There is a word we have stopped questioning, one that we follow like a ritual– obeyed not out of understanding, but out of habit. It is as constant as the air, absurd to even talk about because it exists beyond choice or doubt. “Careers” have reigned over humanity since the beginning. A simple six letter word which is powerful enough to turn us into puppets in a performance we never auditioned for. The word “career” comes from the Latin “carraria”, meaning a road or track, later becoming the Old French “carriere” i.e a racecourse. So human existence is nothing more than following a path laid before us, a predetermined one which we inherit rather than choose, only to reach the end that was always waiting?
Artificial intelligence took over work gradually. First, it handled repetitive work like data entry and customer support. Then, with advances in Artificial Intelligence, it started learning from data and doing more complex tasks like recommendations and automation. After the invention of AI, humans expected to feel liberated. Instead, it silently fed the fear inside them, something older and stranger. The fear of unemployment, the fear of having to answer what we were running towards. A shrouded path, which was never meant to be followed, only endured.
The anxiety revolving around alternate careers in the age of AI tends to arrive with an urgency as if it demands to be solved immediately, like a problem with a single correct answer. The only question that lingers is which part of the racecourse remains unoccupied. But what if the racecourse is the biggest issue? What if the crisis accelerated by AI is not a crisis of skill but of meaning? One that has existed for a long time, patient as time itself, waiting for the machines to arrive so the question becomes undeniable.
On the happiness of a man without a Boulder–
The crisis did not begin with AI. It began with the Industrial Revolution– and more honestly, it began the moment human beings agreed to measure the worth of a life in units of productivity. Karl Marx called it alienated labor, the condition in which a worker is estranged not merely from the product of his hands but from the act of making itself, from other human beings, and ultimately from themselves. In the novel “1984” by George Orwell, the character Winston Smith’s work at the Ministry of Truth reflects alienated labour. He spends his time rewriting history to fit the party’s changing narrative. He produced the works knowing it was false and meaningless. He changes dates, erases names and alters speeches, while the original is fed to the black hole of memories and burned. This is alienation as a philosophical endpoint. The separation between the worker and their creation becomes so severe that what they produce serves only to prove that their role in it has effectively disappeared.
In “The myth of Sisyphus”, Camus writes, “The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd than Sisyphus’s boulder”. Here, he was drawing a connection between the ancient myth and the modern day, between the condemned man climbing hillside to a worker returning to his workplace, between the endlessly falling stone and the record always rewritten. Orwell gave us the flesh. Camus gave us the bone beneath it. The labour we now conveniently call a “career” has always been a misery to mankind. An eternal punishment carried to the grave. The tragedy is not in the crushing itself, but in how, over time, it came to define the very purpose of our existence. Camus showed us Sisyphus, endlessly pushing a boulder that always tumbles back while Orwell gave us Winston, pushing a boulder that, once it has fallen, must deny it ever existed. In both cases, the weight is not just of the stone but the burden to impose and to erase in silence.
But neither Camus nor Orwell could have foreseen the moment, AI would arrive and simply take over the weight of the boulder from our shoulders. Leaving us far behind, standing on the lonely hillside with grim-stained empty hands, and blurred faces which are hollow from inside. When the pushing ceases, we are left with a question that lingers– who am I without the weight?
Maybe the Hill Was Never the Problem–
The human race is bounded by the curse of time, a quiet tide that moulds our days. It is a relentless rhythm controlling our work and rest, our mornings and evenings and often our identity. Each day is a reflection of the day before, we rise, move and perform in a constant loop. A meaningless rhythm, a mosaic built of empty promises. Dostoevsky’s “Underground man” knows this intimately which reflects from the quote, “I am a sick man…. I am a spiteful man, I am an unattractive man”. He quietly fights with the emptiness that stretches beneath the surface of every routine. Time is like a hill neither an enemy nor a companion, simply carrying us like winds which we cannot resist. Suffering comes not from the hours but from the hollow patterns they create. In the stillness of trembling twigs, there is a question that remains– What if the ascent was never truly ours, and what do we become along the way?
The hill is the system surrounding itself around us like a silk saree, until you suffocate in the poisonous delicate florals and the faint essence. In Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”, Gregor Samsa rises with the gleaming sun, not by choice but by the silent rhythm that suffocates him. The unspoken expectation of his family and the ledger of debts and duties marks his days. In the motion of responsibilities and expectations, he somewhat neglects himself. His own needs, emotions and body become secondary, almost invisible. And then one morning the ordinary cracks, when awakens to find himself transformed into a monstrous vermin, a body that felt alien. The change was an existential rupture that exposed the slope he climbed for so long and the system that built him. The support he relied on recedes. The hill is neither cruel nor kind, it is the system itself which moulded effort into identity, slowly revealing the cost of life lived for others rather than for oneself.
The god did us a favour
The myth reveals something quieter than suffering. The gods did condemn Sisyphus to pain but also meaninglessness. He is bound to a labour that consumes itself, leaving nothing but silence. The stone rises and falls, until every trace of effort vanishes. This is the real punishment, not the weight of the boulder but an absence that echoes, the absence of consequence. An erasure of permanence. But the punishment did not remain confined to a myth. Humans rebuilt it, carving every stone for their misery and calling it progress. The hill came back to us, but not in its usual form but carefully disguised in institutions and ambitions. Career became a myth. We stepped onto the slope willingly. We convinced ourselves that the climb was the one true purpose of existence.
For a long time, this structure held up like a promise. It offered a direction and understanding of what life should look like. In this sense, a career became something more than work. It became a religion carrying the hope of answering our quiet prayers. We were entangled so deeply in our work that it no longer defined what we did, but who we are. And when it collapsed we were left unsure of what to pursue, what to avoid and is the meaning of a well-lived life? When “God is Dead”, the structures that once gave meaning collapses with him. The danger is not always the loss sometimes, it’s the void it leaves behind lingering like an eternal wound. The old assurance slowly dissolves. What fills these wounds is rarely freedom, it is more like a substitution. A change, something we are not comfortable with. A constant search for anything to replace them.
This is where we stand now. AI has not just altered the nature of work, it has begun to erode the structure. The hill is unstable. The destination is shrouded. And what remains is not liberation of triumph, but an unsettling ache. For a moment, there is no answer– only absence of one. The instinct is to search for another hill, another structure to inherit. To find another definition of a well-lived life. But this reflex must be resisted. What Friedrich Nietzsche called self–overcoming no longer feels like an abstract idea, but as a necessity– the quiet courage to remain in the silence of solitude without rushing to fill it, to resist the comfort of borrowed answers. Swiftly begin to understand the meaning and complexities of life. As he writes, “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”
Therefore the gods may have done us a favour after all. They designed the punishment to exhaust and to dismiss effort as meaningless. But they did not anticipate this– that removing the punishment would be harder than enduring it. A life without the boulder would not feel like freedom, but like a disease. Not release, but exposure. That is where we are now.
What Sisyphus Does on Monday
“Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm.”
– Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
The thought of Monday is almost revolting. Camus names it because Monday is where the absurd is most legible. The moment when the rhythm reasserts itself without asking permission, when the worker rises and returns to the hill because the hill is what he knows, because the silence of not returning is a silence he has not yet learned to inhabit. The rhythm was never chosen and repeated until repetition felt like choice, and then repeated further until it felt like identity.
AI has broken the rhythm. The streetcar still runs. But the hours inside the office are contracting. The tasks inside them are thinning. Monday morning is beginning to ask a question it has never had to ask before– Why should anything be done at all? And the answer remains uncertain as the rhythm itself.
At such moments, one finds oneself returning– almost involuntarily– to a certain figure– not someone fancied but someone real you’ve actually seen, the kind who exists at the margins of every civilization and quietly persists while the centers shift around him. He is a craftsman. Perhaps he weaves, perhaps he carves, perhaps he tends a particular stretch of land his family has tended for generations– or perhaps he moulds the very base of the civilization itself, quietly, while the civilization looks elsewhere. He has no performance review. He would find the concept of alternate careers puzzling. His work is not what he does. It is what he is. The subtraction is not possible. He is neither a hobbyist nor a brand.
In the book, “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” the protagonist Ivan Ilyich has lived a legible life, a life that can be read about or ranked. Correct career, correct furniture, correct marriage and correct social position. Each decision was a mirror– not of desire rather of decorum. He was, in the fullest modern sense, successful. And on his deathbed he discovers, with the particular horror of a man who has never been wrong about anything, that none of it was real. He realises that success had been the very mechanism of his disappearance. His colleagues visit and think about whose position will become available. His wife performs the appropriate grief. But Gerasim, the young peasant servant, does something no one else in the novel manages to do. He holds his dying master’s legs through the night, not out of duty, not out of pity, but simply because it eases the pain. He simply helps without calculation of return. Tolstoy does not explain this. He does not need to. The contrast is the argument. Ivan Ilyich spent a lifetime being seen and died unseen. Gerasim, sought nothing, gave everything. The difference between them is not virtue. It is the presence of a self that was never withheld from the moment it inhabited.
What Gerasim has is not a skill. It cannot be listed on a resume or measured against a benchmark. It is presence. The full and unmediated occupation of a moment, with nothing held back and nothing calculated. The Japanese call it “shokunin”, not merely craftsman but devotion, the state in which the self and the work are no longer separable. Rabindranath Tagore called the same quality “seva” i.e service not as a labour but as a way of being. The distinction is not merely moral, but structural. What can be priced can be automated, and what can be automated will be. Presence cannot be priced. Devotion cannot be automated, not because machines lack intelligence, but because the value of these things is inseparable from the human being enacting them.
Simone Weil wrote that attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. She did not mean concentration in the narrow sense, the ability to focus on a task, but something more total: the suspension of the self long enough to let something else be real. To receive another person, another moment, another piece of the world without immediately turning it into a reflection of one’s own needs and fears. Most of what passes for love, most of what passes for thought, most of what passes for work, is the self in conversation with its own reflection. Attention interrupts that conversation. It is the moment when the mirror becomes a window.
AI cannot do this. Not because it lacks intelligence in fact its intelligence, in many domains, already exceeds ours but because attention in this sense requires a self that can be suspended, a consciousness that has something at stake. A consciousness that can be changed by what it receives. The teacher whose presence expands the thinking ability of students and their beliefs. The doctor whose manner is itself a form of medicine. The parent who sits with a sick child through the night, not because monitoring is required, but because presence is the whole point. These are not alternate careers in the reskilling sense. They are what careers were always pretending to be.
What Sisyphus does on Monday, when the boulder is gone, is not search for another one. He does something far more difficult. He remains. He learns, slowly, to inhabit the silence that once frightened him and to act without the guarantee of outcome, to give attention without the promise of return, to live without the certainty of arrival. He discovers that the hill was never the center. It was only a distraction from the valley, where the actual living was always waiting.
The stone rolls itself now
For ten thousand years, Sisyphus knew who he was because he knew what he carried. The weight was the answer to every question the gods refused to give him. Career was the same, not merely work but a verdict. A quiet nod validating our existence. A proof that the climbing meant something, that the life being spent was being spent correctly. We did not just work. We were our work. And when the gods designed the punishment, they were not cruel so much they were precise. They gave us exactly what we would have asked for, had we been given the chance to ask.
Now the stone rolls itself. Quietly. Efficiently. Without complaint, without error, without the dignity of exhaustion. It does not need us. It never needed the particular shape of our hands or the specific lean of our bodies or the knowledge we carried in our muscles from ten thousand mornings of the same climb. It only needed direction. And now it has learned that too. Sisyphus stands at the foot of the hill with open hands and no instruction, and the feeling is not what the philosophers promised. It does not feel like freedom. It feels like the moment after a long illness when the fever breaks and the body, unaccustomed to its own lightness, does not know what to do with the absence of weight. The hill is still there. The habit of climbing still lives in his legs. The memory of the boulder still shapes the curve of his palms. But the hands are empty. And empty hands, it turns out, are not the same as useless ones. They are simply hands that have not yet discovered what they are for.
This is the moment we are in. Not the morning after liberation, but the long, disorienting dawn before we have learned what liberation means. The instinct is ancient, powerful, deeply human– to find another stone. To scan the hillside for a new structure to inherit, a new title to carry, a new definition of the well-lived life to borrow from whoever seems most certain. The market is already offering them. Reskill. Pivot. Reinvent. Become irreplaceable. But these are just new names for the same hill. Different boulders, same sentence. The question AI is asking us is not which new skill to acquire. It is whether we are brave enough to put down the need for the stone entirely.
The valley was always there. He just never turned around long enough to see it. The craftsman saw it, the one whose work is not what he does but what he is, and for whom the subtraction is not possible. Gerasim saw it– the peasant servant who held his dying master’s legs through the night not because duty demanded it but because presence was the only honest response. The farmer saw it, pressing his palms into the same earth his ancestors pressed their into, carrying knowledge that was never written down because it was never meant to be stored it was meant to be lived, season by season, in the body itself. These figures were never on the hill. Not because they lacked ambition, but because they had found something ambition was always pointing away from — the quiet, irreducible dignity of a self completely given to the moment it inhabits.
This is what the AI age is uncovering. Not a crisis of employment, though it is that too. Not a crisis of skill, though the reskilling will be real and the disruption will be brutal and the transition will leave marks on generations. Beneath all of that, older and quieter and more patient than any economic cycle, is a crisis of meaning that was always waiting for a moment this undeniable to arrive. We built careers to answer the question of who we are. We measured ourselves in productivity because productivity could be measured, and the measurable felt like the real. We outsourced the self to the role, the identity to the title, the proof of a life to the performance of one. And now the performance is being automated, and what remains is the question we built the boulder to avoid. Not what will I do but who am I, when there is nothing left to carry?
Camus told us to imagine Sisyphus happy. He was not being ironic. He was being precise. The happiness he described was not the happiness of the summit– the satisfaction of completion. It was something stranger, it was the happiness of a consciousness fully present to its own existence, even in the absurdity of it. Even in the repetition. Even in the falling. The revolt was not against the boulder. It was against the idea that the boulder was the point. And if the boulder was never the point, then its removal is not a tragedy. It is an invitation. The most demanding one the human race has ever received.
The alternate career the AI age is pressing us toward is not a career at all. It is a return. To presence. To attention. To “seva” and “shokunin” and the kind of work that cannot be automated because it was never, in the truest sense, work, it was always just one human being, fully given to another. The teacher who expands what a student believes is possible. The doctor whose manner is itself a form of medicine. The parent who stays through the night not because the monitoring requires a human, but because being there is the whole point. These are not consolation prizes for the displaced. They are what the displacement was always going to reveal. The thing that was real, underneath everything we mistook for meaning.
We are Sisyphus. The stone rolls itself now. And what we do with our open hands, whether we grieve the boulder, or search the hillside for a new one, or stand very still in the unfamiliar silence and let ourselves, finally, turn toward the valley– is the only question the AI age is actually asking. It is also the oldest question there is. Not a question of technology or economy or policy, but of what a human life is finally for, when stripped of everything that was never truly ours to begin with. The gods designed the punishment to exhaust us into surrender. They did not anticipate that the surrender would feel, after ten thousand years, like the first free breath.
The hill is still there. It will always be there. But Sisyphus, for the first time, has his back to it. And ahead of him– unhurried and unhidden is the valley where the actual living was always waiting. Where it is still waiting. Where it will wait for as long as it takes for us to remember that we were never, in our best moments, the boulder. We were always the hands.
By: Pavitra Naidu
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