The Stockholm Syndrome of — Labor Why the post-AGI “crisis of meaning” is a red herring

The post-AGI meaning crisis is a distraction. The real question is who holds power when elites no longer need us.

You’ve heard the question. You’ve probably asked it yourself. If AI automates everything, what will we do? The image is always the same: billions of people adrift in subsidised leisure, numbed by screens, stripped of purpose. Harari gave this anxiety a name: the “useless class”; a phrase that doesn’t need context to unsettle you¹.

I’ve always found this an odd thing to worry about. I can think of dozens of things I’ve been dying to do but haven’t had the time for. The question “what will I do if I don’t work?” contains a hidden assumption so deeply embedded we barely notice it: that our existential justification is tied to our economic utility. That without a job, we are not merely unemployed but unjustified. Somewhere along the way, we fused the labour market with our sense of purpose. Now we can’t imagine one closing without the other collapsing too. Have the billions of stay-at-home parents throughout history been leading meaningless lives? This is, to state the obvious, absurd. I’ll come back to this.

I think that the panic around post-AGI meaning deserves more suspicion than it gets. It’s a distraction, and a convenient one for those who’d rather we agonise about purpose than organise around power. The obsession with “what will we do?” is a symptom of a system that benefits from our fixation on it. Dissolve the construct and you see what it was obscuring: who holds power in a world where machines produce most value? I’d like to take a moment to deconstruct the work ethic as the value that underpins the conflation; how it was built tells you who it was built for.

But first, I must acknowledge that the fear is real, and we owe it an honest reckoning before we can see through it.

I am not dismissing the anxiety but, instead, trying to understand what it’s actually about. The truck driver watching autonomous vehicles roll off the production line, the writer watching GPT draft passable prose: I wouldn’t call these people irrational. They are experiencing something like anticipatory grief, mourning a version of themselves that hasn’t died yet but can see the headlights.

On the issue of boredom, Viktor Frankl had a term for the dread that arrives when unstructured time looms: “Sunday neurosis.” A low-grade panic at the absence of external demands, which replaces the pleasant anticipation of a free afternoon.²

On unemployment, Marie Jahoda’s work showed that it devastates people even when they can still comfortably pay their bills. Her insight as a sociologist, drawn partly from a landmark study of an Austrian town in the 1930s, was that work does far more than provide income.³ It imposes structure, makes us stick to a schedule. It forces us into proximity with other people whether we like them or not. It connects us to a purpose larger than ourselves. And it defines us socially; “What do you do?” is the first question we ask upon meeting someone for the first time, because occupation is how we locate each other in social space. To answer “nothing” is to become illegible. Notice what’s absent from this list: any mention of the work itself being satisfying. A person can hate their job and still depend on it for structure and identity and a reason to leave the house.

None of this is speculative. Anne Case and Angus Deaton documented an epidemic of what they called “deaths of despair” in deindustrialised American communities: suicides, opioid overdoses, liver disease.⁴ The crucial detail: many of these people still had income through disability payments or pensions. What they lost was the architecture of daily life. People do not respond to the loss of work by relaxing. They tend to self-destruct instead.

All of this I accept. But none of it explains why employment became the sole provider of these psychological necessities, or why we struggle to imagine alternatives. That is a different question, and it has a historical answer.

How we built the cage

It wasn’t always this way. For most of human history, work was a curse. The Latin labor shares its root with suffering. Genesis frames work as divine punishment. Aristotle considered manual labour fit for slaves, precisely so that citizens could be freed for higher pursuits. The idea that work is virtuous, that it builds character, that idleness corrodes the soul is oddly recent.

And it was, I contend, invented to solve a specific problem: control. Early industrial capitalism needed consistent output. You can watch a man dig a ditch; you can count the bricks a worker lays. But as economies shifted toward cognitive and clerical work, effort became invisible. Economists call this the principal-agent problem: when you can’t directly observe whether your employee did two hours of good thinking or stared at a screen, you need workers to police themselves.

The solution was to make work a moral matter. Idleness becomes sinful. Your labour becomes evidence of your character. Weber identified the moment this happened, tracing the fusion of Protestant theology and capitalist discipline into a single ethic that made hard work a sign of spiritual election.⁵ Foucault saw the deeper mechanics. His central image was the Panopticon: a prison designed so that inmates can never tell whether they are being watched, and so learn to behave as if they always are. The most efficient power is power that no longer needs to be exercised, because subjects have absorbed its demands as their own standards.⁶ Tie someone’s moral worth to their output and they will never slack off, even when no one is watching. The work ethic is capitalism’s most elegant solution to the supervision problem: convince people that their souls are at stake, and you never need to hire another foreman.

But Foucault only gets us partway. We don’t merely police ourselves to avoid shame. We identify with the norms that bind us. To become a subject, in Judith Butler’s formulation, requires being subjected: we are formed as persons through the very structures that constrain us, and so we cling to those structures because loosening them feels like losing ourselves.⁷ This is why the prospect of a world without work triggers something closer to an identity crisis than a scheduling problem. We have fused who we are with what we produce. The guilt we feel on an idle Tuesday, the need to justify a long lunch, the way we introduce ourselves even among friends by naming what we do for money: these are not personal quirks. They are the marks of an ideology that has become highly intimate. We don’t just comply with the work ethic; We want to comply. As Butler called it, we start “desiring our own subjection”. We fear the freedom that would follow its removal, because without our chains we become illegible to ourselves. We are prisoners who have learned to love the cage.

“Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” sounds like liberation. It is the opposite. It is the final move, the moment the prison no longer needs walls because the prisoner has fallen in love with the cell. This is the Stockholm Syndrome of labour.

And the ideology runs deep enough that history’s greatest monsters could exploit it. “Arbeit Macht Frei,” “Work Sets You Free,” was inscribed above the gates of Auschwitz. The historian Otto Friedrich wrote that the slogan was meant as a kind of mystical declaration that self-sacrifice through endless labour brings spiritual freedom.⁸ Of course, I am not comparing modern workers to victims of a death camp. I am comparing the belief systems. The Nazis did not invent the idea that work liberates. They recognised a conviction that already ran through the culture and they weaponised it, with horrible clarity, because we had already accepted that labour is the path to dignity and freedom. The gentler modern version of this faith (e.g., hustle culture or the guilt we feel for taking a sick day) shares a structure with the slogan above the gate: your worth is earned through production, and work itself sets you free.

The cracks are already forming. “Quiet quitting” has been framed as a moral failure: GenZ is lazy, entitled, ungrateful. A more honest reading is that the wage-effort bargain is broken. Productivity has outpaced wage growth for decades. Asset inflation has put homeownership and family formation out of reach for millions. Working hard no longer delivers the traditional rewards, and so a generation is recalibrating effort to match the degraded return. The contract was breached by the side that wrote it.

The work ethic is infrastructure. It was built in a particular era, to serve particular interests, and it can become obsolete.

The gendered blind spot

There is something else hiding in the panic about the “useless class.” Something I see as the collapse of the breadwinner archetype. For a few generations in industrialised societies, male identity became tightly bound to paid employment. You were a man because you earned. When we fret about masses of humans rendered purposeless by automation, we are often unconsciously imagining men losing jobs. The “crisis of meaning” has a gender, and we should name it.

Return to the stay-at-home parent I mentioned earlier. Map that life against the very framework Jahoda gave us. A toddler imposes a ruthless schedule; anyone who has cared for one knows that “unstructured time” is a fantasy. The social world of a primary caregiver is dense and demanding: playdates, school runs, community organising, the constant negotiation of other parents’ needs and expectations. You are embedded in webs of mutual dependence, connected to purposes (the family, the neighbourhood, the school) that are plainly larger than yourself. The identity is rich: mother, father, caretaker, organiser. And enforced activity is not exactly in short supply. All of Jahoda’s psychological infrastructure is present. What is missing is the wage, and the social recognition that flows from it. The “crisis of meaning” turns out to be a crisis of legibility. It is about the loss of a particular kind of socially validated status that we have mistakenly treated as the whole of meaning.

The obvious objection is that stay-at-home parents derive much of their social standing from the wage economy around them. They are “a doctor’s wife,” “a stay-at-home dad who used to be in finance.” Their legibility is borrowed. In a world where nobody works, that borrowed status disappears too. This is a real objection. But even if social recognition is currently borrowed from the wage economy, that is a problem with our recognition system, not with the meaning itself. A mother’s bond with her child does not become less real because society fails to validate it. What it lacks is not meaning but social recognition.⁹

The “post-work” world is not actually unprecedented. We already know what humans do when they are not in paid employment. They raise children and maintain households. They tend to the elderly, make art and give it away, build communities, organise the social fabric that paid work never had time for. The post-work world is not a void. It is what we have spent centuries calling “women’s work” and refusing to value.¹⁰

For those whose identity is bound to production rather than care, this transition feels like annihilation. But this should not be a prophecy of doom. I think that the failure is revealing: it tells us more about the narrowness of our current meaning-architecture than about the emptiness of the future.

Meaning is renewable

So if meaning doesn’t depend on a paycheck, will we actually be fine?

I think the evidence suggests we will.

AI crushed Kasparov in 1997. Pundits predicted the death of chess. Instead, chess boomed: over 100 million users on Chess.com as of last count. We didn’t stop playing because a machine plays better. We watch humans play because we care about human struggle, not optimal computation. We play sports we will never master. We run, though we no longer need to chase anything. We paint, sing, garden, build things nobody asked for. If anything, turning these activities into a profession tends to drain the very sense of purpose they provide.

Even in material abundance, humans will compete for skill, beauty, wit, reputation, attention. Remove the economic game and the status-seeking doesn’t vanish; it redirects. Hierarchy-building is an evolutionary adaptation, not a byproduct of scarcity.¹¹

AI does not deplete our capacity for meaning. Humans generate purpose the way we generate language: compulsively, endlessly, even in captivity.

The real danger: from meaning to power

By now, I have made my position clear: the problem of meaning is not worth losing sleep over. That is not to say, however, that I would feel comfortable sleepwalking into the post-AGI world. Allow me to conclude this essay by pointing at what does worry me.

The social contract has always rested on mutual dependence. Elites needed labour: our muscles, our minds, our compliance. They needed us to buy things. In return, they had to negotiate. The worker had leverage because the factory couldn’t run without them; the citizen had leverage because the state couldn’t function without their taxes and their cooperation. Every major right we have won was won because the powerful needed something from the powerless. The suffragettes could disrupt, the unions could strike, and the tax base could threaten to shrink. Leverage required dependence, and dependence ran in both directions.

Post-AGI, that mutual dependence dissolves. If machines produce most of the value, the masses lose their bargaining position. We shift from citizens who must be negotiated with to dependents who are managed. The elites may still choose to provide for us. But charity is not a right, and benevolence is not a contract. The danger is not that we become “useless”; that is a feeling. The danger is that we become harmless, and that is a political condition.¹²

The threat will not arrive dramatically. AI safety researcher Paul Christiano has described what he calls the “whimper”: a gradual, almost invisible transfer of decision-making authority from humans to optimisation systems, without our hand being forced, simply because the systems are better at deciding.¹³. Tax policy, healthcare allocation, hiring decisions, criminal sentencing. The AI optimises the metric, and the metric improves. Each individual handover seems rational, even welcome. But cumulatively, we lose something harder to name: the capacity to question what we are optimising for. We don’t lose freedom in a dramatic seizure. We trade it away, one convenience at a time.

And this is not hypothetical. Recommendation algorithms already choose our music, our news, increasingly our social connections. We outsource memory to search engines and judgment to AI assistants. The post-AGI world does not invent this dynamic. It accelerates it until the accumulated surrenders become irreversible.

The reflexive policy response, “tax the robots, redistribute the proceeds,” faces obstacles that deserve their own essay. The redistribution mechanisms we have built assume an economy powered by human labour and taxed at the point of employment. A post-labour economy may require entirely new architectures of governance: not merely new tax codes but new conceptions of citizenship, ownership, and political leverage. Universal basic income without political power is hush money for the harmless. It maintains consumption but extinguishes agency.¹⁴

The real crisis is one of power, and it is arriving before we have built the institutions to address it.

The door is swinging open. We are like long-term prisoners: the walls are familiar, the routine is known, the constraints have become comfort. This is not a moment of pure joy. It is a moment of vertigo. Freedom, after sufficient captivity, feels like falling. The crisis is not that there is nothing outside the cell. It is that we have forgotten how to walk without chains.

Meaning will take care of itself. Humans are inexhaustible; we will always find new games to play. But who will be left holding the steering wheel while we play?

1. Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016) and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018).

2. Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (1946).

3. Marie Jahoda, Employment and Unemployment: A Social-Psychological Analysis (1982); see also Jahoda, Lazarsfeld, and Zeisel, Marienthal: The Sociography of an Unemployed Community (1933).

4. Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (2020).

5. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905).

6. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975).

7. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (1997).

8. Otto Friedrich, The Kingdom of Auschwitz (1994).

9. Silvia Federici, Wages Against Housework (1975) and Caliban and the Witch (2004), on the invisibility and devaluation of reproductive labour under capitalism.

10. Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (2011).

11. Dario Amodei, “Machines of Loving Grace” (2024): “meaning comes mostly from human relationships and connection, not from economic labor.”

12. Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958), on the distinction between negative liberty (freedom from interference) and positive liberty (freedom to act and participate).

13. Paul Christiano, “What failure looks like,” AI Alignment Forum (2019).

14. On UBI’s insufficiency without political restructuring, see also the broader debate on post-labour governance in Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work (2011).