“What will you do with your one wild and precious life?” Asks Mary Oliver in her poem The Summer Day. 

On its own, that question pierces a lot of us—certainly a lot of Americans—as interrogation. It recalls something we’ve been wrestling with since the first time we’re asked “what do you want to be when you grow up?” as kids. The question continues to ripple under the surface throughout our university years, bubbling up as we join the workforce and seek jobs. After we get those jobs, the question might hiss and spit every time we clock in and wonder “is this really how I’m whiling away my life?”

We’re wired at an early age to conflate “job” with “identity” in order to derive everyday meaning. So, yeah—no wonder AI sweeping in to take our jobs feels like such a threat to both our paychecks and our creaturely existence. 

But there’s another way to metabolize “what the heck are you doing with your life?”—one at once more momentary and more eternal. I first heard it when I met a Jyotish practitioner named Hakim.

Jyotish is Vedic astrology, practiced widely across India and the global Hindu diaspora. Its organizing philosophy is that the soul is an eternal kernel of awareness, carried through multiple lifetimes in different physical bodies and circumstances to learn spiritual lessons and work through past karma. Each reincarnation is about something new (or something old if your previous incarnation didn’t quite integrate it on the last round). 

Jyotish tells me that my major work in this incarnation is to use my voice to inspire and strengthen others’ voices. To learn how to live with suffering. To cast off the lesson of previous karmic iterations of my own soul that mastered “how to be everyone’s darling” and do, quite frankly, whatever the hell I want. As a recovering good girl, I struggle most with that last one. 

Zooming back out from me to all of us: the Jyotish framework posits that our grand purpose in any given incarnation is to learn and grow. With AI obviating various industries, it gives me comfort to remind my American-educated brain that my soul is here for other business. No matter what I’m doing to earn money, I can be actively and meaningfully attending to that business, too. 

And if all this talk of souls' purpose and Vedic astrology is a little too woo for you, that’s all right. This week’s episode of Simplify might also put your mind at rest.

Our guest, Christine Armstrong, is a researcher and author who has spent years digging around inside organizations to find out what’s actually happening at work, rather than what the press releases say. Her recent book The Mother of All Jobs is a good place to start with her thinking, but in this conversation we delved into her current research: what AI is really doing inside companies right now, how loneliness has become the defining condition of modern working life, and what we might be losing (or slowly starving) in the way we work together.

What Christine is watching happen in boardrooms and call centers and Slack channels across the UK is the slow dissolution of connection, work-based identity, and also, sense. We talked about human attention becoming the luxury commodity of the future. And she told me about visiting a local authority where AI had been brought in to handle casework letters, only to generate such a volume of correspondence that the humans on the other end were drowning in it—not liberated by the technology, but buried under its productivity. More output. Less sense.

We also discussed gossip and what it does for us, a little sidequest I loved so I kept in the edit—you know, just a tiny Jyotish practice in doing whatever the hell I want. :)

More soon,
Caitlin

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