We’re living longer and working differently—so why aren't we talking about what comes next?
First, an apology: I missed the mark on my quarterly newsletter by a couple of months. While I would have loved to connect with you in August, I spent that month moving into my husband’s childhood home—not quite how I envisioned spending our third wedding anniversary. But "in sickness and in health" sometimes extends beyond our spouses. When my 82-year-old father-in-law showed signs of needing more support, we chose the best of a limited set of options and moved in with him.
Around the same time, my 85-year-old grandmother also began showing signs that living independently may not last much longer. Thus began an ongoing series of conversations about care options, including the eventuality of assisted living. Regardless of the path chosen, navigating these decisions is emotionally taxing, time-consuming, and full of hard conversations.
These past few months have given me ample room to ponder: why do so few of us articulate what we actually want for the end of our lives? Only about 30% of Americans have a living will or healthcare directive, but I’m thinking beyond legal paperwork. Medical advances have dramatically extended our lifespans, yet few of us have genuinely mapped out what we want to do with those extra years. Do we want to stay in our homes? Join a senior living community? Which hobbies do we want to maintain? Which relationships do we want to intentionally cultivate?
I can’t help but see a direct parallel between the medical advances extending our lifespans and the AI technologies reshaping how we spend our working years. Medicine gave us longevity decades ago, but as a society—and as individual families—we never made space for the hard conversations on how we would use that “extra” time.
Now we face a similar crossroads at work. Automation and AI tools are absorbing tasks, but instead of humans influencing what to do with that time savings, the space is getting swallowed by the most mundane activities. Americans are increasingly reporting that their days are spent babysitting automated workflows, absorbing the leftover responsibilities of laid-off colleagues, and (of course) attending more meetings.
The result is predictably draining – we’re seeing a rise in AI brain fry, the "two-job job," and an accompanying undercurrent of existential dread. This makes complete sense – if technology is giving us more time, but we have no influence over how that time is spent, then of course we’re going to want to quit – work and life.
So what do we do?
I’ve written about job crafting extensively over the past few years, and it has never felt more urgent. Rather than waiting for external forces to dictate how we spend our energy, what if we reclaimed agency?
Here are a few questions I use during individual engagement interviews to help people reshape their roles so they feel truly reflective of their strengths and interests. I’ve adapted each of them to guide conversations with my aging loved ones recently:
1. Meaning:
(At work) What do you most look forward to doing when you get to work?
(In life) Which hobbies or activities feel energizing and accessible?
2. People:
(At work) Who are the colleagues or teams you interact with that bring out your sharpest thinking, and how can we increase your collaboration with them?
(In life) Which friends or family do you wish you could spend more time with? How would you like to spend that time?
3. Growth:
(At work) What is a skill or project you want to take on this quarter that your current workload is blocking?
(In life) What is something meaningful you still want to experience or accomplish, and how can we help make it happen?
At their heart, these conversations are about more than work and death, they’re about making deliberate choices about how we live – choosing intentionality over inertia. This is easier said than done, as evidenced by the recent WSJ article on the rise of the “Sunday Scaries” – a sense of dread that accompanies the start of the work week. Meanwhile, polling consistently shows that what Americans dread most about aging isn't dying, but the creeping loss of agency—the passive slide into an institutionalized final chapter.
Wouldn’t work (and death) be a little less scary if we had some influence over it?
Not everyone has the opportunity to have these conversations. Death can come for us just as suddenly as a layoff or injury. But millions of Americans will be given extra time, in work and in life. If we’re not proactive in discussing how to spend that extra time, then external forces (the market, the medical bureaucracy) will make that choice for us. Whether we’re navigating the final chapter of life or redesigning our 9-to-5, agency is where our dignity lives.
Don’t let anyone – human or machine – take that away.
Are you ready to help your team get intentional about designing work that will help them thrive? Then reach out today to discuss options for developing your workplace’s unique employee engagement strategy.
