The Great Repurpose

Reclaiming Agency, Meaning and Value in the Age of AI

As we prepare for an AI-fueled economic and workforce disruption, there is an invisible crisis brewing that may prove even more devastating.

It is widely accepted that AI will displace jobs, reshape industries, and force major adjustments to how people earn a living. Governments, companies, and institutions are already framing this moment primarily as an economic crisis.

What is far less discussed is the deeper human disruption that lies deep below the surface: We are entering an invisible Crisis of Meaning.

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Discover where you are on the journey. Visit TheGreatRepurpose.com and find your Great Repurpose Type.

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Work, Identity, and the Hidden Contract

At the center of this unobvious challenge—particularly here in the United States—is a deeply embedded cultural agreement: Our Work is Our Value.

“Gallup polling from 1989 to 2014 shows that 55% of U.S. workers derive their sense of identity from their job, rather than viewing it as simply something they do for a living. Among college graduates—precisely the knowledge workers most exposed to AI disruption—that figure rises to 70%.” — Gallup, Workers’ Sense of Identity Tied to Job

We absorbed this idea early and often. The industrial revolution codified and amplified Benjamin Franklin’s idea that “time equals money.” The education system prepares us to be “employable.” Success is often measured by career trajectories and milestones.

At social gatherings, the first question we ask strangers isn’t “Who are you?” but rather, “What do you do?” Over generations, work has become the primary way people understand our worth, our contribution, and our place in society.

As much as I think about all of this “People Stuff,” I am not immune to this tendency. Even when I am asked the enlightened, “Tell me about you?” I find myself responding that I am the Co-Founder of “This,” and the President of “That!”

I know I am an artist. I know I am more my jobs and tasks and skills—Hell, I’ve spent the past two years co-writing a MUSICAL—and yet, I still fall into the trap of responding that “I AM MY WORK.” Work is how we contribute. Work is how we’re useful. Work is how society recognizes us.

As a result, for many people, this conflation of “work as worth” serves as a proxy, or an outright expression of their personal sense of value, and even purpose.

“A survey of millennials found that 70% agreed they identified themselves only through their jobs.” Dr. Janna Koretz, Boston psychologist specializing in high‑achievers made this connection, “Not liking your job is one thing—but what happens when you identify with it so much that hating your job is like hating yourself?” https://www.welcometothejungle.com/en/articles/what-if-your-career-has-become-your-whole-identity

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Tasks, Skills, and the Proof of Value

While many jobs are going to be lost and most others are are going to change, work itself isn’t disappearing. But work is made up of tasks, and those tasks are increasingly being automated by AI.

Tasks are where people have applied their skills and demonstrated their value historically. People spent years in school, apprenticeships, higher education, and on the job honing specific skills to perform the tasks of their jobs. Those skills determined who was hired, who advanced, who was respected, and who was paid.

Skills are what go on résumés. Skills are what the labor market rewards. And very often, those skills are not arbitrary, but rather, they are expressions of what people are good at, what they care about, and what they have invested large portions of their lives mastering.

The Shift We Are Entering

As AI makes tasks disappear, many people will experience the radical devaluing of their skills, and will lose their primary interface with purpose, contribution, and value, even if they are still employed, still capable, and still needed—not to mention those whose entire industries vaporize in the face of powerful artificial intelligence.

It is why this moment is far more than a disruption of jobs, but rather a gap in purpose… A hollowing out of ideantity—an invisible Crisis of Meaning.

How does The Great Repurpose help?

The Great Repurpose exists to name and articulate the human impact of the shift. It is a map for our forced awakening: a transition from a world where value is proven through tasks, to one where value is rooted in who a person is, how they think, and how they choose to express themselves… an involuntary shift from “What we do” to “Who we are.”

For those whose sense of purpose has been closely tied to their work, this transition will feel disorienting, destabilizing, and deeply personal. There will be ego death. Anger. Mourning. Sadness. This is a transformation none of us asked for and few of us can escape.

Given this inevitability, how do we avoid a generation of “lost” people?

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Discover where you are on the journey. Visit TheGreatRepurpose.com and find your Great Repurpose Type.

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Phases of The Great Repurpose

This transition doesn’t happen all at once or the same way for everyone. But it will unfold in recognizable phases as people move from task‑based validation toward a more durable sense of value, purpose, and agency. What follows isn’t a prescription, but a map—language for an experience many people are already living but lack the words to describe it.

• Unhook Your Identity — “I’m not my job.” | Separate who you are from the tasks you perform. For many people, this decoupling will be a painful and non-obvious awakening. It’s one that reveals how deeply your sense of self-worth has been intertwined with what you do.

• Reclaim Your Value — “But I AM this.” | Reconnect with your inherent value as a human being, and recognize that your perspective, judgment, and ideas are now primary sources of value in the world. You will be valued for who you ARE vs. what you DO.

• Find Your Purpose — “This is what matters to me.” | As you start to understand your value independent of your skills, your purpose will reveal itself to you. Purpose emerges from your worldview, values, the people or communities you care about, and the kind of impact you want to have. You have value. YOU.

• Discover AI’s Power — “Wait! I can do THAT now?!” | Recognize that the same technologies driving this massive shift are also tools we all get to use. AI does not just automate tasks—it expands what individuals can imagine, prototype, and bring into the world. In this phase, AI becomes a partner in exploration, helping you test ideas, see new possibilities, and move from intention to expression faster than ever before.

• Start Creating in Community — “Amplify your impact with AI.” | Reclaim your agency and bring your newly-discovered purpose to life. Imagine and carry practical, real-world concepts forward, using AI execute your ideas, and deliver at a level far beyond anything you ever imagined you could deliver… and don’t do it alone. We’re all going through this. Get in a community (like the AI Salon | theSalon.ai) and share your work, what you’re learning and what you’re discovering on the journey. It’s not you vs. AI. It’s you amplified by AI.

Agency in a Post‑Task Economy

The Great Repurpose is not about abandoning work. It is not about rejecting ambition. It is not about self-help or pop psychology.

It is about restoring orientation, dignity, and authorship at a time when the nature of work, and the way meaning shows up in our lives, is fundamentally changing.

At its core, The Great Repurpose is about regaining agency. It is intended help people understand that who they are, the ideas they carry, and the way those ideas are expressed in the world are not secondary to work… They are the work.

In Case Reading Isn’t Your Thing...

(FWIW: I created this video before I had articulated what The Great Repurpose even was. I expressed the emotion of the transformation before I even knew what The Great Repurpose was. I love living in a future where you can “just do stuff.”)