How do I build a good life in a world I didn't choose?

Or: what the fudge am I supposed to do now?

This post began with a question that I think a lot of people are or are about to be asking, probably out loud, and probably with more swearing than I've used here:  What the fudge am I supposed to do now?

I'm talking mostly about people in their 40s, 50s and 60s, who have spent 20 or 30 years getting properly, painfully good at something that is now being automated, devalued, reorganised or changed beyond recognition. People with mortgages, with children or parents who might need looking after, and bodies that now come with perimenopause, dodgy knees and strong opinions about sleep. People with decades of expertise, reputations and networks that did not appear by magic.

And people who do not want to become "AI optimised" or set up an online shop flogging other people's tat, or spend their evenings building a personal brand. (I would rather eat my own laptop.)

The question underneath all of this is much bigger than just AI:  

How do I build a good life in a world I didn't choose?

Adapt, adapt, adapt (and don't make a fuss)

The message is everywhere. Learn AI. Reskill. Upskill. Be agile. Be entrepreneurial. Be resilient. Stay employable.

Some of that is true obviously. The world is changing, and the evidence suggests many jobs will be transformed rather than simply wiped out. The International Labour Organisation estimates that around one in four jobs worldwide are potentially exposed to generative AI, and it's clear that what happens next depends on how the transition is managed, including whether workers get any say in it. (ILO, Generative AI and Jobs: 2025 Update)

But listen to how we talk about it. Somehow the responsibility for navigating enormous structural change has been dumped on the individual. Your job changes? Adapt. Your industry changes? Reskill. Your organisation restructures? Be more resilient. AI can do half of what you used to do? Learn to use AI. And if you can't keep up, well, perhaps you didn't adapt quickly enough.

"Resilience", incidentally, is what we ask of people when we'd rather not fix the thing that's hurting them.

Which is, frankly, systems all over*.

*corporate, patriarchal, consumer, finance etc, etc, etbloodycetera.

And it doesn't fall evenly (shocker)

The ILO's 2025 analysis also found that the exposure is gendered (no shit shirlokina). In high-income countries, 9.6% of women's jobs fall into the highest exposure category for generative AI, compared with 3.5% of men's. Globally it's 4.7% for women and 2.4% for men. The main driver is clerical work, which is both the most exposed type of job and one where women are heavily concentrated. (UN News).

Exposure is not the same as job losses (the ILO is clear about that, and so am I). But it does tell us whose work is being redesigned first. And I guess I'd quite like to know why we're not more surprised that it's the same people, again.

A *52-year-old is not a blank sheet of paper

There is a special kind of nonsense in so many conversations about careers and technology. It assumes everyone is infinitely mobile, and that if your career disappears you can simply become something new.

Maybe you can, but maybe you don't want to. Maybe you've spent 25 years becoming a brilliant teacher, researcher, translator, engineer, fundraiser or social worker, and you actually like it. Maybe you're very good at it. Maybe the problem isn't that you failed to keep up, but that the world around your work moved the goalposts.

So perhaps the question shouldn't only be "how do we make you more adaptable?" Perhaps it should also be: what's worth preserving?  What do we (all) lose when we automate this? What knowledge disappears? Who gets the benefits, and who carries the risk? What kind of work do we actually want to exist?

None of that is anti-technology. It's just asking who the change is for.

*random example age picked, nothing to do with what it looks like in my mirror.

A spreadsheet is not an organisation

The same thing is happening inside organisations. Boards are told they must adopt AI. Governments are working out what it means for public services and jobs. There are good reasons to look at all of it.

But somewhere there's a spreadsheet saying a process can be automated, and I'd bet my last euro (which is more accessible than I would like it to be) that it has no column for the person who's been holding the whole place together for 18 years - the one who knows why things work the way they do, and where everything is buried. Nobody wrote it down because nobody ever does. Of course the restructuring plan has a very clear column for the savings, funnily enough, but um, none for the people paying for them.

An organisation isn't a set of tasks. It's people, and their knowledge, relationships, trust, judgement and informal work. It's their willingness to tell someone senior that something isn't working, and their willingness to care. You can remove a task without removing the human system around it, and sometimes the task is the least interesting part. The stuff that holds a place together is so often the stuff nobody measured, and I suspect it's no coincidence who tends to be doing it.

So what happens next?

No idea. Honestly. And anyone who tells you they do is selling something.

I can't tell you which jobs will go. I don't think everyone should become an entrepreneur, and I don't think the answer for organisations is just to automate faster. I'm not romanticising the past either. Automation can remove truly dreadful work, AI can extend what people are able to do, and some people will benefit enormously.

The real questions are: who gets to decide what we do with that? Who gets a say? Who benefits? Who bears the costs? What is work for? And how do people keep enough agency to shape what comes next?

A better question

I think there's a better question than "how do I stay employable?" It's:  what would a good life look like from here?

Not the life you were promised at 25, and not the one an algorithm thinks you should want. Not the one that happens to suit whatever the technology of the moment can do, but yours, with the experience you've built up, the responsibilities you carry, the things you care about and are good at, and probably a few things you haven't found yet.

But we also need to be honest about something. Asking "what would a good life look like?" is a lovely question when you've got the time and headspace to ask it. How do you ask it when the redundancy notice has arrived and the mortgage payment is due on the 31st? Having choices is a privilege, and like most privileges it isn't evenly shared (sound familiar?). I don't have a neat answer, but I do think it can't only be a question for people to wrestle with alone at the kitchen table. It's also: who gets the time, security and support to ask it?  And who is responsible for making sure they do?

The future is going to change whether we like it or not. That doesn't mean we hand over the question of what kind of future we want.

This is the territory I'm moving into: thinking about change, work and AI with organisations and individuals who would rather make better choices about the change than just survive it. If that's you, say hello.

So: how do I build a good life in a world I didn't choose? I'd love to hear how you're thinking about it.