A few days ago, I had dinner with Fabio Lalli. We talked about artificial intelligence, automation, and the ways these forces are reshaping the boundaries of our daily lives. That evening inspired Fabio to write an article I recommend you read: 2100, the Year We Finally Went Back to Being Human. Thanks to the Machines, in which he imagines a future where machines will free us from the burden of forced production, allowing us to rediscover our essence. A vision I share, and one that pushed me toward a very pragmatic reflection.
The year 2100 lies well outside my biological horizon. And I have no intention of delegating my freedom to a century I will not live to inhabit.
That is why I am writing now. Because liberation cannot be a promissory note signed today for our great-grandchildren to cash in. It’s the premise on which we have built our present that needs revisiting.
The idea that relentless work is the natural condition of human beings is false. Measurably, historically false. We are not moving toward something new. We are correcting an anomaly.
The Anomaly We Mistake for Nature
In 1972, anthropologist Marshall Sahlins published Stone Age Economics, a book that should have rewritten our understanding of the history of work. His argument was uncomfortable: hunter-gatherer societies, which we tend to imagine locked in perpetual struggle for survival, worked an average of three to four hours a day. The rest of their time was devoted to rest, socializing, play, and ritual. Sahlins called them the original affluent societies: not because they had much, but because they consistently had exactly what they wanted.
Medieval Europe was not so different. Jacques Le Goff documented how the liturgical calendar guaranteed between one hundred and one hundred and fifty feast days per year, days on which all non-essential work was suspended. The Church imposed rest as a moral obligation. Uninterrupted labor was considered excess, not virtue.
The ancient world was even more explicit and, in some ways, more honest. For the Greeks, manual labor had a precise name: banausia. It was considered degrading, physically deforming, and incompatible with the life of a free citizen. Not out of superficial snobbery, but from a precise anthropological conviction: whoever was forced to work with their hands to survive could not be fully free. They depended on others — on the market, on the master, on the weather. And whoever depends cannot think, deliberate, or participate authentically in civic life.
Free time, by contrast, had a noble name: skholé. From which, not coincidentally, we get the word “school.” Skholé was not idleness in the modern sense, nor the absence of engagement. It was the time devoted to what matters: civic life, philosophy, the care of relationships, and participation in the polis. Aristotle was explicit: the full realization of the human being — what he called eudaimonia, commonly translated as happiness but more precisely as flourishing — required time freed from necessity. Without skholé, no good life was possible.
Rome elaborated the same concept with different nuances. The Latin otium, hastily translated as idleness, was in reality the time for reading, reflection, intellectual correspondence, and self-care. Cicero considered it a necessary condition for wisdom. Seneca devoted some of his most powerful writings to it, warning that the man who cannot be alone with himself is a slave even when no one compels him. Negotium, non-otium, literally the negation of free time, was what one did out of necessity, not by choice. It was not the center of life: it was the price paid in order to live it.
We must be honest about one thing: these societies were built on slavery. The skholé of the few was made possible by the forced labor of many, men and women stripped not only of free time, but of freedom itself, of dignity, of recognized humanity. This is a contradiction that cannot be minimized or ignored.
Aristotle, who theorized the full realization of the human being, justified slavery as natural. It is one of the most glaring moral failures of ancient thought.
And yet, and this is the point worth preserving, the philosophical principle these cultures had glimpsed remains valid regardless of its distorted application: there is a qualitative difference between time devoted to survival and time devoted to living. Between doing out of necessity and being by choice. That distinction, which the Greek and Roman world had at least theorized, even if it then built a monstrous system to realize it, is precisely what the Industrial Revolution erased. Not only for slaves, but for everyone.
With the Protestant Reformation first analyzed by Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and the Industrial Revolution next, work shifted from practical necessity to moral duty. Historian E.P. Thompson described how factories literally rewrote the human relationship with time: from cyclical time, tied to seasons and the rhythms of the body, to linear time punctuated by the clock and the factory bell. We stopped living time and started consuming it.
One hundred and fifty years of Calvinist theology, industrialization, and factory discipline are today mistaken for human nature. Forgetting everything this species experienced in the two hundred thousand years that came before.
The Productivity Paradox and the Risk of Emptiness
The Industrial Revolution did not stop at working time. It colonized everything else.
Frederick Winslow Taylor, an American engineer of the late nineteenth century, systematized what he called scientific management: every worker’s movement was to be measured, optimized, and standardized. The human body became a mechanism to be calibrated. Thought, the pause, the intuition, the moment of creative distraction, was a waste to be eliminated. Taylorism was not merely a production method: it was a philosophy of the human being. It said that the value of a person is measured in output per unit of time. And that philosophy left the factories and entered schools, hospitals, offices, and families.
Henry Ford brought the system to its logical conclusion. The assembly line did not ask workers to think: it asked them to repeat. One gesture, a thousand times a day, every day. Time ceased to have rhythm; it had only cadence. And Ford understood something his contemporaries underestimated: for the system to work, workers also had to consume what they produced. The five-day working week was born not out of generosity, but out of calculation. The free Saturday existed to make room for consumption. Rest became functional to production. Even free time had a master.
What happened next is history we still live in our bones.
The Fordist-Taylorist model left the factories and redesigned the entire social organization. Sleep rhythms synchronized with work shifts, not with the sun. Meals became timed breaks. Cities structured themselves around commuting times. Even domestic architecture adapted: the modern kitchen, rational and efficient, is a direct descendant of Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1920s kitchen, designed to minimize movement and maximize the speed of meal preparation. Nothing escaped the logic of optimization.
The result was an anthropological transformation without precedent. For the first time in the history of the species, human time was divided into two rigid and hierarchical categories: productive time, which had value, and everything else, which was functional recovery for production. Real life, the life made of relationship, contemplation, play, and care, was confined to the margins. Not because anyone deliberately decided this. Simply because the system had no way to account for it, and what cannot be accounted for ceases to exist socially.
Technology has never reversed this trajectory. Bertrand Russell understood it as early as 1932: if productivity doubles, working hours do not halve. We produce twice as many things, or we invent new work to fill the time. Juliet Schor documented this paradox in The Overworked American: despite decades of productivity growth, Americans were working more hours on average than their grandparents. David Graeber, in Bullshit Jobs, traced where this has led: a significant share of contemporary work produces no real value. It exists because our culture cannot imagine people who simply do not work.
AI can do the work in our place, but if we do not change the underlying premise, if our worth as people remains tied to how much we produce, technological liberation risks becoming a mass identity crisis. If for nearly two centuries work has been the grand narrative holding us together, what happens when that center dissolves?
The risk is not idleness. It is atomization: finding ourselves free but without a shared language for being together.
We need a new cathedral-building project, a collective purpose that measures its value in relationships and cohesion, not in margins and returns.
When Disengagement Is More Honest Than Fake Enthusiasm
Young people are already moving in this direction, often without knowing it. The quiet quitting phenomenon, documented by Gallup in research showing that over 60% of workers under 35 describe themselves as actively disengaged, is not laziness. It is an immune response to a system that no longer keeps its promises. It is the refusal to sacrifice oneself for a badge in exchange for a borrowed identity. They are looking for a sense of purpose that is not necessarily billable. They are right.
But quiet quitting is only the visible surface of something deeper and harder to measure.
Beneath it lies a crisis of meaning that demographic data describes better than any workplace wellbeing survey. In almost every high-income country, birth rates are in freefall. The economic explanations, cost of living, precarious contracts, and access to housing are real but partial. Something more radical is at work: a generation that has internalized, often unconsciously, that bringing children into the world means condemning them to a system that no longer knows what to offer in exchange for the sacrifice it demands. It is a lucid calculation, even if rarely articulated.
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt, in The Anxious Generation, documented how rates of anxiety, depression, and a sense of uselessness among young adults have risen steadily since the early 2000s — long before the pandemic, which simply accelerated trends already underway. Haidt attributes part of the problem to social media, and he is right. Social media are often a multiplier, not the cause: they are the environment in which an older void manifests itself. When work stops providing identity and free time is colonized by the infinite scroll, there is not much left to hold onto.
There is also a phenomenon that in Japan already has a name, hikikomori, and that is emerging with similar characteristics across Europe and North America: voluntary withdrawal from social and working life, not out of hedonistic choice but out of existential exhaustion. Young adults who simply stop participating. They do not protest, they do not organize, they ask for nothing. They withdraw. It is the most silent and most radical form of refusal of the system, and also the most troubling, because it produces not dialogue, but absence.
What these phenomena share: quiet quitting, demographic decline, chronic anxiety, social withdrawal, is not laziness or generational narcissism, as one often hears. It is the breaking of an implicit pact. For nearly two centuries, the system has demanded sacrifice in exchange for meaning: work, produce, be useful, and in return you will have identity, recognition, belonging. That pact has broken. And no one has yet proposed anything credible to replace it.
This is where the question ceases to be sociological and becomes urgently practical: if work can no longer be the moral center of adult life, what replaces it?
It is the most important question a society can ask, and the fact that almost no one is asking it seriously is already, in itself, an answer.
Where You Work Is Not Neutral
If we accept that work-as-identity is a historical anomaly, and that its crisis is producing isolation, emptiness, and withdrawal, the practical question becomes unavoidable: what kinds of environments can host something different? Where can we experience, concretely, a relationship with time and with others that is not entirely governed by the logic of returns?
The answer is neither romantic nor nostalgic. It is not about returning to the medieval piazza or the Greek polis. It is about understanding which spatial and social characteristics favor the kind of collective intelligence that the current system tends to suppress: the non-linear, lateral, relational kind. This kind produces value without that value being immediately measurable.
Organizational research in recent years offers precise indications. Bouncken and colleagues at the University of Bayreuth, in a series of studies published between 2020 and 2021 in the Journal of Business Research, documented how coworking spaces generate forms of innovation that are difficult to replicate in traditional offices: not because they offer better technology or more ergonomic workstations, but because they create what researchers call sociomateriality, an environment in which physical and social relationships interweave in ways that favor cross-pollination between disciplines, sectors, and diverse perspectives.
Collision, not concentration, is the generative mechanism.
Orel and colleagues (2022), in a study published in the Review of Managerial Science, showed that coworking spaces work best when conceived as community hubs rather than as simple desk providers: the value for members is not the workstation but the network of relationships that the workstation makes possible. Del Sarto et al. (2023), empirically analyzing the impact of coworking spaces on startups, confirmed that the greatest benefits are not infrastructural but relational: access to expertise, informal feedback, and a sense of belonging to a broader ecosystem.
There is, however, a necessary clarification that recent literature does not shy away from. Johns and colleagues, in a critical review published in the European Management Review in 2024, remind us that coworking is not neutral by definition: it can reproduce exclusions, create elite communities, or become simply a way to outsource office costs. A piazza can be an authentic meeting space or a shopping mall with tables. The difference lies in the intention with which it is designed and managed.
For freelancers and independent professionals, the dimension is different but equally concrete. Remote work solved the problem of flexibility and created a new one, more subtle: the erosion of the boundary between work time and life time, and the disappearance of that intermediate space — the commute, coffee with a colleague, the casual conversation — unproductive space, but human space. Berdicchia and colleagues (2023), analyzing wellbeing in collaborative workplaces, found that the primary predictor of satisfaction is neither the quality of the equipment nor the speed of the connection, but the perceived sense of community — the feeling of belonging to something larger than one’s own screen.
For companies, the question is even more strategic. In an economy where automation absorbs repetitive and predictable tasks, competitive advantage shifts entirely to the capacity to generate ideas that machines cannot produce: unexpected connections, lateral intuitions, solutions born from creative conflict between different points of view. That capacity does not flourish in an open space where everyone wears headphones and stares at separate screens. It flourishes in environments where unbillable time, the time of coffee, of disagreement, of a question asked aloud without knowing whether it makes sense, is treated as investment, not waste.
Coworking is therefore not just a logistical solution. It is a cultural response to a question the factory never knew how to ask: how do we create value together when value is not only measurable in output?
The Question That Remains
There is a thread running through everything we have seen. Sahlins’s hunter-gatherers, the citizens of the Greek polis, the medieval peasants with their one hundred and fifty feast days, the workers of the first factories who resisted the factory bell not out of laziness but out of dignity: all of them, in different ways, had a relationship with time that was not entirely subordinated to production. All of them knew, or at least their cultural system knew, that existing does not coincide with producing.
Then we lost that thread. Not gradually, not through conscious collective choice, but through the effect of a specific historical conjuncture: the Calvinist theology that transformed work into vocation, the industrialization that transformed it into physical obligation, the Taylorism that transformed it into a science of the body, the Fordism that transformed it into the center of social identity. One hundred and fifty years in which that loss became so natural as to seem inevitable.
Artificial intelligence has reopened the question not because it is wise, but because it is brutally efficient. When a machine does in seconds what a human being used to do in hours, the question that arises is not technical: it is existential. If you are not what you produce, who are you? If your time is not measurable in output, does it still have value?
Fabio Lalli, in the article that inspired this piece, answers by looking toward 2100. It is a generous and necessary answer; it reminds us that the direction exists, that there is a horizon to move toward.
I am interested in what happens now, in the next ten years, in the lives of people who are already today grappling with this shift without yet having a language to describe it.
What convinces me is that we do not need to wait for machines to begin correcting the anomaly.
We need three things that are much simpler and much harder at the same time.
The first is a different language for value. As long as we continue to measure a person’s contribution in billable hours, quarterly productivity, and annualized returns, we are using the factory’s tools to evaluate human beings. Those tools were already inadequate in 1900. In 2026, with automation absorbing more and more executable work, they are simply wrong.
The second is a different architecture of time. Not in the utopian sense of eliminating schedules or abolishing deadlines, but in the very practical sense of restoring dignity to unbillable time, the time of reflection, of conversation without agenda, of long-range thinking. Not as a concession to employee wellbeing, but as a necessary condition for any form of collective intelligence worth something.
The third is the courage not to answer too quickly. Some questions need to be inhabited, not solved. The crisis of meaning we are going through is real and deep. Quick fixes, corporate mindfulness, welfare as a benefit, a desk in an Instagrammable coworking space, may be part of an answer, but they are not the answer.
The answer requires organizations, institutions, and individuals to sit genuinely with this question:
What are we building together, and for whom?
Thank you, Fabio, for that dinner and for your vision. Your 2100 is a destination I hope to see reflected in the eyes of those who come after us. But the hardest challenge is not waiting for machines to set us free, it is stopping believing, right now, that we ever needed their permission.
If relentless work is a one-hundred-and-fifty-year anomaly, the real question is not what we will do when machines work in our place.
The real question is: why did it take a machine to remind us that we had the right to exist without having to justify it?