Recently, several people have come to see me with the same professional distress:
“Leslie, I’m completely lost… I earn a good living, I have a position of responsibility, but I no longer know why I get up in the morning.”
The typical profile? Surprisingly consistent. Executives, managers, directors, senior experts with responsibility and comfortable salaries. People who have “made it” on paper. And yet, an inner void. An identity fog.
They all share the same symptom: deep exhaustion, not physical, but existential. They are completely lost.
The revealing test: one simple question
“Explain your job to me in two minutes, as if you were talking to your 15-year-old nephew. What do you actually do? What are you for? What value do you create?”
The result was staggering. And frightening.
Awkward silences, evasive looks, stammering, retreating into abstract corporate jargon (“I manage flows,” “I optimize synergies,” “I coordinate interfaces,” “I work cross-functionally”). An inability to define the tangible value they produce.
When you can no longer simply explain what you do, the link between you and your work is broken.
These are not isolated cases. We are living through an epidemic of professional disorientation. This crisis of meaning, which anthropologist David Graeber brilliantly identified under the provocative term “Bullshit Jobs,” is no longer a marginal theory. It is a lived reality for a significant share of the working population.
1.The erosion of meaning: when tasks no longer form an identity
This great blur affects all categories:
- department heads who “manage a bit of everything,”
- deputies who “keep the machine running,”
- coordinators, secretaries, assistants, cross-functional specialists,
- managers who orchestrate, support, monitor, and control.
Roles that exist within organizations… but are often impossible to explain clearly.
Why? Because many professionals, drowning in complex processes, endless meetings, and PowerPoint reporting, have lost sight of their real impact. These so-called polymorphic or cross-functional roles were built by stacking tasks, missions, and emergencies. Not by design, but by inheritance. People are told what to do, but rarely what their true role is.
When your day consists of answering emails to prepare a meeting whose purpose is to debrief the previous meeting, the question of “why” becomes painful. Recognition is lost — not financial, but intellectual and moral.
The result: people define themselves by tasks. But tasks do not define you.
You can execute actions without ever understanding your contribution.
You do things, but you become nothing.
Yet “meaning at work” rests on three pillars: understanding your contribution (I see the result of what I do), a sense of usefulness (what I do serves something or someone), and ethical coherence.
Today, these three pillars are often broken. The individual becomes an interchangeable cog. The inability to explain one’s own job is the ultimate symptom of this alienation. If you cannot explain it clearly to a child, your role is probably too diluted, too abstract — or worse, useless.
This brutal realization is what makes these professionals unhappy. They realize they are trading their life time for money, without any other satisfying return.
2.The AI tsunami: revealing and amplifying the crisis
It is on this psychologically fragile ground that the “tsunami” of generative artificial intelligence arrives.
With the flood of information about AI, predictions about disappearing jobs, skills to acquire, tools to master… many experience a silent anxiety. Alarmist articles, World Economic Forum reports, LinkedIn posts claiming “85% of jobs in 2030 don’t exist yet,” YouTube videos titled “These 47 jobs will disappear before 2028”…
The human brain, already in existential distress, switches into survival mode: total panic.
If loss of meaning was a chronic illness, AI is an acute crisis. Uncertainty about the future, lack of visibility and perspective become almost psychologically traumatic for many. It’s a form of paralysis: we know we must move, but fear freezes us.
One person told me: “How can I retrain if I don’t even know who I am today?”
And indeed:
- The first challenge is not training.
- The first challenge is self-understanding.
AI does not create the identity crisis. It merely reveals it. It acts as a mirror. It shows very clearly what a machine can do — and what still belongs deeply to humans.
The real question is not: “Will my job disappear?”
But rather: “What do I do that a machine will never be able to replace?”
Until you can answer that, you are navigating without a compass.
Generalist roles in the crosshairs
The dominant narrative is anxiety-inducing: “AI will replace X% of jobs.” And for the first time in the history of industrial revolutions, it is not blue-collar workers on the front line, but white-collar workers.
My observations align with forward-looking studies (notably those by Goldman Sachs and the IMF). Here is a non-exhaustive list of roles I see suffering the most today:
- traditional department heads,
- executive assistants,
- office managers / polyvalent assistants,
- generalist heads of administration and finance,
- junior controllers spending their lives copy-pasting Excel files,
- middle managers whose only real power is approving expenses and enforcing schedules.
Their common denominator? Their added value was mainly based on three things that AI now does better, faster, and without coffee breaks:
- collecting, centralizing, and redistributing information,
- coordinating schedules and tasks,
- checking that people do what they were told.
Large Language Models excel precisely at this: summarizing, writing, planning, organizing data. Today’s tools (Notion AI, custom GPT agents, Zapier + Make + Claude Projects, next-generation ERPs, etc.) do exactly that.
If your job mainly consists of “bridging” two departments that don’t talk to each other, or reformatting Excel data into Word documents, AI is already doing your job.
The end of the petty boss
Jobs based on surveillance, control, compilation, procedural writing, and information circulation will also disappear or be absorbed by intelligent systems. The old “command and control” model — roles whose primary function is to monitor employees, check their work, and pass orders downward (and reports upward) — is already dying. AI will finish it off.
Modern information systems now have enough data to perform this “control” role far better than humans. Dashboards update in real time. Machines detect performance anomalies faster than any line manager.
If your added value as a manager boils down to being a “white-collar foreman” or an information relay, your role is destined to disappear quickly. Its value has become highly questionable. Humans no longer belong in pure surveillance.
The result: these roles become empty shells. Employees feel it viscerally. They sense, vaguely but painfully, that they have become the weakest link in the chain.
The brutal question no one dares to ask
Faced with this bleak picture, the natural reaction is panic. Everyone talks about “upskilling.” But training for what? The market is flooded with thousands of AI tools and courses sprouting everywhere. Too much choice kills choice.
The fundamental mistake is to think we must learn to code or become technical AI experts. That is not the issue for most of us. The real challenge is learning how to collaborate with these tools to augment our human value.
However, there is one professional category for whom technological ignorance is no longer an option: leaders.
The urgency of technological competence at the top
Should leaders who do not understand technology and AI be urgently removed? The question is brutal, but the answer tends toward yes.
But not in the way you think. It’s not about removing them. It’s about urgently pulling them out of their deadly comfort zone and putting them back into motion.
For decades, it was socially acceptable for a CEO or manager to say with a smile: “Oh, technology isn’t my thing, I have a CIO for that.” That posture is now organizational suicide.
Today, technology is the business. AI is redefining business models, value chains, and customer relationships. A leader who does not understand the capabilities, limits, and strategic implications of AI is like a ship’s captain who doesn’t know how an engine works: they may set a direction, but they won’t know whether the ship can get there until it’s too late.
A manager who does not understand what AI will actually do in their department over the next 24 months will, in practice, be harmful to the organization. They will make decisions based on obsolete intuitions, slow projects out of fear, and block younger generations who grew up with these tools.
Technological literacy has become a core leadership skill — indispensable and decisive for the proper functioning of any organization. This is not about knowing how to program, but about having a deep digital culture to make informed decisions.
In an AI-driven world, the leader is no longer the one who knows or controls, but the one who gives meaning, listens, connects, and transforms.
Conclusion
The vertigo felt by the professionals I meet is healthy. It is the alarm signal of a system at the end of its rope.
AI is not here to replace us.
It is here to force us to become interesting again.
So, can you say who you are professionally — without using your job title?
See you in the next post for a three-step guide to professional awakening.
