Meaning used to be simple. For most of history, someone handed it to you. A priest, a king, a book, a tradition. You were born into a structure that told you what mattered, what to do with your time, and what your labor was for. The structure could be oppressive, often was, but it answered the question that most people now can't answer at all, which is why any of this matters.
Then we got smarter, supposedly. We traded the divine framework for a productive one. Meaning stopped being inherited and started being earned. You went to school, got a job, climbed a ladder, bought things that proved you were climbing, and the accumulation itself became the point. Progress replaced the sacred. Merit replaced birthright. And productivity became the closest thing to a god that a secular society could produce, complete with its own rituals, its own guilt, and its own version of salvation through more output.
That worked for a while, or at least it looked like it did. But something corroded underneath. Work got broken into pieces small enough that no single person could see the whole, and once you can't see the whole, you can't feel the meaning. The artisan became the employee. The employee became the task-completer. And the task-completer became the person lying awake at 2 a.m. wondering why none of it feels like enough, despite doing everything they were told to do.
Now the productive framework is starting to crack, too. Postmodernism took a hammer to every hierarchy it could find, and some of those hierarchies deserved it, but the demolition left a vacuum. If no perspective is better than another, if all structures are just power dressed up as truth, then meaning doesn't live anywhere. It got deconstructed out of the room. And what replaced it, for most people, is a low hum of nothing. Scrolling. Consuming. Optimizing metrics that don't point anywhere. Meaning from up there died centuries ago. Meaning from out there is dying now. And meaning from nowhere, which is where most people currently live, is not a stable place to build a life.
AI accelerates this. Not because it's evil or because the technology is wrong, but because it promises to do the one thing that most people use as their last remaining source of identity: the work.
If a machine can write the copy, design the system, run the ads, build the site, analyze the data, and do all of it faster and cheaper than a person, then the person who defined themselves by their ability to do those things is suddenly standing in an empty room. The skills that took years to develop become commodities overnight. The tasks that used to separate you from the average person are now available to anyone with a subscription and a prompt.
This is not a hypothetical. I use AI tools every day. I build with them. I think alongside them. And the gap between what the tools can produce and what I would actually publish is real, but it's not a gap in technical skill. The tools are competent. Often more than competent. The gap is in perspective. The tools can write clearly, structure an argument, design a layout, but they can't decide what's worth writing about, or why it matters right now, or what to leave out because it doesn't serve the thing being built. They can operate on a perspective, they can mimic a perspective, but they cannot hold one, because holding a perspective requires a life that has been lived in a specific direction with specific stakes and specific losses that shaped what the person cares about and why.
That gap is the only durable edge left for anyone who makes things.
I think about this constantly because I'm building something that bets on it.
I work a day job at an automation company, and the work is honestly fine. I like building things there. The systems are real, the problems are tangible, and the people are good. It's not a prison I'm trying to escape. But it's also not the thing I want my life to be organized around forever, because the thing I care about most, the thing I keep coming back to even when it would be easier not to, is the studio I'm building on my own time.
That studio is a bet that authorship matters. That taste matters. That there is a market, maybe a small one, for work that carries a specific point of view and was made by a specific person with a specific set of experiences and a specific way of seeing. Every essay, every system, every product, every piece of client work that comes out of it is an expression of a perspective that took years to form and can't be replicated by feeding a prompt into a machine, because the machine doesn't know what I chose to care about or why I chose it, and it doesn't have the accumulated weight of every wrong turn, every failed project, and every interest I killed in order to go deeper on the ones that survived.
The studio isn't anti-AI. I use AI constantly. But AI functions as a compressor in my work, not a creator. It can take a mess of raw thinking and help me organize it. It can handle mechanical tasks that would otherwise eat the hours I need for the work that actually matters. What it cannot do is decide what the studio stands for, what gets published and what gets killed, what's worth the time and what's a distraction wearing the costume of progress. Those decisions require taste, and taste requires a person who has been building long enough to know the difference.
The word that keeps coming up when I think about what survives the AI transition is taste. And taste is a harder thing than people realize, because taste is fundamentally about exclusion. It's the willingness to say this belongs and this doesn't, this is good enough and this isn't, this serves the thing I'm building and this is a tangent I'm following because it's easier than the real work.
In a world where AI can generate infinite output, infinite content, infinite options, the person who can curate, who can filter signal from noise, who can look at a wall of possibilities and choose the three that matter, that person becomes the scarce good. Not the person who can produce the most. Not the person who can execute the fastest. The person who can discern.
This is counterintuitive for anyone raised in the productivity framework, because that framework taught us that more is better, that speed is the advantage, that the person who ships the most wins. And for commodity work, that's probably still true. If the task is documentation, data processing, template generation, anything where the output is interchangeable and the creator is irrelevant, then AI wins and should win, because those tasks were never where human meaning lived anyway. They were the soulless middle of the work spectrum, necessary but empty, and losing them to machines is not a tragedy. It's a correction.
What remains after that correction is the work where the creator is inseparable from the creation. The essay that only works because of who wrote it and what they chose to include. The system that only holds together because the person who designed it has a philosophy about how systems should work. The product that only resonates because the taste behind it is specific and earned and visible. If you could swap the creator out and the work would be just as valuable, then AI can and probably will replace it. If the creation only works because you made it, because it carries your perspective and your situation and your accumulated judgment, then that's the edge. And it's the only one that doesn't erode with the next model update.
The difficult thing about perspective as a competitive advantage is that you can't optimize for it the way you can optimize for a skill. You can't take a course on having a point of view. You can't prompt your way into taste. Perspective is the residue of a life that has been lived in a particular direction with real decisions and real consequences and real things lost along the way. It forms slowly, through the accumulation of everything you chose to care about and everything you chose to let go of, and it becomes legible in the work only after enough time has passed for the pattern to become visible.
This means the people who will thrive in an AI-saturated world are not the ones learning the most tools or mastering the most prompts. They're the ones who are living a life that produces a perspective worth hearing. They're building their own thing, making real decisions about what belongs and what doesn't, shipping work that carries their name and their judgment, and staying in the work long enough for the depth to compound. The tools matter, obviously, everyone will be working with AI in some capacity, but the tools are downstream of the person using them. A machine with no perspective and a human with no perspective produce the same thing: competent, interchangeable, forgettable output.
The meaning crisis is real, and it will get worse before it gets better. The people who built their identity on productivity are going to have that identity dissolved by machines that are more productive than they'll ever be. The people who built their identity on being clever with tools are going to watch those tools get handed to everyone. What won't dissolve is the person who built something of their own, who made choices that shaped a point of view, who stayed in the work long enough to develop taste that can't be replicated because it was formed by a life that can't be replicated.
That's what I'm betting on. Not because I'm certain it will work, but because the alternative, outsourcing my perspective to machines and collecting whatever passive baseline the future decides to offer, is not a life I'm interested in living. I'd rather build something specific, with real stakes and the real possibility of failure, than float through an optimized life that never required me to decide what mattered.
Meaning used to be given. Then it was earned. Now it has to be generated. And generating it requires something that no machine has access to, which is a person who chose a direction, paid the cost of that choice, and let the accumulated weight of that life show up in the work.