The Future Of Work & The New High-Income Skill Stack

I want to explore a question that might seem strange at first: why are we still consuming information from humans when advanced AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude are readily available? We can ask AI for summaries or specific information on any topic, yet we choose to watch, listen, and read content created by people. This fundamental question lays the groundwork for understanding the future of creative work and how we can become scarce resources in an increasingly automated world.

Many predict that AI will replace everyone's jobs, and while this sounds dire, I view it as one of the greatest opportunities ever. When AI can do everything well, everything becomes a commodity, making it less valuable to pay for. The real question then becomes: how do you become a scarce resource that people want to pay for, especially as a creative? The answer lies in your unique taste, perspective, story, and the specific skills we'll break down.

The History of Meaning in Four Acts

To understand our current situation and the opportunities ahead, it's helpful to trace the history of how humans have found meaning:

• Act One: Meaning Came From Up There. For most of human history, meaning was assigned by gods, kings, elders, and scriptures. You didn't have to find it; it was given. This characterized early foraging societies.
• Act Two: Meaning Was Found From Out There. During the Industrial Revolution, science replaced religion as the dominant framework. Meaning shifted to productivity and progress, earned through work and contribution to "the machine."
• Act Three (Where We Are Now): Meaning Was Deconstructed Into Nothing. This is postmodernism, where everything is deconstructed, no single perspective is privileged, and nothing is objectively true. Meaning isn't given or earned; it's simply gone, leading to a widespread scarcity of purpose.
• Act Four: Meaning Will Be Found In Here. In the future, meaning must be generated from within, by you, for you.

This shift is critical for creatives. While mundane, repetitive work might be automated, creative work—the ability to synthesize reality through your unique lens, create something new, and share it—is where humans find meaning. Creatives are the "meaning architects" of society.

Post-Labor Economics and the Surviving Human Jobs

The traditional economic loop (work -> wage -> spend -> company profits -> more jobs) is broken by AI. If AI does jobs, wages collapse, spending collapses, and the system falters. This brings us to David Shapiro's post-labor economics framework, where household income could come from three sources:

1. Wages: What AI threatens.
2. Transfers: Government payments, UBI. However, this is politically unstable and, importantly, for many, it doesn't provide meaning or a sense of growth.
3. Capital Income: Owning income-generating assets. The future likely requires broadening capital participation beyond just billionaires.

Even in a post-labor world, not all jobs will disappear. The jobs that survive are those where the human is the product – where who they are matters more than what they produce.

• High Liability Roles: Where human accountability is crucial.
• Statutory Positions: Roles with legal human requirements.
• Experience Economy: Bartenders, boutique shops, art galleries, live performances—fields that offer unique human experiences.
• Meaning Makers/Meaning Economy: People who help others navigate the human experience.
• Relationship and Trust Jobs: Sales, diplomacy, negotiation.

As Naval Ravikant once said, "There are almost 7 billion people on this planet someday. I hope there will be almost 7 billion companies." This future allows every person to become their own enterprise, solving problems, learning, and creating value for others, which is arguably the most meaningful way to live.

The Anatomy of Meaning: Pillars and Generators

To engineer meaning, we must first understand what leads to meaninglessness:

• Stagnation: No forward movement, feeling stuck.
• Isolation: No connection to something greater, feeling like you don't matter.

Modern life, with its constant digital distractions, often fosters both stagnation and isolation. If these are the killers, then meaning is built upon two pillars:

1. Progress: Forward movement achieved through creative problem-solving and struggle (distinct from suffering). Humans need to feel like they are going somewhere.
2. Contribution: Feeling like your progress matters to something greater than yourself, requiring an audience, community, or a cause. Solo projects often feel hollow without this.

Money, in this future, will continue to be a status symbol, but also a tool for expressing agency and growth, allowing us to do things we couldn't before.

The actual generators of meaning are:

• Struggle: The engine of progress. It's about choosing what you struggle for – mastering a craft, building an audience, speaking a truth.
• Curiosity: The direction of progress. Nonlinear attention, following threads that don't yet make sense. AI cannot be curious. This is your unique edge, allowing you to discover ideas nobody else is thinking about.
• Status (or Recognition): The proof of contribution. It's the signal that your struggle mattered to someone else, that you're not alone.

These three generators – struggle, curiosity, status – are quite literally the foundation of a story. Our brains are story engines; we crave novelty, drama, myth, and meaning. When basic necessities are met, and leisure time increases, people will pay most for compelling human narratives and experiences.

Humans vs. Machines: A Division of Labor

The future isn't "man vs. machine" but a division of labor. People pay for speed and efficiency when they want to escape an experience (e.g., bureaucracy, slow service). Conversely, people pay a premium for experiences they want to savor (e.g., a five-star restaurant, live theater, handcrafted goods).

As Chris Pake put it:

The elegance of the future is not in man versus machine, but in their division of labor, silicon sanding the rough edges of necessity so carbon can ascend to meaning. We will abolish baristas and canonize chefs. Silence agents and encore actors. AI handles the friction and humans handle the narrative.

AI handles the friction; humans handle the narrative.

The Creator Economy = The Meaning Economy

This leads us to the practical application of these ideas. The shift in money flow means that instead of being paid solely for labor or output, you'll be paid by people who believe in what you're doing and want to see more of it. This combines business (persuasion) with art (doing what you love with care).

When you follow a meaningful creator, you're not just seeking information; you're buying their perspective, supporting their opinion, and valuing their curation. Attention is the ultimate scarce resource. Learning to capture and deliver value on attention allows you to demand a premium for what you do.

AI will flood the internet with mediocre content, but it won't matter because there isn't enough human attention to consume it. People will gravitate towards content that truly matters, shifting attention to curated, human-centric narratives. It's not just creation, but curation and distribution.

This isn't a winner-takes-all market. Many creators build slowly, attract small but dedicated audiences, and charge premium prices, earning more than those with millions of followers. Furthermore, not everyone will find meaning through work; some will find it through family or other pursuits, further reducing perceived "saturation." Creators are increasingly becoming primary sources of information and education, trusted more than centralized institutions. This is a massive opportunity for those with genuine expertise or a unique perspective who can articulate it effectively.

When everything becomes a commodity due to AI's instant creation capabilities, the value of something human skyrockets. This includes a human perspective, a human point of view, curation, and taste. Skills are being abstracted up a layer; we no longer need to focus on manual or technical labor in the same way. The focus shifts to controlling the ideas and the narrative.

The Last Defensible Moat: You

This is the core insight: the last defensible moat is you. To determine if AI can replace you, use the "swap test":

If you can swap the creator and the creation without it losing value, AI can replace it. If the value is tied to who made it, that's your moat.

• A generic stock photo is swappable; a photograph by a famous photographer is not, as its value is tied to their eye, choices, and reputation.
• A generic blog post on productivity is swappable; an essay by someone whose journey you've followed for years is not, because you've invested in their unique trajectory and story.

What can AI not replicate?

1. Perspective: AI can think about your perspective but not from it. Your perspective is shaped by unique beliefs, experiences, wounds, and wins – things AI lacks because it has no stakes.
2. Energy Signature: This is the human ability to select what to focus on and why it matters to you. Two people covering the same topic will feel different. AI can mimic style but not care. (I even shared a prompt on my Substack about finding your intellectual signature.)
3. Sensemaking: AI can process information, but it cannot decide what information means. It cannot frame, prioritize, or say "this matters and this doesn't." Sensemaking is inherently human because it requires stakes.
4. Trajectory: You have a life, a past, a present, a future, and a story arc. AI has no trajectory, no mortality, no temporal compression. Your creation comes from a unique point in time that cannot be re-simulated.
5. Evolving Taste: Your taste changes; what you wanted to write about yesterday, you might not today. AI would get stuck in an infinite loop trying to replicate a constantly evolving human. You grow, you change, and your work reflects that progression.

The Post-Labor Skill Stack (Hierarchy)

This isn't a list of career-specific skills, but a hierarchy of fundamental human skills, helping you uncover and lean into your nature:

1. Agency (The Meta-Skill): The ability to act without permission or prompting; creating your own story and trajectory. Without agency, you're just following an automated path.
   • Practice Agency: Reject the default path, make deliberate choices, choose your own problems to solve, use money as a tool for agency, filter signal from noise based on your curiosity rather than chasing trends. Take imperfect steps, make mistakes, and correct them.
2. Taste (Discernment): Curation matters more than creation. In a world of infinite information (the "infinite library problem"), selecting what matters and sharing it with others is paramount.
   • Develop Taste: Build things, create, curate, put things out there, and iterate based on what works and what doesn't.
3. Perspective (Expanding Human Capacity): Developing your perspective means becoming less conformist, ideological, and dogmatic. You gain the ability to hold complexity and contradiction, see systems, and understand nuance. This allows for genuine agency and sophisticated curation.
4. Persuasion: The ability to make people care about what you do. Many creatives struggle with this, working on projects for years that no one ever sees.
   • Learn Persuasion: Study marketing, sales, and copywriting. Build on social media, make mistakes, learn from them, and refine your techniques.
5. Technical Knowhow (Using Tools): This is about leveraging available tools, primarily AI, as the vessel for everything else. It's the practical, ground-up skill.
   • Learn Tools: Experiment with various AI tools like Claude, ChatGPT, Manis, Eden. For example, Eden is designed as a drive that handles busy work, allowing you to focus on creative tasks. It enables you to organize files, transcribe videos, ask an agent to process information, and collaborate with teams, streamlining your creative workflow.

Actionable Takeaways

• Cultivate Agency: Consciously choose your struggles, reject conformity, and use your curiosity as a compass. Don't wait for permission; start creating your own path.
• Develop Your Taste: Build, curate, and share. Your unique discernment will be your most valuable asset in an AI-saturated world.
• Expand Your Perspective: Challenge your assumptions, embrace nuance, and learn to hold complex ideas. This broadens your creative potential.
• Master Persuasion: Learn how to articulate the value of your work and connect with an audience. A great creation is meaningless if nobody sees it.
• Leverage AI Tools: Don't fear AI; integrate it. Use tools like Eden or other AI agents to handle the "friction" and busy work, freeing you to focus on the human-centric "narrative."
• Focus on Being the Product: Understand that in the future, your unique identity, perspective, and care are what truly differentiate you and command a premium.
• Embrace the Meaning Economy: Recognize that people will increasingly seek out and pay for meaning, connection, and growth. Position yourself as an architect of these experiences.