Something wonderful is happening, and almost everyone is describing it as a catastrophe.
Every week now, there's a new headline. Thousands laid off. AI replacing teams. Entire departments dissolved overnight. The language is all crisis and alarm and grim predictions about the future of work. And if you're reading those headlines and feeling a knot in your stomach, I understand. It's frightening to watch the ground shift under millions of people.
But I want to show you something hiding inside that fear. Because once you see it, the whole picture changes. And what emerges is one of the most hopeful things to happen in the modern economy in a very long time.
Stay with me.
The Inches Ran Out
Alan Watts told this wonderful story about the Great Depression. One day the economy was humming along: people building houses, buying things, living their lives. The next day, bread lines. Poverty. Collapse. And Watts asked: what actually changed? The lumber was still there. The nails were still there. The workers still had hands. The skills hadn't vanished overnight. The physical wealth of the country was completely intact.
What disappeared was the money. And Watts said it was exactly as if a foreman had shown up at a construction site and told his crew: "Sorry, boys, we can't build today. No inches." And they'd said: "What do you mean, no inches? We've got wood, we've got metal, we've got tape measures!" And the foreman shook his head: "You don't understand business. We've been using too many inches and there are no more to go around."
It sounds like a joke. But Watts was making a devastating point. We confuse the measurement with the thing being measured. Money measures wealth. Money is not wealth. Wealth is lumber, and skill, and energy, and food, and shelter, and the capacity of human beings to do useful things for each other. The symbol got confused with the reality, and the confusion has been running the show ever since.
I keep thinking about that story, because something very similar is happening right now with jobs. We're watching the symbol collapse, and we think the reality is collapsing with it. But what if the reality was never in the symbol to begin with?
What a Job Isn't
Here's a question that sounds simple and turns out to be enormous.
What is a house?
A house is bricks, timber, insulation, glass, wiring, pipe, and labour. In the United States, the actual construction cost of a median home is somewhere around $150,000 to $200,000, depending on where you build it and how you build it. Materials and labour. The physical stuff that becomes a structure you can live in.
The median sale price of a home in 2026? Over $400,000. In many markets, much more.
So where does the rest of the money go? It goes into the space between the physical reality and the price tag. Planning. Permits. Legal fees. Developer margins. Financing costs. Insurance. Brokerage. Title search. Inspection. Appraisal. Compliance. Each step adds cost. Each cost gets passed along. And at the end of the chain sits a family signing up for thirty years of debt to pay for a structure that took six months to build.
That gap between what something costs to produce and what someone pays for it is a map. And if you follow the map, you'll find that a remarkable amount of the distance is filled with people. People whose work is to manage, administer, coordinate, oversee, report on, and approve the work that other people are doing.
Some of those people are essential. The architect matters. The electrician matters. The building inspector who makes sure the foundation won't crack matters very much.
But an extraordinary number of roles in the modern economy exist for a different reason. They exist because the organisation grew complex enough to need them, and they exist to manage the complexity that their own existence creates. It's a strange loop. The bureaucracy generates the need for more bureaucracy. The process requires people to manage the process.
These are what people have started calling fake jobs. And the remarkable thing about that phrase is how many people, when they hear it, quietly think: that might be me.
The Pigeon Principle
There's a Japanese farmer named Masanobu Fukuoka who spent fifty years proving something that ought to have been obvious. Nature, left to itself, works beautifully.
His rice paddies produced yields equal to the most heavily managed farms in Shikoku, and he achieved it by doing less. No plowing. No herbicide. No chemical fertiliser. His method was to observe what the land wanted to do on its own, remove whatever was preventing that, and then step back. He called it do-nothing farming. The name was a bit misleading, because he worked very hard. The "doing nothing" referred to the interference. Stop disrupting the system, and the system finds its own elegant balance.
Here's an analogy that captures the same principle.
Imagine you start feeding pigeons in a town square. Kind impulse. A handful of breadcrumbs on a sunny afternoon. The pigeons come. More pigeons come. They breed. The population grows beyond anything the square could naturally support, because the food supply is now artificial. Soon there are so many pigeons that they're unhealthy, they're fighting, the square is a mess. And if you suggest maybe stopping the feeding, people are horrified: you can't stop now! Look how many there are! They'll starve!
But the pigeons were fine before. And the ones that exist beyond the square's natural carrying capacity only exist because of the feeding. The generosity created the dependency. The solution became the problem.
Hold that thought.
The Expensive World
Something very similar has happened at the scale of civilisations.
We built an expensive world. The expensive world requires high incomes to survive in. The high incomes require complex organisations to generate them. The complex organisations require thousands of roles to manage their own complexity. Many of those roles produce nothing tangible. But they cost something. And that cost gets folded into the price of everything the organisation sells.
Which makes the world more expensive. Which requires even higher incomes. Which requires even more complex organisations.
The feeding created the pigeons. And the pigeons require more feeding.
A subscription to a streaming service costs what it costs partly because the company behind it employs layers of middle managers, strategic planners, project coordinators, and operational overhead whose salaries are baked into the price. A dental checkup costs what it costs partly because the practice management software was built by a company with six layers of product management. The coffee you bought this morning cost what it cost partly because every company in the supply chain is carrying its own weight of roles that exist to manage other roles.
Each individual cost is small. Multiplied across every transaction in the economy, they're enormous. And they all flow downstream, eventually, to you. To the price of everything you touch.
This is the part that changes the picture completely: those fake jobs, the ones being dissolved by AI, aren't just an employment story. They're a cost of living story. Every unnecessary role is overhead that gets priced into the products and services that real people pay for with real hours of their real lives.
When those roles disappear, the cost of the things they were inflating starts to fall.
The Tribe Always Had Room
For most of human history, there was always something you could do.
This is worth sitting with for a moment, because we've drifted so far from it that it sounds almost naive. But for the vast majority of human existence, the cost of being alive was so low that anyone could contribute at whatever level they were capable of. The best hunter hunted elk. A decent hunter hunted smaller game. Someone who couldn't hunt at all could gather. Someone who couldn't gather could tend the fire. Someone who couldn't tend the fire could watch the children while others worked.
There was always a next rung down. Contribution existed on a spectrum, and the spectrum went all the way to the simplest possible thing: go look for berries. It wasn't glamorous. Nobody built a career around it. But it was useful, and it was available, and it meant that virtually every person in the community could participate in keeping the whole thing going.
Now look at what we've built.
To contribute in the modern economy, you typically need a degree, or a certification, or years of documented experience, or all three. You need a resume. You need to clear an interview process. You need to generate enough economic value to justify a salary high enough to cover an apartment, transportation, food, taxes, insurance, and all the other costs of existing in a world that charges premium prices for everything.
The bar for participation is so high that millions of people simply can't clear it. They aren't useless, they're priced out. Their natural level of contribution, the honest simple work they could do with their hands and their time, has been rendered economically invisible because the cost of keeping a human being alive in the modern world is so far above what that simple work is worth.
The expensive world doesn't just fail to find room for people at the bottom. It actively generates their uselessness. It creates a barrier so high that only high-output people can clear it, and then it looks at everyone standing on the other side and calls them a burden.
The pigeons again. We overfed the square. And now we're blaming the pigeons.
What $20 a Month Means
And here, finally, is the hopeful part that almost no one is talking about.
An AI subscription costs about $20 a month.
For that price, one person can now do work that five years ago required a department. Write marketing copy. Build a website. Manage a supply chain. Draft legal agreements. Analyse financial data. Design a product. Handle customer communication in four languages. Plan an entire business strategy.
One person. Twenty dollars. A laptop. And whatever they're willing to learn.
Think about what this means for the plumber who's always wanted to run her own business. She's brilliant with pipes and fixtures but never had the budget for a marketing team, a web designer, or an accountant. Now she has all three for the cost of a lunch. The carpenter who invented a beautiful piece of furniture but couldn't afford the infrastructure to sell it. The farmer who wants to sell direct to families but doesn't know how to build a storefront. The retired teacher who has a brilliant idea for an educational product.
Every one of them just got access to an entire corporate support structure for twenty dollars a month.
The trades, in particular, are fascinating here. Right now, there's a shortage of nearly a million skilled tradespeople: plumbers, electricians, bricklayers, carpenters. Real work, with real materials, producing real results for real people. Work that no AI can do, because it requires hands and eyes and physical presence. The demand is enormous and growing. And AI doesn't threaten these roles; it makes it radically easier for the people in them to run their own operations without corporate overhead.
This is the bit that gets lost in the doom and gloom. AI isn't removing the ability to be useful. It's removing the gatekeepers between a useful person and the ability to operate independently. The entire apparatus of corporate infrastructure that once stood between someone with skill and their ability to deploy that skill in the world: that's what's dissolving. The tax on initiative. The overhead between you and your own capability.
Fukuoka's Lesson
Fukuoka spent his life showing that the elaborate interventions of modern farming, the chemicals, the tilling, the machinery, mostly existed to solve problems that those same interventions had created. Strip them away, work with what the soil naturally wants to do, and the rice grows beautifully on its own.
There's something here that applies to everything we've been talking about.
Humans know how to be useful. It's genuinely in our nature. Give a person a clear enough view of what needs doing and a low enough cost of living, and most of them will find something to contribute. They always have. For hundreds of thousands of years before the first corporation existed, people built shelters, grew food, made clothes, traded skills, tended animals, raised children, and kept their communities running. They did this with no HR department, no onboarding process, no performance reviews, and no employee handbook.
The vast apparatus of modern employment, like modern farming, often exists to manage problems of its own creation. The complexity generates the need for more complexity. The overhead generates the cost that requires more overhead. And at the very bottom, locked out by the accumulated weight of all that unnecessary structure, are millions of people who could do honest useful work if the barrier weren't so absurdly high.
AI is lowering the barrier. When the cost of production falls, the cost of goods falls. When the cost of goods falls, the cost of living falls. When the cost of living falls, the amount someone needs to earn to survive falls with it. And when that number falls far enough, the spectrum of contribution opens back up. There's room again for the person who gathers instead of hunting. For the person who tends the fire instead of building the house. For the person whose contribution is simple and honest and real, even if it doesn't generate enough revenue to justify a salary in today's inflated economy.
Go look for berries. That was always an option. We just built a world where the berries cost eight dollars a punnet and the field they grow in was paved over for a parking garage managed by a firm with nine layers of oversight.
The Wonderful Part
Watts wrote that we can't proceed with a truly productive technology if we keep confusing the symbol with the reality. Money with wealth. Jobs with contribution. Employment with usefulness.
What if the collapse of fake jobs is the beginning of that confusion finally clearing?
The physical wealth hasn't gone anywhere. The lumber is still there. The nails are still there. The hands still work. The minds still think. The plumber still fixes pipes and the farmer still grows food and the carpenter still builds shelves and the teacher still knows things worth teaching. All of that is real. All of it was always real. The only thing that's changing is the vast, expensive, unnecessary apparatus that stood between the real and the possible.
When Fukuoka stopped interfering with his rice fields, the yields didn't drop. They matched the best farms in the region. The rice knew how to be rice. The soil knew how to be soil. All that complexity, all those interventions, had been solving a problem that only existed because of the interventions themselves.
Something like that is happening now. The rice is fine. It was always going to be fine. We just need to stop paving over the berry fields.
And once we do, once the cost of living falls and the barriers dissolve and the spectrum of contribution opens back up, I think we're going to discover something truly wonderful: that there were never as many useless people as the expensive world made it seem. There were only people standing outside a locked gate, waiting for someone to notice that the gate was never needed in the first place.
— The Straw & The Berry