It’s been another brutal season for workers.
If you’ve been watching the headlines with that pit in your stomach, wondering if your team is next, I see you.
Amazon just announced 14,000 layoffs. UPS has cut nearly 50,000 jobs. Intel, Target, Nestlé, and Microsoft keep joining the list.
But here’s what I need to tell you: what’s happening isn’t just an economic reset. It’s an existential one.
We talk about AI as if it’s coming for our jobs. The truth is more uncomfortable than that. Automation is not just threatening employment. It is forcing us to confront something we have been avoiding: How many of us were doing work we never really cared about in the first place?
The question isn’t “What happens if my job goes away?”
It’s “What part of my work still matters when it does?”
The Moment I Chose My Work Over My Job
Three years ago, I was you. Comfortable. Corporate. Climbing.
I had the title, the trajectory, and the salary that made my parents proud. But I also had this gnawing feeling that I was performing someone else’s script. The work I actually cared about, helping people navigate change with dignity and creating spaces where humanity was not a buzzword but a practice, was happening in the margins. It lived in the hallway conversations and in the moments between meetings.
I didn’t leave because my job disappeared. I left because I realized the work I was made to do could not fit inside the job I was paid to do.
And that terrified me.
Because here’s what nobody tells you about choosing your work over your job: it requires you to trust something invisible. There is no org chart for purpose. No performance review for meaning. You trade the known for the necessary, and some days it feels reckless.
But here’s what I learned: A job is what you’re paid to do. Work is what you’re made to do.
Jobs come and go with every reorganization, every market shift, every algorithm that learns to do what you do faster. But work, the drive to build, to care, to solve, and to connect, endures. It is the thread that carries your purpose through every change.
Barbara Whye, a former Intel executive and someone I am honored to call a mentor, once told me something that changed how I see this moment.
“AI won’t take your job. But the person willing to stay curious about AI might.”
That line has stayed with me because curiosity is what keeps our work human. It is what separates performing tasks from creating value.
Automation can take over tasks. It cannot take over purpose.
The Real Crisis Isn’t Job Loss, It’s Meaning Loss
Here is the uncomfortable truth we are all dancing around.
AI is not revealing that our jobs are replaceable. It is revealing that many of us were already replaceable because we stopped making our work irreplaceable.
We optimized for efficiency. We automated ourselves before the machines did. We followed the playbook, hit the metrics, climbed the ladder, and somewhere along the way, we forgot to ask if the climb mattered.
That is the real crisis behind the layoffs. It is not only “Will I have income?” It is “Was any of this mine to begin with?”
And that is actually the gift hidden in the chaos.
Because if you are being forced to ask what work matters to you, you finally have permission to stop doing work that does not. The crisis is not that jobs are disappearing. The crisis is that we waited until jobs disappeared to ask what we actually wanted to build.
Monica Villalobos, CEO of the Arizona Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, said something on The Future of Human Experience podcast that captures this perfectly.
“I just fell in love with the potential of purpose.”
In a world obsessed with productivity, that line is radical. The most effective leaders I meet today are not chasing speed. They are cultivating meaning. They know the best teams are not built on perks or KPIs but on trust, belonging, and shared purpose.
That is what Oskhar Pineda calls the “human basics of life.” Vulnerability. Communication. Trust. These are not soft skills. They are the real engines of performance.
When leaders create space for people to bring their full humanity to work, they unlock something algorithms cannot measure: commitment.
Because meaning, not money, is what keeps people showing up when everything else is uncertain.
But Let’s Be Honest About Who Gets to Build
I know what you might be thinking. “That’s easy for you to say, Eric. You left. You had the luxury of choice.”
And you are right.
Not everyone can walk away from a paycheck to chase meaning. Some of us have mortgages, medical bills, aging parents, or kids in college. The privilege of reinvention is real, and pretending otherwise would be tone-deaf.
So let me be clear: I am not asking you to quit your job.
I am asking you to start identifying the work within your job that would still need to exist even if the job title disappeared tomorrow.
Maybe you cannot start a company right now. But can you start a conversation with someone doing work you admire? Can you carve out 30 minutes a week to work on something that is yours, a side project, a skill, a question you cannot stop asking?
Building does not always mean starting over. Sometimes it means protecting what matters while the structure around it changes.
Steven Zylstra of the Arizona Technology Council said something recently that defines this moment.
“There has never been a better time to be in Arizona than right now.”
He was not only talking about geography. He was talking about possibility.
Even in times of uncertainty, some people keep building. They build new companies, new ecosystems, and new ways of working that blend technology with humanity. They look past the headlines and focus on the horizon.
But here is the nuance: you do not have to be one of those people right now. You just have to start asking yourself what you would build if you could. Because that question, that curiosity, is the beginning of your real work.
The Future Belongs to Those Who Protect Their Work
If the last few years have taught us anything, it is that certainty is an illusion.
But work, the deeply human kind, has always been renewable. It adapts. It evolves. It finds new forms of expression.
Layoffs are real. The fear is real. The financial pressure is crushing.
But so is the opportunity to redefine what success looks like beyond titles and paychecks.
Your job can be taken. Your work, your ability to learn, connect, lead with purpose, and create value in ways only you can, cannot.
The work that matters most is rarely the work you are assigned. It is the work you choose.
The future does not belong to those who protect their jobs. It belongs to those who protect their work.
So Here Is What You Do Next
Ask yourself this question. Write it down. Sit with it. Let it unsettle you.
“If my title disappeared tomorrow, what part of my work would still need to exist in the world?”
That is where your legacy begins.
But do not stop at the question. Do one thing this week.
- Reach out to someone whose work you respect and ask them how they found it.
- Start a document where you track the moments in your current job that feel like your work.
- Spend one hour learning something that makes you curious, even if it has nothing to do with your job description.
Because here is the truth. The work that matters most is rarely the work you are assigned. It is the work you choose.
And in the Human Era, that choice is the only security left.
This vision of navigating change with humanity at the center is what I explore with organizations and leaders through my work and speaking.
If your organization is navigating this transition, I would love to continue the conversation.
You can also subscribe to my newsletter for more insights on how to thrive in an era of constant change.
