On Being Useful

Zhuangzi’s useless oak, a misattributed Emerson quote, and why AI won’t spare the most measurable version of you.

There’s a pattern I keep noticing across colleagues and friends. Two people get the same bad news — an office is downsizing, a function is being “AI-enabled,” a role that used to need five people now needs two — and they split into two completely different responses.

One person redoubles. More certifications, more courses on whatever the new tool is, later nights, an inbox that never shows them online but somehow always replies within nine minutes. They’re not panicking, exactly. They’re competing, quietly, against a threat they can’t fully name, and their answer is to become unmistakably, measurably indispensable.

The other person pulls back. Fewer hours where they can get away with it, less willingness to let the job be the whole shape of their week, more of their actual attention going to their kids, an instrument they’re relearning, friends they’d been meaning to see. Sometimes that looks like real conviction. Sometimes it looks more like a slogan — “just enjoying life” — worn the way you’d wear armor, which isn’t quite the same thing.

I’ve done versions of both in the same month. I suspect most people reading this have too.

Neither response comes out of nowhere. Every few months there’s a new model that quietly absorbs a skill someone spent a decade building. The people getting…