You’re having lunch with your coworker, who flew in from out of town. 

While your coworker used to be very busy, their schedule at the moment was wide open.

When you ask them about your new boss, they tell you their boss just seems to hide off in a conference room. The two have met less and less often recently.

Your coworker eats lunch at a leisurely pace, while your stomach churns as you barely finish your sandwich and hurry off to the next meeting. You feel envious.

A week later, you see the news that your coworker was laid off.

The saying goes, “The reward for good work is more work.” And the punishment for bad work is no more work.

One form of job security involves making sure you have work. This is true when you’re working as an employee, and doubly so when you’re working with a client as an independent consultant, freelancer, or agency. 

Here’s the secret, though: a lot of white collar work is made up. Maybe even all of it. 

Amidst the AI boom, the future of white collar work will continue to be driven by looking for opportunities, pitching ideas, and initiating projects. Finding and making up work. Even with AI automating or augmenting some parts of work, there will always be new problems and opportunities.

Does the team need your project? Does the company need your team? Does the market need your company? Does the world need your market? 

“It’s all invented anyway,” Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander write in The Art of Possibility, “So we might as well invent a story or a framework of meaning that enhances our quality of life and the life of those around us.” They put a question forward:

What might I now invent, 
That I haven’t yet invented, 
That would give me other choices?

Everyone is making up work. It’s a timeless art. Those who do it well are helping the best idea win, which means finding people who need it. 

What work will you make up next? 

Riffing on Jeremy Giffon saying, “We just make up stuff for us to do. That’s sort of the whole point of it.”