[∞](https://unattributed.cc/2026/08/13/workism-ai-and-vocations/)
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NOTE: Sorry for the duplicate post. There was a glitch in the system here that posted this article twice.
Introduction #
There is this truly great read in Noema: Why Is Everyone In Tech So Sad? by Aaron Horwath. One of the major points of this article is that Workism was used to replace religion in people’s lives. The idea that people looked for purpose in their work the way some people are called to vocations. And now, there seems to be a collapse in Workism that is leading to widespread disenchantment among knowledge workers.
One sentence in particular caught my attention:
That’s the true beauty of Workism: It is manufactured to distract people from the hole in their souls that a vocation would otherwise fill.
While that is the state of employment now, it wasn’t always the case. However, even in my case the end result is very similar.
My Time In Tech #
I spent approximately thirty years in technology in multiple roles. I started off in development, moved into documentation, technical support, and finally into infrastructure. The ladder I climbed literally doesn’t exist today.
It wasn’t my plan to leave the tech industry when I did. Due to personal reasons I had to relocate to take care of family. When I looked at the job market in this area it became clear pretty quickly: this wasn’t the market for my skill set. This market wants the jack-of-all-trades (master-of-none). Whereas, while I wouldn’t call myself a master, I have a highly defined set of skills (and now I wouldn’t even consider it to have kept up).
This was ten years ago. I’m honestly glad I didn’t even try to go back into tech.
The Underlying Tension #
Even before this situation arose I had felt tension in the IT field. And it wasn’t some specific change in the technology, the training, or knowledge. All of those things can be solved. No, this was a change in the relationship that I had with work. This was a change in how I defined myself, and how I was becoming more and more of a misfit in the field that I had spent so long in.
A lot of this centered on employer expectations. In my early employment there were things that were enjoyable about the jobs. There was interesting technology to experience. There were interesting problems to be solved. And, more than anything, there was a form of camaraderie with my coworkers. We shared this sense of adventure, and joy that the job brought us.
But over time that changed. Probably because early on we were on the cutting edge of so many things. Honestly, when I started, most IT people wouldn’t allow an x86 server in their server room. They were still dominated by HP, IBM and Sun. By the time I left, HP and IBM were exceptions, and Sun’s platforms were x86 based.
What happened during this time was likely predictable. Early on companies looked for people with knowledge and experience in this new hardware. The IBM PC and Louts 1-2-3 had been a curveball thrown at the IT departments of many of these companies. Companies responded by finding people that were knowledgeable about the technology, but not necessarily knowledgeable about IT.
And, also during this time, IT itself went under a transformation. In the days of mainframes and minicomputers IT was an expense. It was something that was paid for, and the bean counters didn’t really understand how to quantify IT. But around this time IT departments found themselves being changed from an expense based to cost based. In other words, the accountants had been given the directive to understand the value of IT, how to quantify it in dollars instead of it just being a black hole of expense.
My Perspective #
As I moved from one employer to the next I found the requirements for the jobs changing. Things like NDA’s were being introduced. Uncompensated overtime in the form of “on-call” duty became a standard. Allocations for training were reduced. Budgets were always big enough to get the newest toy some business department wanted, and the IT people were told to deal with it instead of being consulted on the viability of these systems.1
When I started in the industry I worked for small companies. And there was a definite element of “Workism” in those companies. We put in long hours and lived for the jobs. But we were all enjoying, at least at some level, what we were doing. There were things we were getting to experience through our jobs that we never would have been able to anywhere else.
But, several jobs later, I started separating my identity from the workplace. The rigidity of the structures put in place between HR and Accounting sucked most of the fun out of being an employee. Instead, it was more like being a drone, a worker bee. The changes that were force on IT departments by clueless managers changed the dynamics of the work environment, and not for the better.
At first, I engaged with different technologies outside of work that I knew weren’t going to become part of my work environment. But then when most of that started running dry for me, I turned to other things.
Re-Finding My Vocation(s) #
I wasn’t a computer science major in school. I had started down that road, but had found it to be less interesting to me. I had other interests, mostly leaning towards the arts. Music was a particular interest to me. But, then, in college I found myself wandering into the writing program, and ended up becoming an English major.
I never graduated from college. But that wasn’t an issue in the early days of x86 technology invading corporations. There were plenty of opportunities for anyone that could reasonably demonstrate that they had a needed skill set and were competent. I had basically found myself moving into the IT field because: (a) It offered stable employment. (b) My parents (my father in particular) didn’t like the idea of his son becoming an artist / musician / writer / etc. My father equated it with “being a bum."2
As employers tried to push their employees further in one direction, I started rediscovering the vocations I’d had before. I started finding issues that I was concerned about, and joined a podcast to talk about both technology and social aspects of technology.
Then I started found a whole new love and appreciation for music. The music industry had become this quagmire of manure, so I started getting into music that wasn’t from the major labels. All of this led to a series of projects that were about the person I was and still am: A blog where I reviewed indie music. A podcast where I played a lot of the music I had curated. And finally my own little indie music label.
But all of those were set aside when I left the tech industry. Not because I didn’t want to keep them going, but because I had personal responsibilities that I had to prioritize above them.
Hobbies Become Vocations #
When the personal responsibilities I had left the tech industry to handle were concluded, I found myself with a lot of time on my hands. I found myself in a new place in my life, a place where I could pursue whatever I wanted to.
The first thing that came to my mind was to start into a loosely tech related hobby. Kind of a low-tech hobby. But my interest in that hobby waned, but it didn’t disappear. Then I started turning myself towards several other hobbies, the majority of which took me away from tech.
I’ve been writing about these hobbies on Ennui Vagaries. But the biggest turn around happened when I realized that I wanted to get back to one of my big vocations: writing. Experimenting in writing with fountain pens led me to find the joy and purpose in my writing again. Eschewing the CMS platform that no longer fit for my writing process led me to find new platforms that are a much better fit.
And because of this newly re-found joy, I am back to writing posts daily. On three different blogs, each with a different focus. This is the life that I have wanted to have back, and I only found my way back to it by getting out of the tech space.
It’s a Cycle Repeating Again and Again #
The article asks questions about what happens when the spell of “Workism” is popped:
What would happen, then, if something threatened that faith? A paradigm shift that broke the spell of Workism? A sort of enlightenment that caused Knowledge Workers to start asking tough questions of their organizations and themselves.
I would posit that this isn’t new. It’s a cycle that happens to every generation. We’ve seen it many times, albeit most of the time it’s not as loud as the current circumstances.
For example, in my early career many developers were used to writing code to the bare metal. DOS didn’t offer a lot of facilities. Developers used libraries to access low level functions of the system. Those were mostly I/O related. They weren’t some class system for accessing a window manager. Then came the web and java, and the whole paradigm shifted again. And there were a lot of developers that just left. It wasn’t fun for them if the low-level bare-metal coding went away. There was a developer who was well known in the Open Source community who just shut everything down. He posted that he had left his job, and was leaving behind the projects that he had worked on for years. He was disabling his phone, and abandoning all communication in the online world.
My personal journey evolved around multiple factors, the biggest of them being the continual creeping enshittification of the work environment. Eventually I found that my skills, while highly desirable at the time, AFAIK, weren’t applicable in my current job market. And that’s when I realized it was time to let go.
The only difference I see now is this one is landing with a kerthunk, potentially hitting tens or hundreds of thousands of “knowledge workers” all at once. And my response is:
Welcome to the cycle.
Time to find your vocation and start rebuilding your life.
I could tell some absolutely absurd stories about the
bleepthat some managers pulled, but I have to be drunk enough to engage in those stories.↩︎ - I could, and likely will at some point, write more about my father’s perspective of employment. I have written a little about it before, but there is more to be said.
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