I was at the wedding of a close friend last weekend, where I probably knew 90% of the guests and ended up in countless conversations and catch-ups throughout the weekend. As you might expect, two topics seemed to find their way into almost every conversation currently: AI and work. Probably even more so with me, because once people ask me, “What do you do?”, it’s almost inevitable that we end up there.
It was one of the most beautiful weekends I’ve had in a long time. But returning to work afterwards left me reflecting on many of those conversations. Because they contained so much worry, fear, and uncertainty that they made my heart sink. The concerns ranged from, “I’m scared AI is going to extinguish us all,” to, “I know my field won’t exist much longer, but what am I supposed to do about it?” to, “If we don’t have work anymore, what will we even do all day?”
What struck me most was not the questions themselves because I’ve heard them all along. It was how little excitement accompanied them. I barely heard a word about possibility, opportunity, or positive imagination for the future.
As things go, I was sitting here trying to figure out how to continue this article when I stumbled across a YouTube conversation between Rob Hopkins and Nate Hagens. I was ready for lunch anyways and promptly took a two hour detour to listen to it. Thank you, serendipity.
Listening to Rob Hopkins, I was struck by his argument that we are facing a crisis of imagination. We seem remarkably good at imagining what could go wrong. Give us a new technology, a geopolitical conflict, or a societal challenge, and our minds quickly generate vivid scenarios of collapse, disruption, and catastrophe. But ask us to imagine a future that is meaningfully better than today, and many of us struggle.
Hopkins points to research suggesting that creativity and imagination scores have been declining for years. There are many possible reasons: the decline of free, unstructured play in childhood, the rise of screens, education systems increasingly focused on testing, and our growing separation from the natural world. Our culture reinforces that contraction. Turn on Netflix and humanity is wiped out by zombies, aliens, viruses, AI, or nuclear war. Browse the bestseller lists and you'll find no shortage of middle-aged white men writing about extinction and collapse. Turn on the news and it's crisis after crisis. The future is either business-as-usual or dystopia. We are immersed in narratives that exercise one side of our imagination while neglecting the other.
What I found particularly interesting was the connection between imagination and stress. Research suggests that imagination and memory rely on many of the same neural processes. Under chronic stress, anxiety, and uncertainty, our capacity to imagine the future begins to shrink. The future contracts. We become preoccupied with immediate threats rather than longer-term possibilities.
In a culture built around urgency, fear, and precariousness, that has profound implications. Because if our ability to imagine alternatives diminishes, so does our ability to create them.
And perhaps that was exactly what I was hearing in those conversations at the wedding. A lack of positive imagination. People could clearly articulate what they were worried about. They could explain the risks of AI, the uncertainty of work, and the challenges ahead. What they couldn’t do was picture the after.
Ask someone what they’re afraid AI will take, and they’ll talk for twenty minutes. Ask them what they’d actually want work and life to look like on the other side, and you get a shrug. Silence. Maybe a slightly embarrassed “I haven’t really thought about it.” We’ve rehearsed the catastrophe so many times that it feels real, and left the better future as a blank we don’t quite trust ourselves to fill in.
That blank is the whole problem. Because, as Hopkins says, imagination is directly tied to agency. If the only future you can picture is one where work disappears and takes your income, identity and purpose with it, then of course you freeze. There’s nothing to move toward, only something to brace against. Maybe the biggest challenge is that we’ve forgotten how to see the possibilities.
Not in the simplistic “technology will solve everything” sense. But what if AI genuinely makes large parts of today’s work unnecessary? What if it dramatically reduces the cost of creating, learning, building, coordinating, and solving problems?
What kind of society would we want on the other side of that? What would people do with an extra twenty hours a week?
How would we spend our time if productivity was no longer the primary measure of human worth? What would communities look like if more people had time to care for children, aging parents, neighbours, local projects, art, sport, nature, friendship, and each other?
Would we simply sit around bored? Or is that assumption itself a reflection of how deeply we’ve come to equate jobs with meaning?
Hopkins borrows the famous quote from William Gibson: "The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed." His point is that positive futures don't need to be invented from scratch. Many of the ingredients already exist somewhere. He calls his approach "evidence-based dreaming." The future he imagines is not based on wishful thinking but on real examples that already exist somewhere in the world and those can be put together into a coherent story.
If you’ve followed my writing on Substack over the past 15 months, you’ll know that this kind of exploration has been a core of it. Hopkin’s arguments resonated so strongly because they echoe threads I’ve been pulling on for a while. Much of my writing over the past year has been an attempt to search for better stories about the future. Not stories rooted in denial or wishful thinking, but in possibility.
And the future we build starts with what we believe about ourselves. We talk about every crisis as inevitable because people are just too flawed to avert it. In The Stories We Tell About Ourselves, I explore Rutger Bregman’s thinking from his book Humankind, looking into our assumptions about human nature that shape the systems we create. The most foundational act of positive imagination might start with believing that humanity is capable of building a better future in the first place.
The same applies to work. People quickly assume that if jobs disappear, purpose disappears too. As if jobs were the only legitimate way to contribute to society or create meaning. In this article, I argued that we may need to expand our definition of work beyond the narrow container of a job. Care work, relationships, health, learning, creativity, community building, contribution - these have always been essential forms of work. Perhaps the future is about rediscovering all the forms of work we have systematically undervalued.
This is where some of the more optimistic visions of automation become interesting. In The Machines Are Taking Our Jobs. Thank God, I explored Emad Mostaque’s ideas from his book The Last Economy that AI could ultimately free us from compulsory labour and allow us to spend more time on what he calls ‘the arts of being human’: creating, caring, connecting, learning, exploring, and meaning making. In his vision, people freed from the pressures of survival begin to rebuild deep social connections. They move more, sleep better, eat with greater intention, spend meaningful time with loved ones, and pursue creative and intellectual work.
And if you’re wondering how such a world could function economically, David Shapiro’s work on post-labor economics offers possible answers. His vision is built around broader ownership, new social contracts, and a society where prosperity is no longer tied exclusively to wages. It’s a reminder that our current economic model is not a law of nature. It is a design, and designs can change.
What connects all of these ideas is that they are attempts to identify possibilities that already exist in seed form and ask what might happen if they spread.
Will any of these visions unfold exactly as described? Probably not. The truth is, I don’t know whether all the optimistic scenarios will play out. Some days I feel incredibly excited about the future. Other days I get completely swept up in all the negative scenarios out there and feel just as anxious as everyone else.
I’m not an optimist all the time. I’m just as affected by the headlines, the uncertainty, and the fear all around me. That's why the conversations at the wedding stayed with me. But I consciously try to choose possibility over despair, again and again. Because if we can only imagine collapse, we surrender our agency before the future even arrives. But if we can imagine possibilities, we give ourselves something to move toward and, eventually, something to build.
As Rutger Bregman closes his book ‘Utopia for Realists’, he reminds us that imagination is how civilisation changes:
“If we want to change the world, we need to be unrealistic, unreasonable and impossible. Remember: those who called for the abolition of slavery, for suffrage for women, and for same sex marriage were also once branded lunatics. Until history proved them right.”
And perhaps that’s the real invitation: not to predict the future, but to participate in imagining it.
I want to highlight some of the books that have shaped my thinking, and that I highly recommend if you’re looking for a reframe of perspective.
Human Kind. A hopeful history - Rutger Bregman
The Last Economy - Emad Mostaque
Utopia for Realists. And How We Can Get There - Rutger Bregman
Factfulness. Ten reasons we’re wrong about the world and why things are better than you think - Hans Rosling
Not the end of the world. How we can be the first generation to build a sustainable planet Hannah Ritchie
On my list to read now: How to Fall in Love with the Future: A Time Traveller’s Guide to Changing the World - Rob Hopkins
I’m building Afterwork to help people navigate the biggest shift of our time as AI disrupts work as we know it. I write about what comes next - from portfolio careers to deeper questions of identity, purpose, and life beyond employment.
Through my mentoring, I work 1:1 with professionals transitioning from jobs into portfolio careers. My Vision Workbook is a way for you to work through this self-paced.