It’s another work week at the Slack message factory; You crack open your company laptop only to be bombarded by notifications from your team in a different time zone. They’ve already tagged you in several threads: “Tagging you for context”, “Can we get your thoughts on this?” “Can we catch up on a video call?”
You type, “How about you catch these hands,” but delete the message and switch over to happy channels you know HR is watching closely.
The “post your cute animals” or “vacation” channels remind you that these people can be happy or at least smile for the millisecond their camera shutters.
You remind yourself to empathize and remember coworker Johnny with the 6 wall-mounted guitars on his webcam background. When’s the last time Johnny picked one up and serenaded for fun?
When’s the last time you did anything for fun?
Did you stop yourself because of fear of being called performative?
Enough introspection; that’s not what founders do. I mean, you’re salaried, have a manager, and a Notion page full of startup ideas, so... not for long. You swipe onto the next vacation photo.
Ahh yes... a beautiful landscape photo with the absurd amount of greenery that feels nostalgic and calming at the same time.
You used to hike. You used to do a lot of things: run, bike, paint, play in the orchestra, read, sing late at night with friends.
But that was in college... where you’re encouraged to try things, take as many basket-weaving classes as you can before you’re an adult and have to deal with the financial burden of existing.
That’s the thing. College didn’t teach you to paint; you did the learning. It gave you permission to be bad at painting for a semester. And somewhere in between graduation and your first performance review, the permission expired, and you took it as a matter of fact or pretended not to notice.
That used to be a private loss. It’s about to be a public one. Every AI lab is telling us on the record that the work is going away and the capital M “Meaning” question is next. Which means the thing you quietly gave up in your twenties is the thing you’re going to be graded on. And the basket weavers are already ahead.
The Death of the Nepo Artist
For most of history, exploring was something you did if someone else was paying. Galileo found Jupiter’s moons and named them after the duke who paid his salary, Cosimo de’ Medici. Van Gogh painted for about ten years and sold almost nothing. His brother Theo sent him money every month and, for two of those years, let him sleep in his Paris apartment. Virginia Woolf, a novelist living off an aunt’s inheritance, wrote down what it actually takes to write fiction: five hundred pounds a year and a room with a lock on it. The patron didn’t just fund the work. The patron granted permission.
We still run that system. We just renamed the patron. Today it’s a trust fund, a spouse with a stable job, a gap year, a nepo baby with a studio in the arts district. Every time you see someone with a hobby you’d like, some part of you does the math on who’s paying for it. And the math becomes the excuse.
Because here’s the move nobody announces. Once you believe exploration requires a patron, the only patron you have left is your employer; they’re paying your bills. So you route your exploration through them. You’ll learn that martial art when the promotion lands, because then you’ll have more time and the confidence to wear a Gi. You’ll hike when the sprint ends, because your team needs you now with all cylinders firing. You’ll learn guitar, ask that person out, go to the bookstore you’ve been meaning to go to... yadda yadda. Does this help with the Sunday jitters? What if the cure for it was to live how you’d like to live, not in the future, but today?
Johnny’s six guitars aren’t a hobby. They’re a background. Evidence to himself that he’s still the kind of person who could.
And your company is delighted to hold that permission slip. An employee who’s waiting for permission to have a life is an employee who checks Slack first thing on Monday.
The permission that slipped
It’s easy to be cynical about people chasing trends. Everyone learned sourdough during COVID. Everyone bought a road bike, a pottery wheel, a houseplant. We roasted them for it. We called it performative.
But some of them kept going. That person will open a bakery near you, and you’ll know the feeling of a hug in the form of a smell from freshly baked bread during your morning walk to the rock climbing gym down the street.
The trend was a permission slip handed to everyone at once, and some people used it.
You don’t need a patron to be bad at something for an hour a week. You need to love and respect yourself enough to spare sixty minutes and have the willingness to look like a beginner in front of others or no one. The starving-artist version, quitting the job and moving into a van, is just the patron model again with worse math. The version that works is boring: keep the salary, take back the permission.
The basket weavers ahead of us
Here’s the part that should scare you. Whether AGI is five years out or fifty, the question the labs are describing is not “what will you do for money?” It’s “who are you when nobody needs your output, your butt on the chair at 9 AM, or the late Friday night game of office chicken.” And most of us have spent our entire adult lives making sure we never have to answer it. The job answered it for us. That’s the fool’s gold we’ve accepted.
The basket weavers already answered it. The sourdough people, the guy with the oboe at the park, or the woman at the trailhead every Saturday. We used basket weaving as the punchline for useless college classes. Turns out it was the only class about what to do with a life.
We laughed at them for being fearless in taking their interests seriously, and it turns out they were running the drill early.
The herder in the mountains isn’t waiting for anything. When the work goes away, they lose a paycheck. You lose a whole self you sleepwalked into being.
So AGI isn’t a reason to wait. It’s the opposite; as I mentioned in my 40-hour workweek is dying video, it’s the deadline.
The people with the least dread on the other side of it won’t be the ones with the best severance. They’ll be the ones who already know what they’d do on a Tuesday.
So this week, pick one thing up from the college course list. Not the one you were good at. The one you miss. Go be bad at it on purpose.
Do it until you find the answer to: What would you do on a Tuesday when nobody expects you to be productive?
Don’t post in the happy Slack channel.
Or do; you don’t need my permission; you never needed anyone’s.
You already know what you’d say next. You’ve said it about the guitar, the trail, living abroad.
Maybe in another life.
You’re in it.
Hello, I made a video version too; if you prefer to hear it, click here. Thank you for your time.