The Meaning Economy: Replacing What We Do With Who We Are
- Rich Washburn
- Aug 14
- 3 min read
For most of human history, our lives moved in time with the planet. Work wasn’t a set number of hours on a clock—it was a rhythm in sync with daylight, weather, and seasons. In the agrarian world, your calendar was written in crops and climate: plant in the spring, harvest in the fall, hunker down in winter. Communities were tight-knit, roles were flexible, and your place in society was shaped as much by kinship and trust as by your output.
Then came the Industrial Revolution, and with it, the great reprogramming of human life.
How the Clock Took Over
Factories needed people at machines, and machines didn’t care if it was snowing or midnight. The natural cadence of life was replaced with a mechanical one. Artificial light made it “day” whenever business demanded. The whistle replaced the rooster. And so, the 40-hour workweek—which, by historical standards, was already a hard-won reduction from brutal 12- to 16-hour days—became the organizing principle of modern life.
For the first time in history, your economic role became the primary definition of who you were. Social hierarchy hardened into the “job title caste system,” where a business card could tell someone almost everything they thought they needed to know about you. Whether people admitted it or not, a janitor, a lawyer, and a surgeon didn’t enter a room as equals—not in the way society perceived them.
We moved from intrinsic identity—a sense of self rooted in values, passions, and relationships—to extrinsic identity, tethered to roles, paychecks, and professional labels. And that shift rewired nearly every aspect of our culture: education geared toward job readiness, cities designed for commuting, entire social lives orbiting around work schedules.
The Next Disruption: AI and Post-Labor Society
Now we stand at the front edge of another upheaval—one with the potential to rival or even surpass the Industrial Revolution’s societal impact. Artificial intelligence and automation are steadily consuming not just repetitive labor, but creative, strategic, and analytical work. The trajectory is clear: many of the roles we use to define ourselves will either shrink dramatically or vanish altogether.
If the economic safety net evolves—through universal basic income, universal access to resources, or some yet-unimagined system—then for the first time in 200 years, survival will no longer require selling our labor.
The scaffolding of extrinsic identity will collapse.
And then the question becomes:Without the shorthand of “what do you do?”, who are you?
The Return of Intrinsic Identity
Intrinsic identity is the self that remains when all external labels are stripped away. It’s your values, your passions, your worldview, your curiosities—your self independent of the systems you work within. It’s what you’d still be if there were no résumés, no business cards, no performance reviews.
The re-emergence of intrinsic identity would be more than just a personal awakening—it would re-liquidate the solid fixtures of society. The pecking orders we unconsciously reinforce today would melt. People would need to find new ways to signal belonging, competence, and purpose. In time, new rhythms—social, creative, even spiritual—would solidify into the norms of the post-labor era.
But make no mistake: the transition won’t be smooth.
The Transition Stages
The Disorientation Phase – The first shock when millions lose the roles that once defined them. Some will celebrate; others will feel adrift.
The Productivity Whiplash – A split between those who dive into projects, exploration, and learning, and those who stall in the absence of structure.
The Identity Rebuild – Communities, networks, and social circles reform around shared interests and values rather than shared professions.
The New Rhythms – As intrinsic identity becomes the norm, cultural and economic life stabilize into patterns we can’t yet fully imagine.
The Meaning Economy
What emerges on the other side could be a Meaning Economy—a world where value isn’t derived from labor hours, but from creation, exploration, and contribution. People will build, write, compose, and explore not because they have to, but because meaning is the only true currency left.
We may end up with a society more like the pre-industrial world in one respect: life shaped again by natural rhythms, personal relationships, and shared human experiences. But unlike our ancestors, we’ll have access to global knowledge, near-infinite creative tools, and the freedom to pursue mastery in anything we choose.
Why It Matters
The last time society’s identity framework shifted this drastically, it gave us the modern world as we know it. This next shift could undo much of that structure, replacing it with something more fluid, personal, and perhaps—if we navigate it well—more humane.
The question isn’t whether intrinsic identity will make a comeback. The question is how gracefully we’ll make the transition from being what we do to being who we are.
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