For centuries, work organized human life, both by the need to survive and by providing structure: schedules, routines, hierarchies, habits, a sense of belonging. People got up, went out, produced, came back, slept. That repetition was not just economic, it was existential.
Habits kept the individual within a collective choreography that prevented excess thinking. What was inherited, what was traditional, what was learned by imitation: all of this functioned as a defense against emptiness. Tradition is, deep down, the habit that survives its authors.
But now something is crumbling: artificial intelligence (AI) threatens the invisible structure that sustained everyday life. Work was the axis of the days, the clock that marked the passage of time and justified breaks. When that timer goes off, there will be silence. An immense silence, full of empty hours, where people will no longer know what to do, neither with their body nor with their mind. In that space without orders or urgency, an old question will appear: “for what?”
Until today, that question was not necessary. Religions gave ready answers, governments offered collective projects and companies invented goals to fill the weeks. Each one found a prefabricated meaning and adopted it as a shelter. There was no need to wonder too much: it was enough to follow the rituals. But when machines work better than us, when systems learn to reason and decide on their own, that coat will fall apart. What is coming is not just unemployment: it is dishabituation. And this is deeper than unemployment.
Without habits, thought becomes a river without a channel. And when the human mind flows without direction, it tends to collide with suffering. Because thinking, in its most honest form, is not a joyful activity: it is an attempt to escape from something that hurts. The thought is born from discomfort, not curiosity. Wondering about the meaning of life is not a philosophical concern, it is a form of escape. Most people don’t think until something forces them to, and when they do, the first thing they discover is that there is no answer.
The problem is not new, I was just asleep. What changes now is the scale. If millions of people stop working and the days become slow; If time expands and leaves room for introspection, then that question—that of “what for”—will no longer be a marginal question: it will become collective. And when an entire society begins to confront meaninglessness, we will see consequences that until today only appeared in individual biographies: anxiety, hopelessness, compulsive consumption, the need for stimulation or addictions. Because the human being, left without external purpose, is forced to face the absence of internal purpose.
For generations, the meaning of life was an outsourced service. Religions, ideologies, and political and economic systems offered a framework that freed each individual from having to think about his own emptiness. It was a kind of tacit contract: the system provided a purpose and you, in return, fulfilled your part. This included working, believing, obeying, saving, and progressing. It worked for centuries because suffering necessitated occupation. A life full of tasks suffers less, or at least it seems like it. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is replacing pretexts.
The most difficult thing will not be adapting to the new labor market, but rather the absence of justification. For the first time, human beings will be able to live without anyone needing them; Therefore, your strength, memory, calculation and experience will be redundant. The only thing that will remain will be your conscience, faced with free time. And this free time, when there is no desire, becomes a mirror.
In that reflection each one will see what was always there: the lack of goal. Life has no purpose, and pretending that it does has been the great collective entertainment. We are born, we suffer, we seek relief and we repeat that cycle with different disguises: love, religion, money, success, children, causes, pleasures and distractions. Anything works as long as you keep the vacuum away.
Therefore, the change that is coming requires a different education. If in the 20th century we taught how to work, in the 21st we should teach how to exist without reason. Explaining early on that life has no purpose or mission is not cynicism: it is prophylaxis. Just as children are taught that fire burns or that gravity does not forgive, they should be taught that the universe promises nothing. That there is no destiny or ultimate reason, that meaning is a useful invention, but not real. And that, far from being tragic, can be liberating.
Because if life has no purpose, then there is no possible failure. The only thing that remains is the present, and in it, the constant oscillation between suffering and relief. Understanding that can prevent emptiness from turning into despair. It is about recognizing the mechanism, since suffering is inevitable and the illusion of purpose is optional.
Artificial intelligence, by removing busyness, also removes excuses. It confronts us with the question that no one can delegate anymore: what to do with time? Perhaps the future does not need philosophers, but instructors of emptiness, teachers who teach how to live without purpose, how to tolerate the absence of goals without falling into panic or consumption. Because when everything works without us, the only thing left to learn will be how to inhabit nothingness without fear.
Perhaps the time has come to tell the truth: we did not come for anything, we are not going towards anything, and between the two things there is only the experience of suffering and its relief. The rest, literally everything else, is conversation.
Things as they are
Mookie Tenembaum addresses international topics like this every week with Horacio Cabak on his podcast The International Observeravailable on Spotify, Apple, YouTube and all platforms.
