technically speaking, if labor no longer maps to identity—and embodied AIs can now do most things better, faster, and without imposter syndrome—then yes, we may all be able to retire. Not in the pension-collecting, sunset-gazing sense, but in the ontological sense: retired from the burden of proving our worth through productivity. No gold watch—just a quiet, irreversible shift in what it means to show up in the world.
Maybe the future won’t look like work at all. Maybe it’ll look like conversation. Like long walks. Like building intricate, useless things. Maybe we’ll become custodians of strange rituals—obscure crafts, shared hallucinations, collaborative dreams—that don’t “scale” or “optimize” but still matter. Not because they produce, but because they point: to the fact that we were here, and awake, and making meaning in the ruins of exhausted proxies. And maybe that’s enough. Maybe that’s the work now.
Further Reading & References
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. (Language as “form of life.”)
Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture.
Setiya, Kieran. Midlife: A Philosophical Guide. (On telic vs. atelic activities.)
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. (Autotelic behavior.)
Pascal, Blaise. Pensées. (On diversion and the human avoidance of existential stillness.)
Watts, Alan. The Wisdom of Insecurity. (Living without telos.)
Sicart, Miguel. Play Matters. (Ludic design as non-instrumental engagement.)
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. (Medium as message, rituals of communication.)
Vervaeke, John. Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. (On recursive relevance realization.)
Sam Harris. Waking Up App. (Meditation, atelic framing, AI selfhood discourse.)