Why self-taught generalists may dominate as AI rewrites the rules of work
Last year, I was catching up with an old friend over a round of golf.
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Research suggests people entering the workforce today are on track to hold roughly twice as many jobs over their careers as people 15 years ago, and 70% of skills used in most jobs may change by 2030
People entering the workforce today are on track to hold roughly twice as many jobs over their careers as people did 15 years ago.
No one expected the generation born into technology to be so cautious of AI. Are Gen Z onto something older generations are missing?
There's something deeply counterintuitive buried in some recent Gallup figures, and I think it's worth sitting with for a moment.
I grew up in the 1990s and the thing nobody warned me about is that the resilience my generation was praised for was just the absence of anyone asking how we were — and the adults who admire us now for being "low maintenance" don't realize they're describing the exact training that made it almost impossible for us to ask for help in our thirties.
By the mid-1990s, somewhere between half and two-thirds of American kids in elementary and middle school were spending part of their afternoons unsupervised, depending on which study you trusted and what exactly you counted as supervision.
I'm 38 and I realized last weekend that my dad has started walking me to my car when I leave his house — something he never used to do — and the walk is always five seconds longer than it needs to be, with one extra small comment, one extra small wave, and I understood on the drive home that the walk isn't a goodbye, it's a quiet request for one more minute that he doesn't know how to ask for out loud
I sat in the rental car for ten minutes at the end of my father's road last weekend, engine off, hands on the wheel, unable to make myself drive.
The most painful thing about having a lonely aging father is that he won't let you fix it — he says he's fine, he doesn't want to be a burden, he insists the visits are too much trouble — and you spend years respecting his wishes while quietly understanding that the wishes are the loneliness talking, and the man underneath them has been hoping you'd override him for a long time
It is a Sunday evening in London, and my father is sitting in his usual chair, in his usual living room, with the news on at a volume slightly too loud.
The new feminism tells women they can have it all — but it doesn't tell them what it costs
"Have it all" is one of the most expensive lies feminism ever sold women.
Stop asking what AI can do and start asking what it can't
For the last two years, just about every conversation we've had about AI and careers has revolved around the same question.
The generation that sacrificed the most for their families is now quietly grappling with a question nobody prepared them for: if I spent my whole life living for others, what do I actually believe about how I want to live now
Surveys of older adults consistently surface a quiet pattern: people who spent decades building lives around providing, caregiving, and obligation often report difficulty naming what they actually enjoy once those roles loosen.
Opinon: Critical thinking still outperforms fast AI adoption when it comes to thriving in an AI-driven world
It seems like there's a story being told in just about every workplace right now.
Forget the dorm-room founder. The real winners are often twice that age.
The image is by now so familiar it feels like fact.
I’m 38 and I noticed last summer that my parents mostly ask about logistics — the drive, the weather, the dogs, the job — and rarely ask how I actually am
I drove to my parents' house last summer for a long weekend, and somewhere on the second day I noticed something I'd been not-noticing for about thirty years.