By Milly Tamati

Hey, it’s Milly. It’s been a long while since I published an essay, this one has been taken it’s time to percolate.

Please read, and share widely. Reply with your feedback, questions, critiques.

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Well, pour yourself a cuppa and let’s get into it ♥️

The words you are reading right now are not being typed. I'm sitting on my couch, on the remote island I live on with 191 others. The sun is setting, and I'm overlooking the mountains. There's a dusting of snow on top. I live in the Scottish Highlands where sea eagles fly overhead, seals shout 'hello' when you jump into the freezing sea, and where it's mandatory to wave at every person who drives past. It’s a place so small, you know your neighbours. A place so vast, you can find yourself walking for hours without seeing a single soul.

And yet it's from here that I have created a world, an ecosystem, if you will. It's called Generalist World. GW is a network of over a hundred thousand people around the world. It's a space where we all figure out what's coming next, together.

I've spent the past few years demonstrating online what it means to have a non-traditional, unique career. A career that only you can live. In that time, we've helped thousands of generalists meet others like them, see themselves in a new light, and find immense value in who they are.

I first realized this was a “thing” many years ago, when I left the startup I'd helped grow, and my boss said "there's a Milly shaped hole being left behind." Not a narrow, specialized-shaped hole. A squiggly, stretchy, zig-zag, one-of-a-kind-shaped-hole. For the past three years I've been obsessed with understanding models of how people work in ways that don't fit societal norms, but do work for the people who ultimately have to live them.

I’m seeking to understand the different shapes of careers, and in which ways that shape helps someone live a life of meaning.

And for three years, I have been preaching to the whole world the value of the generalist. At first, this was received with some snickers and laughs, people thinking it was silly. We live in a specialised world, they said. But I had a hunch that things were changing. I could see this in my own life. And with the exponential growth of AI, I am more convinced than ever that in the future, the most successful, content, and free people will be the generalists. They simply have to be when we now all have 10,000 specialists with PhDs in our pocket.

With the gains of efficiency and productivity in AI, which just one or two years ago we honestly couldn't have even imagined, it begs the question on everyone's tongue: what next?

Recently I read an article about a company called Block, whose CEO laid off nearly half their workforce. Four thousand people from a team of ten thousand. This isn't unusual anymore. We've seen hundreds of thousands of people be laid off in the past few years. But what stood out was the announcement. The CEO, Jack Dorsey, didn't shy away from saying exactly why. He didn't hide behind economic pressures or some vague restructuring language. He was actually very clear.

"A significantly smaller team, using the tools we're building, can do more and do it better," he wrote. "And intelligence tool capabilities are compounding faster every week."

He went on to say:

"I don't think we're early to this realization. I think most companies are late. Within the next year, I believe the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes."

Block's stock surged 24% the day of the announcement. The market didn't mourn the loss of 4,000 jobs.

It….. celebrated.

Okay, I hear you say, but surely this is pretty isolated to teach companies? Well, the IMF's Kristalina Georgieva put the scale of what's coming starkly: "Almost 40 percent of global employment is exposed to AI." In advanced economies, that number rises to 60%.

Hearing these numbers is a bit like having your head out the window of a car flying at 100km an hour. Hard to breathe. They're coming in at a catastrophic scale, with very little Plan B to be seen.

I've observed that when humans reach the brink of catastrophe ie: with our changing climate, we tend not to be able to process it. It's too big, too sore, too much to look at.

I once heard an amazing poem that was like: “the world’s on fire, but I have to do the dishes. The world’s on fire but the kids need picked up from school….”

When the world’s on fire, we tend to only be able to just carry on as usual.

But I think the displacement of jobs is only half this fire.

Losing your job is one thing. An awful thing. But it's not just income people will lose. It's their identity.

Because when you ask someone "what do you do?" and they instinctively answer with their job title, that's what I'm talking about. Pew Research found that 77% of workers with postgraduate degrees say their job is central to who they are. Work identity has become deeply cultural. You are what you do.

Our worth tied to our work runs deep (which is wild when you consider it’s a construct we have created).

And we already know what happens when that identity is taken away. Anne Case and Angus Deaton, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and his partner, spent years studying what they call "deaths of despair." Deaths by suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism more than tripled between 1992 and 2017 among Americans who lost access to meaningful, well-paying work.

Tripled.

This is less about economic downturn and more about what happens when people lose the thing that tells them who they are. When the factory closes, when the mine shuts down, when the office is automated - it's not just a paycheck that disappears. The morning routine disappears. The colleagues disappear. The answer to "what do you do?" disappears. And for millions of people, that question and its answer was the scaffolding that held everything else up.

Case and Deaton's concluded:

Purpose, and by that I mean the everyday sense that your life matters, turns out to be a matter of life and death in the most literal sense. A meta-analysis of over 136,000 people found that those with a high sense of purpose have a 17% reduced risk of dying from all causes.

So if our jobs are entangled with our purpose, and that purpose is eliminated - often not by our choice - then what?

When work changes at scale, people won't just lose their income. They will lose their identity. And losing identity means losing meaning, structure, and purpose.

This is the part that isn't in the headlines. The layoff announcements get coverage. The stock surges get coverage. The unravelling that follows? That happens behind closed doors.

Since you were a kid, you've been put into a box. I was Milly Tamati, and I went to Mangatawhiri Primary School. Then I was Milly Tamati, and I went to Hauraki Plains College. Then I was Milly Tamati, tour guide. Then I was Milly Tamati, startup operator. It's only in recent years that I feel I've been living a life that has been ahead of the curve. A life where I actively reject putting myself into one box.

When I introduce myself, I say: "I'm a founder, a writer, a creator. I’m a wife, an aunty, a friend. I grow veg. I ferment food. I volunteer on local community boards. I do deep women's work. I lift weights. I walk 10,000 steps every day. I'm learning how to build cob houses. I'm writing a book."

I have actively, explicitly, not put myself in a box.

The new world of work is not going to look like doing the same job with the same skill for the next 40 years. I think we all feel this now; AI is simply developing too fast for this to be true. When you are someone who has multiple interests, multiple skills, multiple passions, the intersection at which you combine them is how you stay ahead.

David Epstein's Range drew on study after study showing that in complex, unpredictable environments - which is what the real world actually is - generalists outperform specialists. David cites a LinkedIn study of half a million members found that one of the best predictors of who would become an executive was the number of different job functions they had worked across. Harvard's Laboratory for Innovation Science studied problem solvers on the InnoCentive platform and found the further a problem was from the solver's own expertise, the more likely they were to solve it.

We know that innovation doesn't happen in the depths of a single discipline. Universities like the London Interdisciplinary School have built entire curricula around this. Breakthroughs happen at the edges, where different fields collide. Generalists have been living at those edges their whole lives.

Iain McGilchrist, a psychiatrist who spent decades studying the divided brain and the author of the Master and his Emissary, put it this way: "Our talent for division, for seeing the parts, is of staggering importance - second only to our capacity to transcend it, in order to see the whole." The productivity era was built on division. Dividing labour, dividing knowledge, dividing people into specialisms. What comes next requires seeing the whole.

The promise of productivity was always that it would serve us. Work more, earn more, live better. White picket fence. Cushty retirement. Productivity kept its promise to the economy, but it broke its promise to the people doing the producing.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass (which I beg you to read!) has a name for this kind of system: a Windigo economy. An economy that "grants personhood to corporations but denies it to the more-than-human beings."

It's this same logic that calls forests "natural resources" and calls workers "human resources." Value measured by extraction. Worth is tied to output.

Resources.

I'm from New Zealand, and I grew up with a fundamentally different framework. In Te Reo Maori, our worldview is that the land is not a resource. It is alive. It is an ancestor. We have a concept called kaitiakitanga, it means guardianship, stewardship, the responsibility to care for what sustains us rather than extract from it. And manaakitanga - the ethic of care for one another, of lifting people up, of seeing hospitality not as a nicety but as a way of being. It’s these principles that have guided me in the creation and growth of Generalist World.

These models are what the world can look like when it's built on reciprocity instead of extraction. And they are exactly the frameworks we need as the extractive model of productivity collapses under the weight of its own logic.

The Windigo economy eats until there's nothing left. Kaitiakitanga asks: what do we owe to what comes after us?

I fear we have become so caught up in the now, that this question isn’t anywhere near loud enough.

Nearly a century ago, John Maynard Keynes saw this crossroads coming. In his 1930 essay "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren," he predicted that by 2030, productivity gains would mean humans would only need to work fifteen hours a week.

"Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem - how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well."

And then, his warning:

"Yet there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy."

It gives me a little chill, because I think this is where we are.

What happens when AI “solves” productivity? What happens when AI productivity becomes almost infinite, and much cheaper than human labour? What happens when productivity stops being the organising principle for work?

Or said in another way..

WHAT THE F* ARE WE ALL GOING TO DO?

What comes next I'm calling the Post-Productivity era. It's when AI handles most of the knowledge work, and productivity stops being the point.

Would you believe it? I'm still speaking. Instead of typing, one of my AI’s is listening and transcribing. This future isn't some far-off-in-the-distance-sci-fi. It's literally happening right now, on a couch, on a remote Scottish island, while the sun goes down.

The past six months of working with Claude, first as my sparring partner, and now a fully fledged team member, has sent me into flow state more times than I can count. Work has felt fun, expansive, exhilarating. Adrienne Maree Brown wrote that "what is easy is sustainable. Birds coast when they can." That's what this feels like. Working with AI often has me feeling like I'm flying.

I can also unequivocally say, this is the most fun I’ve had at work, ever. And it’s really strange to correlate that to working with AI. In equal measures it makes me feel like I’m superhuman, and like I’m collaborating with the very thing that will be the demise of what I know work to be.

But I’m not afraid. Because I know that AI is not the demise of me. It’s not the demise of who I am, the value I have as a human being. It will change the way I work. But it cannot change the worth I have.

And here, we come to my main thesis.

If you've made it this far, welcome. This is the crux that I want you to stew on, talk to your friends about, stare at the sea and mull over. To get so dang crystal clear in your worth and value, that your sense of identity is rock-solid.

Run through a scenario with me.

It’s 2027. We all still work, but it looks different.

We logon to our laptops, and check in to see what our agents have worked on overnight. We give feedback, approve tasks, and pour ourselves a cuppa tea. We pop in our headphones and walk the dog, speaking aloud today’s content for Linkedin. AI transcribes it and by the time we’re home, there’s a post waiting. We settle back at our laptop and Claude Code is waiting, we’re not technical but we’re just shipping an app for one of our 3 clients. You giggle that it’d have cost us $20,000 to do this a few years ago. Our team meetings about to start, and we decide to walk again, our AI can transcribe and organize our notes anyway. We return home and our agents have completed the to-do’s from the call, they created workflows, documentation and booked our train for next week to meet the team in-person. You have your agent negotiate with your clients agents. You leave Claude around midday working on tonight’s tasks, while you go to your afternoon’s music lesson, volunteer in your community garden, and watch the kids at soccer practice.

I could keep going, but you get the gist. AI won’t be like the software you sometimes log on to. It’ll be like the most efficient teammate you’ve ever had, who knows you, your business, your preferences. Who can help you do 10x the work 10x times faster.

Work is absolutely not going to disappear, but it absolutely is going to change.

I don’t care how established your business is, imagine you’re now a startup.

I don’t care how many years you are into your career, imagine you’re now junior. And by this I don’t mean that your past skills and experience aren’t relevant, of course they are. We absolutely need people with wisdom and life experience under their belts in times of wicked environments. But just like we all were beginners when the internet made it into our homes (remember the beep beep boop of dialup?), so will be the case as we understand how to use and leverage AI.

Because over the next 18 months, we all become beginners again as the shape of how we work shifts. My sense says that the people who resist this, will have the toughest time. This isn’t to say don’t question it, and don’t challenge it, and don’t think critically about how you’re using it (I actively encourage ALL of these things!), but I believe ignoring it also won’t serve you.

This all might sound absolutely terrifying or absolutely brilliant, and probably a bit of both at the same time! This is why I believe its that this is the time to look to generalists; those who have navigated being a beginner many times, to understand how to quickly and smoothly find our feet.

Because I believe this new way of working is going to unlock something that we lost for a very long time.

Meaning, outside of the work that we do.

I’ve presented many chunky ideas throughout this essay, and I want to close by leaving you with practical ways you can ready yourself for this change. These suggestions come from my own experience, as well as those I’ve witnessed navigate change extremely well.

BONUS: INVEST IN DOING NOTHING

What I hope you take from this essay more than anything, is that you have agency, and you have options. You don’t need to wait like a sitting duck for AI to “come for your job”. You can see where the puck is going, and you can plan accordingly.

When AI excels at being productive, it opens space for what's next. And what's next isn't actually something new. What's next is a return.

A return to meaning.

We're going to have an explosion of art, philosophy, charitable work, volunteering, hobbies, comedy. Doing stuff just because it lights us up. Making. Playing. Connecting. Creating projects together. Solving problems we see in our communities. Humans are meaning-making beings. What comes post-productivity might sound nebulous, but it’s not.

The question is no longer how much can you produce. The question is who are you and what do you uniquely create.

The World Economic Forum's top skills for 2030 aren't technical. They're human. Resilience. Creative thinking. Empathy. Curiosity. And as for working in giant corporations? I think in five years, we're going to look back on how we used to work, and it will seem like it was 50 years ago.

We'll be working in smaller, autonomous teams. Communities will become innovation hubs. Portfolio careers and fractional work will become the norm. Remote work. I think we’ll see an exodus from cities as people give up the corporate dream. VP’s will ditch the next promotion cycle to open a cafe. I think the traditional 9-to-5 will soon be considered a relic of the past, the way we now look at factory shifts or farm labour.

But the honest truth is, I don't know what's coming. Nobody does. And I think that's the point. This essay isn't me saying “this is the blueprint for exactly what will happen!”. It's a question. And one of the most important one we've faced in a long time.

What I do know is that it could be a new chance. One where work sustains you, not just pays your bills. Where success is measured by wellbeing and relationships, not by how much you produced or consumed. Where we have time to notice the coots floating by, to take 15,000-step conversations with friends, to sit by the river and think about the problems that actually matter.

A world where we embody kaitiakitanga and manaakitanga - guardianship of the land and care for one another. Where we stopped trading our humanity for exponential growth. Where the work we do heals rather than harms.

A world built on reciprocity. Not extraction.

I'm still on my couch. The sun has set now. The mountains have gone dark. Tomorrow I'll walk the single-track road that runs the length of this island, and I might not see another person for two hours. And somewhere in the world, a group of generalists will meet up in a cafe or a co-working space or someone's living room, and they'll introduce themselves not with a job title but with a list. A beautiful, sprawling, unoptimised list of everything they are.

That's how I see the post-productivity era. Just a normal Tuesday.