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Origins: The Collapse of Work
& The Search for Meaning
I didn’t set out to write about identity unraveling, the collapse of work, or the shifting nature of meaning. It started with a feeling—one I couldn’t name at first.
For years, work was a mirror. Creating, building, refining—I saw myself in the process. But slowly, that reflection faded. The work still had value, but it no longer anchored my sense of self. At first, I thought it was burnout, a phase to push through. But looking around, I saw the same disorientation everywhere.
It wasn’t just personal. It was structural.
Late-stage capitalism has turned identity into a market product—something to optimize, monetize, and maintain. Social media, self-help culture, and hustle mentality have reduced the self to a brand. Work, once a stabilizer of identity, is eroding under AI, decentralization, and automation.
And so the question that was once easy to ignore becomes unavoidable:
If I am not my work, then what am I?
I looked to history for answers—moments when meaning itself had shifted. That search led me to Days of Heaven, Terrence Malick’s meditation on change. Set at the turn of the 20th century, the film follows workers harvesting wheat by hand, unaware their way of life is vanishing with the rise of industrialization.
That’s where we are now—still defining ourselves by work, clinging to a script as the system dissolves. A liminal space. Like the workers in Days of Heaven, we linger in a world already gone.
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Identity in Motion: From Static
Self to Navigational Flow
There was a time when I thought of identity as something fixed—something to be found. I imagined a fully realized version of myself, waiting to be uncovered through work, experience, and skill. But that idea of identity was always an illusion.
I used to believe that if I worked hard enough, I would finally arrive at myself. That there was a finished version of me waiting to be unlocked, like a fully rendered character in a game. But then my life fractured. A divorce. A move across the country. A new job at a big Tech company. One day, I looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize the person staring back. The foundation I had built my identity on had crumbled.
For months, I tried to reclaim the past, to restore the version of myself I had lost. But slowly, a different thought emerged: what if identity isn’t something we find, but something we create? What if identity is a field, not a fixed point—a song that changes depending on who’s listening?
The unraveling of work is forcing people to confront this truth. The roles that once provided structure—titles, careers, industries—are losing their stability. The Industrial Age measured human worth through labor. The Knowledge Economy measured it through expertise. Now, as AI, automation, and decentralized systems take over both, what remains?
We are moving into what writer Yancey Strickler calls The Post-Individual era—a time when personal identity is no longer the dominant framework for meaning. Strickler describes a shift away from individual self-maximization toward something more relational: an era where networks, interdependence, and shared purpose become the new center of identity.
“Yet, the post-individual shift suggests we are not meant to define ourselves alone. ”
Historically, identity was more fluid, less tied to personal ambition and more rooted in association. Post-World War II, social identity was often forged through community structures—unions, fraternal organizations, social clubs, professional guilds. These weren’t just about networking; they provided a shared framework for meaning. Today, individualism has replaced collectivism to such a degree that even community has become a product. The shift from associations to social media followings, from clubs to personal brands, from communal effort to personal optimization has made identity an isolating pursuit.
Yet, the post-individual shift suggests we are not meant to define ourselves alone. Instead of identity as a personal project, we are seeing the emergence of identity as a shared context—something shaped by participation in larger structures.
Black Mountain College embodied this fluid approach to identity. There were no rigid roles; students and faculty moved freely between disciplines. Merce Cunningham abandoned narrative dance, allowing movement itself to tell the story. Ruth Asawa wove sculpture from wire, rejecting the boundary between fine art and craft. Charles Olson developed Projective Verse, where poetry wasn’t fixed on the page but moved and expanded like breath.
These ideas parallel what philosophy and cognitive science have uncovered for decades. Jean-Paul Sartre argued that existence precedes essence—we are not born with a fixed identity but define ourselves through action. Deleuze and Guattari described identity as a rhizome, something that spreads in all directions rather than following a single path. Neuroscientist Francisco Varela suggests that the "self" is not an internal, stable entity but something co-created through interaction with the world.
Ram Dass put it more simply: identity is a set of costumes we wear. Terence McKenna described it as a hallucination, a story we mistake for real because we’ve repeated it to ourselves for so long. Insert Ground Hogs Day here. The self isn’t something we must find—it’s something we can shape, remix, and redefine.
The moment I let go of the idea that my identity had to be recovered, I began to move forward again. I stopped asking, “Who am I?” and started asking, “How do I want to engage with the world today?”
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The End of Fixed Reality: Ontological Design
& Play as a Mechanism for Reality Creation
We like to think of reality as something external and stable, a fixed landscape we navigate. But in truth, reality is participatory—it is shaped by perception, interaction, and feedback loops. The way we see things is not separate from what they are; it is an active part of their construction.
This is the core of ontological design—the idea that the tools and systems we create don’t just serve us; they reshape us. Every major shift in technology has not only changed what we do but also redefined how we see ourselves:
The internet rewired our attention.
Social media redefined self-presentation.
AI is now reshaping creativity, decision-making, and what we consider intelligence.
Reality, then, is not something external—it is something we are constantly designing. If the systems we build shape our perception, and our perception shapes reality, then the question is not just How do we adapt? but What kind of world do we want to create?
One answer might be found in play.
When I was a child, I built elaborate worlds out of sticks and scraps of paper. Everything had a purpose. Everything was alive. But adulthood conditions us to separate play from work, from responsibility, from meaning.
Yet play is not an escape from reality—it is the mechanism by which reality is constructed.
“What if the best work isn’t forced but discovered? What if play isn’t the opposite of meaning, but the path to it?”
At Black Mountain College, play wasn’t a distraction from serious work; it was the serious work. John Cage and Merce Cunningham structured their music and dance performances around chance, proving that deep play could produce profound artistic breakthroughs. Robert Rauschenberg erased a de Kooning drawing to explore the generative power of absence. Josef Albers used playful experimentation to reveal that color wasn’t an inherent property but something relational.
Philosopher Johan Huizinga argued in Homo Ludens that all culture—language, art, science—began as play. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s research into flow states suggests that the highest forms of creativity happen when work becomes indistinguishable from play. Ram Dass saw the entire universe as divine play, a cosmic game where meaning emerges through experience rather than being imposed from above. Terence McKenna viewed play as the evolutionary force that generates novelty, allowing intelligence itself to expand.
If the world is something we design, and if play is the state in which we generate the most meaning, then perhaps the most profound question we can ask is not just How do we design the future? but How do we learn to play again?
What if the best work isn’t forced but discovered? What if play isn’t the opposite of meaning, but the path to it?
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Leap Before You Look: The Work That Emerges
There is a moment just before a major transition—before the form has fully emerged—where everything feels unstructured. I’ve felt it at different points in my life. The first time I moved to a new city without a plan. The moment I left a career path that no longer felt like mine. The decision to step into something unknown without proof that it would work.
This is the paradox of emergence: The path does not appear until you take the first step.
The best work I’ve ever done didn’t come from forcing an idea. It came from deep immersion, from letting something unexpected emerge. Josef Albers taught his students that form arises through interaction rather than pre-planning. Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes weren’t fixed structures but adaptive systems that responded to tension and pressure. Gregory Bateson believed true creativity happens when structure and play collide but also was the first to state the double bind theory. Imagine that. Ram Dass saw work as a practice, not a product. Terence McKenna viewed creation as an alchemical transformation of chaos into meaning.
History’s most interesting periods weren’t when things were fully formed—they were threshold moments, when everything was in motion. Black Mountain College was a threshold. The postwar era of artistic associations was a threshold. The internet before it became corporate was a threshold.
Now, we are in another one.
The world ahead will not be built by those who wait for clarity. It will be built by those who move before they fully understand what they are stepping into. Work, at its best, isn’t something we control—it’s something we participate in.
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Beyond Productivity: The Emergence of
Work, Meta-Groups, and Context Windows
The best work I’ve ever done didn’t come from following a plan. It came from immersion in process. There is a fundamental shift happening in how we think about work—it is no longer about mastery and expertise alone but about interaction, response, and adaptation. The future of work will be:
Process-driven rather than output-driven
Exploratory rather than transactional
A field of interaction rather than a fixed role
The best work will not be pre-planned and executed; it will be discovered through engagement, play, and response.
At the same time, we are moving beyond traditional institutions into meta-groups—fluid, networked communities that operate across disciplines, industries, and geographies. These groups are shaping shared frameworks for meaning, replacing rigid hierarchies with dynamic participation. Examples include:
DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations), where governance and collaboration are redefined
Research collectives, where institutions give way to networked knowledge
Community-driven brands, where people co-create rather than simply consume
Meta-groups are not just about affiliation—they are about collaborative meaning-making, transforming work into something interactive and emergent.
But the ability to navigate this shift depends on a critical skill: expanding our context window. AI operates on context windows—the information it has access to at any given time. Humans, too, are shaped by the frames through which we perceive the world. Our ability to see, interpret, and imagine is determined by what we expose ourselves to, what we question, and what we overlook.
As work becomes more fluid and meaning is co-created through networks, our greatest asset will be our ability to expand our context—broadening the frames through which we understand, adapt, and create.
Art of Emergence
What happens when the way we used to measure value disappears? We explored that moment—not by offering easy answers, but by proposing a different way of seeing. We don’t need to emerge. We are already here.