Within the debates inspired by the growing advance of the technologies we call "artificial intelligence", the most repeated are linked to the world of work: what will our future be like if an algorithm manages to do a large part of our tasks?
It is a disturbing scenario not only because it calls into question our work luck but because it challenges us in our own identity.
It's one of the consequences of a new religious creed born in Silicon Valley that begins when someone asks, "What do you do?"
According to Simone Stolzoff, author of the recent book The Good Enough Job, the very human exploration and search for who we are was replaced today by the question of what we do.
The way we make a living has become directly our life.
It's what journalist Derek Thompson calls workism, the search for meaning about who we are at work.
In his vision, our jobs fulfill the function that religious identities once had: they give us not only stability, but also a personality of our own, a community to belong to, and a sense of purpose.
Who are we at work and in life? Photo: Clarín Archive.
It is not, after all, a far-fetched idea: our work occupies most of the hours of our days and usually worries us so much that it takes away our sleep.
Thus, sometimes, we feel that it is inevitable to see our tasks as reflections of who we are.
Silicon Valley's elite are committed to working longer hours: their culture of productivity has become a model.
Although the fetishization of work is not exclusive to the United States and its first expressions can be found in the twentieth century, this enthronement of what we do as a vital pillar of who we are found in the current startups of Silicon Valley its maximum expression, building a work culture, in which the self-esteem of great leaders is intertwined with professional achievements.
According to sociologist Judy Wajcman, Silicon Valley's elite are "younger and more masculine and more committed to working longer hours" than in other arenas, making that culture of productivity, which glorifies working all the time, a target for other industries.
What it hides, however, is that this way of life is possible because there are care tasks carried out by someone else, usually unpaid or poorly paid.
However, the recent wave of layoffs by tech companies, which left tens of thousands of people out of work, tested the faith of the Workistas: who are you really if your job is your identity and from one day to the next you lose it?
It is an even greater dilemma than what happened in a pandemic, when we all live with concern about changes in the way we work.
Several scientific studies show that when we develop multiple interests, we not only become fuller and happier human beings, but, ironically, we also get better at work.
People who cultivate other interests are more resistant to adversity and solve their problems with greater creativity.
Workism, after all, is more like faith than science.
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