Adventures of a Bystander in the Age of AI — Crossing the Chasm Within
Everyone is talking about AI taking away jobs. Just a few days back, a Coaching colleague, whose practice focus in Career shifts wrote a wonderful passage that the bigger issue may not be unemployment—it is meaninglessness. “Work has never been just about money. It has been about identity. It provides structure. It is the story our parents proudly share when someone asks about us. Take that away, and who are we? The fear of meaninglessness is real. For many, work has been the anchor of identity, the rhythm of daily life, and the narrative thread of belonging. AI disruption threatens to unsettle that anchor. It is not just about automation or efficiency; it is about the erosion of the stories we tell ourselves and others about who we are.”
And yet, this is not inevitable. History shows a recurring pattern: when technology reshapes work—whether in the industrial revolution or the digital revolution—humans eventually re-anchor meaning in new roles, crafts, and communities. The challenge is not the disappearance of meaning, but the transition, the liminal space where old identities dissolve before new ones take shape. I know this from experience. For over fifteen years, I worked as a Change and Transformation consultant. Then one day, I stopped. Not because the work was meaningless, but because I no longer needed that identity to define me. I discovered that life continues, and meaning can be found in other places—relationships, writing, contemplative practice, service. The pay check was never the whole story.
Peter Drucker was introduced to me by none other than Subroto Bagchi, who wrote quote often about him. Subroto considered Drucker as the father of modern management. By the way, while many other management gurus are known by the great institutions they are affiliated with, Drucker chose a low key University and eventually that institution got its identity from Drucker’s contribution to the Management science.
Drucker began his career in an apprenticeship at a Hamburg trading company. By his own account, he “learned nothing” about the business itself—the managers barely paid attention to the trainees. Yet he later said it was not a wasted year. He read voraciously, discovered Kierkegaard, and began shaping the philosophical foundations that would define his life’s work. Apprenticeship, he showed, is not only about acquiring skills, but about forming identity through exposure, discipline, and reflection. In times of disruption, perhaps we are all apprentices again—learning to re-anchor meaning in unexpected places.
Drucker’s memoir, a classic must read, Adventures of a Bystander, makes this even clearer. He portrays himself not as a man defined by his jobs, but as an observer, a learner, a bystander to history. His identity was never confined to the roles he held—consultant, professor, writer—but was rooted in curiosity, reflection, and the people and ideas he encountered. His life shows that one can live fully, contribute deeply, and yet not be imprisoned by professional labels.
He also recounted a disturbing episode from his time in a London investment bank in the 1930s. What struck him was not the technical work of finance, but the culture of the firm—how traditions, rituals, and unspoken rules shaped identity and power. Among these, Drucker noted a shocking practice: the secretary of the managing partner was considered part of the “succession package.” Whoever was to become the next managing partner was expected to assume not only the professional responsibilities of the role but also inherit the secretary in a personal capacity. Drucker was appalled by this, and he shared it as an example of how institutions can normalize practices that, when seen from the outside, are clearly unethical and dehumanizing. The point of the story is not the scandal itself, but the lesson Drucker drew: organizations often bind identity to roles in ways that are arbitrary, unhealthy, or even absurd. What was considered “normal” in that investment bank was, in fact, a distortion of both work and human dignity. Drucker’s lifelong insistence that management is a moral practice—not just a technical one—was shaped by witnessing such episodes early in his career.
Hannah Arendt, some 70 years ago, predicted the peril of modern life—long before the so‑called knowledge economy came into existence—that chasing productivity would extinguish meaning. In her seminal groundbreaking work, The Human Condition, she distinguished between labour, the endless cycle of necessity tied to survival; work, the creation of durable things that give the world stability; and action, the highest form of freedom, where we reveal ourselves to others and shape history. Her concern was that modernity collapses these distinctions, reducing all activity to the logic of labour and output. In such a world, thought is measured by its utility, people are valued by their efficiency, and even leisure is instrumentalized as recovery for further work. This marks the triumph of the animal laborans—the human as labouring animal, hollowing out meaning and eroding the very spaces where freedom, creativity, and genuine human action can arise.
One of the most influential books on technological change, Crossing the Chasm, was written not by an engineer but by an English Literature professor, Geoffrey Moore. That paradox is telling: the deepest insights about change often come from outside the expected domain. They remind us that identity is larger than occupation, and that wisdom often comes from the margins. So the deeper question is not “What will AI take away?” but “Who am I when the titles and roles fall away?” One of the most powerful coaching questions I have ever faced was exactly this: define yourself beyond titles, beyond roles. Interestingly, that question did not come from a certified coach, but it has stayed with me as one of the most transformative. It stripped away the masks and left me face-to-face with something more essential.
I am also reminded of a story shared by Wipro veteran Dr. Sridhar Mitta. In the early days, Wipro manufactured PCs and even built a homegrown productivity suite. When these systems were installed in offices, the Munims of Kolkata—masters of the traditional Marwari accounting system, Parta—insisted on cross-checking the computer’s output with their own methods. They did not trust the machine. Change takes time. But eventually, they adapted. And so did the organizations around them. This story is a parable: humans resist, test, and cross-check—but eventually, we learn to swim in new waters.
Fish know how to swim. Squirrels know how to climb trees. And birds know how to fly. They did not need finishing schools or certified coaches. The only inherent talent humans are born with is the ability to adapt—and to work with strangers. Unlike other animals, we are wired for collaboration and reinvention. That is our evolutionary gift. AI may unsettle our roles, but it cannot erase this gift. If anything, it calls us to exercise it more consciously.
But there is another way to meet disruption—not by clinging to new roles, but by letting go the shackles of identity itself. After moving out of the 9–5 prison of corporate walls, paychecks, and social media emojis, I immersed myself in the ordinary life of a Zen student, guided by an ordinary Zen teacher, in an ordinary Zendo. And in that ordinariness, something extraordinary revealed itself. I began to notice that I was no longer the protagonist of my life, endlessly striving to perform and prove. More often, I was simply a witness. Watching thoughts rise and fall. Watching the Zendo waterfall come alive and then dry itself out. Learning to be calm under stress from Zendog Bhim . Watching myself breathe. When one shifts from being the protagonist—the doer, the achiever—to being the witness—the observer—a spaciousness opens that can hold all of life’s experiences without being defined by them. In this shift from doing to witnessing, my equanimity, inner peace, tranquillity, and joy have not just grown—they have multiplied. And one thing I reaslised is in that state of mind, Arendt’s definition of Labour becomes an action from the true mind. Infact Zen, through its ordinary life, ordinary mind just teaches this. Everything is selfless action. Whether it is archery, ikkenaba, cleaning dishes or zendo, walking dog, reading philosophy or doing zazen.
So in my humble view, the real answer to the problem of meaninglessness is not to seek new identities, new labels, or new masks. That is only rearranging the furniture in the same prison cell. The deeper work is to strip away those onion skins of identity—consultant, professional, achiever, even seeker—until what remains is the emptiness at the core. And in that emptiness, there is no void. There is space. Spaciousness that holds everything: joy and sorrow, gain and loss, sound and silence. As the Heart Sutra reminds us: form is emptiness, emptiness is form. To realize this is to be free—not from work or responsibility, but from the compulsion to define ourselves by them.
AI may strip away the masks we have worn at the market place for decades. But perhaps this is not a loss—it is an invitation. An invitation to rediscover meaning in relationships, creativity, service, and contemplative practice. An invitation to remember that identity is not a title on a business card, but the living presence we bring to each moment. Identity can be adaptive, distorted, or transcended—but never reduced to a job title. The Munims of Kolkata, Drucker the bystander, Arendt the philosopher, Moore the literature professor, the London banker’s secretary, and the Zen student in the ordinary Zendo all point to the same truth: we are more than our roles. And when the roles fall away, what remains is the freedom to simply be. What remains for you, when the roles fall away?
It feels fitting to conclude with a final layer of witness-consciousness. This essay itself is a product of the very transition it describes. The thoughts, experiences, and conclusions are my own, but the process of articulating them was a collaboration with an AI language model. It served as a digital apprentice, helping to structure arguments and find connections between Drucker, Arendt, and Zen. In this collaboration, I experienced the very point I hoped to make: the tool did not define the meaning; it aided in its expression. The witness—the essential self—remained, simply using a new kind of brush to paint its truth.
