It's The End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)
Exploring the decline of corporate jobs, the shift to skills-based economy, and strategies for adapting to the fast-changing world of work!
Ready or not, now is the time to move toward the path of greater personal agency and adaptability.
In this edition:
- The Decline of Corporate Jobs
- Long-term outcomes, short-term implications
- Choose Your Own Adventure
Part 1: That's great, it starts with an earthquake
Just this week alone, we have seen:
- Amazon cut 14,000 corporate jobs
- Target cut 1,800 corporate jobs
- General Motors cut 1,750 jobs
- UPS 48,000 jobs
- Paramount 2,000 jobs
- Charter Communications 1,200 jobs
We’re moving from employment as container to skills as currency. Jobs were a twentieth-century mechanism for packaging capability, stability, and identity under corporate infrastructure. They made sense when the coordination costs of work were high. Now that AI, platforms, and digital systems have collapsed those costs, we can disaggregate the package.
Let’s get into it.
Shifting from Jobs to Skills
A “job” bundles together:
- a set of skills,
- a reporting structure,
- access to tools and capital,
- a promise of continuity
As those functions decouple, skills remain valuable, but the corporate wrapper loses its necessity. Platforms can now match work to skill in real time, handle contracts and payments automatically, and provide access to shared tools.
So yes— as mentioned by Rishad Tobaccowala (I highly recommend his Substack), we are likely at peak full-time employment. This is not because humans are less needed, but because the form of their participation is changing. The limitation is actually in the number of people who can adapt fast enough to the changing forms of work.
When stable roles disappear or reorganize, those of us who can reframe their skills, learn new tools, and operate across boundaries will continue to find opportunity. Those who wait for predefined positions will struggle. So scarcity has shifted: the world doesn’t lack “positions,” it lacks people practiced in adaptive capability, the ability to see change early, learn quickly, and reconfigure their work to fit new realities.
The Paradox of Abundance
AI amplifies human leverage but erodes the need for traditional headcount. The result is a world with less employment but more work. The Paradox of Abundance (also known as the Resource Curse) hypothesizes that an abundance of [something] results in more people being worse off. I don’t totally have my head wrapped around it yet - if you’re more familiar than me, please get in touch and help me think.
What is emerging, though, is a skills market that will look more like an ecosystem: fluid, reputation-based, and continuously reconfigured. The practical challenge is portability: how we, as workers, signal credibility, maintain benefits, and find stability in motion.
Part 2: Light a Candle, Light a Motive
Long-Term Possibilities: Where we might go
Bear with me: Employment has evolved through distinct eras—agrarian, mercantile, imperial, industrial, and corporate—each layering on the one before it. In the agrarian age, people’s labor was tied to land and survival; in the mercantile age, to trade and exchange; in the imperial age, to expansion and administration; in the industrial age, to mechanized production and scale. The corporate era extended those principles through management, coordination, and capital markets. We now stand at the beginning of corporate sunset, where technology and distributed intelligence are unbundling the corporate form itself, signaling the rise of new systems for how people connect their skills to meaningful work.
I see three possible futures:
- The Cognitive Economy: Thinking becomes infrastructure; AI transforms knowledge work into interpretation and insight. A hopeful frontier where human imagination and machine reasoning collaborate to expand what’s possible.
- The Fabrication Economy: Autonomous production enables local creation; design and stewardship replace mass labor. A vibrant, hands-on era where creativity and community reshape prosperity from the ground up.
- The Bio-Digital Economy: Biological and digital intelligence merge; human experience becomes a new form of participation and value. A deeply connected age where empathy, consciousness, and innovation blend to redefine what it means to live and work.
I’ll dig into these more in the next newsletter, but for now, let’s get into the short-term implications.
Short Term Implications: What do we do about it?
For experienced professionals, the distinction between a job search and a work search is no longer semantic—it’s strategic.
- A job search looks for placement inside an existing structure.
- A work search identifies where your capabilities solve real problems, regardless of organizational boundaries.
Shifting to a work search means building visibility around what you can do, who you can collaborate with, and what results you create. It treats your skills as active assets rather than static credentials.
Those who make this shift early will adapt more smoothly, because they’ll already be operating in the networked, skills-based economy while others are still waiting for jobs that may not return.
In short: the long-term arc hasn’t changed, but the timeline is accelerating. Skills are becoming the new infrastructure of labor. The corporations that survive will act as brokers and stewards of those skills, not owners of the people who have them.
You can keep pursuing traditional employment, as there will always be jobs. But keep your eyes wide open: the traditional job market is crowded, automated, and emotionally perilous. Ten thousand other applicants are hitting “submit,” and AI filters most of them out before a human ever looks. Current-day job hunting is a process that will erode your confidence and threaten your identity if you tie your worth to outcomes you can’t control.
Part 3: Offer Me Solutions Offer Me Alternatives
How Ready Are You?
Each person should take a moment to assess their own readiness for today’s work market. Take a beat to gauge how prepared you feel to navigate a world where stability comes, surprisingly, from adaptability.
-
Independent Track: You’ve already detached your identify from employment and are ready to define work on your own terms.
- Jump In! Begin to build your personal ecosystem: clarify your focus, define your offers, and create a visible platform that attracts the kind of work you love.
- Transitional Track: You still like the safety of employment but can feel its fragility. You’re curious, but also cautious, and willing to experiment.
- Dip Your Toes: Begin to experiment in low-risk ways, pursue a variety of experience builders that can fill the current employment gap and strengthen your resume, reframe your skills and begin building options outside a single employer.
- Stability Track: You have real obligations - mortgages, families, medical needs or tuition. You can’t afford risk, but you feel the shaky ground. This path must honor stability and also make room to build adaptation.
- Diversify Your Efforts: Dedicate about 65% of your time to a structured job search (I recommend Collaborative Gain’s Job Search Councils and the book Never Search Alone), and the remaining 35% to preparing for the post-job market. Use that time to build a small online portfolio, learn to use digital tools, practice contracting or invoicing basics, and collaborate on short-term projects that develop independence and confidence.
…And I Feel Fine
If you made it this far, thank you for sticking with me. The truth is, it’s okay that these systems are coming apart—they haven’t been working all that well for us anyway. The world of work is shifting fast, and each of us has to decide how ready we are for what comes next. Whether you’re focused on independence, transition, or stability, the real task is to keep moving—keep learning, connecting, and shaping what comes after the corporate era. In the next issue, I’ll share more about the futures taking shape and the practical actions that fit each path.
What a time to be alive.
