AI Will Take the Jobs. It Can't Take Your Purpose.

I spent years behind glass in a Midtown office, waiting for a million-dollar dream that was never going to fulfill me. That is the thing AI can't touch. My purpose was never the job.

There was a window in Midtown I used to stare out of. Glass tower, free coffee, my name finally floating through rooms I'd spent years trying to get into. And a voice in the back of my head that kept saying: Kid, this is it. Just sit here a few more years and the million-dollar dream is yours.

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All I had to do was wait it out. Like my dad clocking in at the John Deere foundry, except my factory had glass walls and a savings account. I'd sit at that desk selling people rebranded versions of the same tired Cap'n Crunch schemes I'd been chasing since I was a kid, only now it was pills for cancer and arthritis instead of cereal-box sweepstakes. On paper I was thriving. Underneath it I kept asking, what is the point of all this?

So when people panic that AI is going to take all the jobs, here's what I keep thinking: some of those jobs were already taking us. We spent forty years speeding the machine up and calling it progress, and somewhere in there we stopped getting our purpose from the work itself and started getting it from the paycheck.

Will AI take all the jobs? Maybe.

We climbed a ladder to make somebody else rich and then sat at the top and told ourselves this is it. This is my purpose. I'll keep showing up as a marketing associate because someday I'll be a marketing manager. When maybe your purpose was always so much bigger than a title that never helped a single human being.

Maybe your purpose was to teach a kid to read. To help someone see the world differently than they were told to. Maybe it's to build a new world people can step into and love.

That's the part the panic gets wrong. Even if AI takes all the jobs, it can't take your purpose. It can't replace the wanting. Humans will always carve out something to live for, and let's pray we find better somethings than the one I was staring out that window chasing, because the one we've been logged into for fifty years isn't working. It never was.

The man making $7.50 an hour behind the deli counter at a gas station doesn't have one ounce less purpose than the CEO pulling a million a day. And it's silly to think those two couldn't both find some other way to be happy with themselves.

We built a whole world that measures a person's purpose by their paycheck, and then we wonder why the paycheck never fills anyone up. AI walking into that world doesn't change the math. It just turns the lights on in a room we'd been sitting in with our eyes closed.

AI taking your job isn't the fire. The job was already burning.

If a machine eats the marketing-manager ladder, that isn't the building burning down. That's the eviction notice from a building that was already on fire. I just couldn't see the flames from behind the glass.

That's why I can't get scared the way I'm supposed to. The thing everyone's terrified of losing is the thing I spent years trying to escape. Losing the job was never the tragedy. Mistaking it for my purpose was.

AI will radically reshape work. Maybe that's not a bad thing.

Here's the part I can't stop turning over. The forty-hour week isn't a law of nature. It's about a hundred years old. Somebody invented it, sold it to us as the shape a life is supposed to take, and we've been clocking into it ever since. My dad at the foundry. Me behind the glass. Every time the work has changed before, the loom, the assembly line, the factory that ate my dad's back, we mourned it like the meaning was ending. It never was. The meaning just went looking for somewhere new to live.

So maybe AI reshaping work doesn't gut us. Maybe it hands millions of people the thing my mom had to claw out of the dark. She went back to school at night while she raised us, exhausted, and earned her master's in her forties in the cracks between everything else. She made her own path because nobody handed her the time. What if the machine widens that crack into a door.

I'm not naive about it. It could go the ugly way, and plenty of people will get crushed in the gap if we let them. But it could also burst forth a century of the things we keep swearing we don't have time for. Creativity. Meaning. People building something because it's theirs and not because it pays. A hundred years of human beings finally getting to find out what they were for.

What AI can't touch

If I made a million dollars in a day, I'd retire. I'd go off to some beach and count grains of sand to fulfill my purpose. I'd have a child and raise it the best earthly way I knew how. Fresh vegetables, a hut on a beach or deep in some jungle, far from the scavengers of the city and that relentless pull of civilization telling me I need to be better.

But I didn't have to wait for the beach. I didn't have to wait for the million.

Because the last three years, my purpose became writing books. Not generating them. Writing them. AI helped me bring my thoughts to life, and I've been more creative in the past two years than at any other point in my career. Not at work. At home. Bustling ideas spilling onto the page with a partner who could discern them. Shape them. Help me bring them to life. AI didn't make me an author. I was always an author. It just helped me refine the craft.

And that's the thing AI can't touch and never could. My purpose was never the job. It was waiting on the other side of it the entire time.

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Luke Stoffel is an IBPA Book Award-winning author, GLAAD-honored artist, and creative director. He is the author of How to Win One Million Dollars and Shit Glitter, winner of the 2026 IBPA Book Award; the sci-fi novel Boy, Refracted, called "a truly singular book" by Publishers Weekly BookLife; and The Third Person. His Pop Art Tarot is published by Rockpool Publishing and distributed worldwide by Simon & Schuster. He writes about AI in publishing, AI disclosure, and the future of authorship. Part of The Warboy Essays.