IMO: You must be able to live on your wits!

Living on Your Wits in the Age of AI

Why You Can’t Depend on a Job—or a Company—Forever

For most of the twentieth century, the formula for a stable life seemed straightforward.

Get a good job.
Work hard.
Stay loyal to the company.

In return, the company would provide stability—steady income, predictable advancement, and perhaps even a pension.

That model shaped how generations of people thought about work.

But the world that made that arrangement possible is rapidly disappearing.

Today, with the rise of artificial intelligence, automation, global competition, and constant technological disruption, depending on a single job or employer as your long-term safety net is becoming increasingly risky.

In modern life, stability no longer comes primarily from institutions.
 It comes from your ability to think, adapt, and live on your wits.

Links:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vz3HKkVrJE4

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Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

Sara Causey discusses the impact of AI on job security, emphasizing the need for individuals to be self-reliant and adaptable. She highlights the decline of traditional employment models, citing technological disruption, corporate volatility, and global competition as key factors. Causey advises building transferable skills, maintaining multiple income streams, and fostering personal resilience. She shares personal anecdotes, such as securing a freelance gig through networking, to illustrate the importance of relationships over resumes. Causey concludes that the modern career landscape is unpredictable, advocating for a mindset of independence and adaptability.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

AI impact, job market, personal resilience, technological disruption, corporate volatility, global competition, transferable skills, multiple income streams, networking, relationship building, creativity, adaptability, personal growth, career stability, modern economy.

Welcome to the Causey consulting podcast. You can find us online anytime at CauseyConsulting llc.com and now here's your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. When I was thinking about what I wanted to say, what I wanted to record for the March episode of this podcast, what I kept coming back to is the idea of being able to live on your wits with the advent of AI companies closing down the job market being in complete poo poo condition. I have said before that whenever I was really focused on job market and economy type episodes, if I was not on the absolute leading edge of reporting things I had to have been extremely close. I was talking about things like ghost jobs and people keeping help wanted signs in the window to get their PPP loans when they weren't actually hiring anybody. I was the Paul Revere. I was the person that was like, here we go. Here we go. Major job market problems long before anybody else in the mainstream media was saying that. In fact, I got so tired of talking about it that I stopped, because it's like there's only so long that you can warn people that don't want to listen. Nevertheless, here we go. I really want to say that with the advent of AI, with companies closing down with jobs disappearing. You cannot be dependent on a job or a particular company forever, and that may include your own business, that may include something that you've gone out on your own and bootstrapped into a successful position that might not last forever. And I'm not trying to say this to be pessimistic. I'm actually trying to say it to give you a sense of what can I do. What are transferable skills? What can I be thinking about now? Because the best time to consider what would I do if things went belly up is before that happens now. We're not getting into a chicken little sky is falling state. The goal is not to foment panic or absolute worst case apocalyptic scenarios. I'm not saying that your world is going to fall apart tomorrow and you need to run around like your hair is on fire. What I'm saying is I hope to God that you think about these things before an emergency comes up. Now I will give you my standard disclaimer here. I don't give you advice. I don't tell you what to do or what not to do. I opine for your entertainment only, and that's it. The onus is on you to be a responsible adult and decide what makes the most sense for yourself and your family. So today I'm going to talk about the importance of living on your wits. Stay tuned.

Just a reminder, Sara's award winning biography of Dag Hammarskjold, Decoding the Unicorn, is available on Amazon. Her next nonfiction project, Simply Dag, will release on July 29th. To learn more about her other works, please visit SaraCausey.com. Now back to the show.

Obviously, the old contract, the old way that things were done, is dead and gone, and we already know that in the 20th century, stability tended to look like lifetime employment. You had a 30 to 40 year career at the same company. You got the pension and the gold watch. To be fair, did every single baby boomer or member of the silent generation get that arrangement? No, they didn't. And when you go back and look at the statistics, it's actually pretty surprising how many of them did not get that arrangement, but it became a cliche, the idea of working for the same company for basically your entire working life, getting the guaranteed pension and the gold watch at the end of it, corporate pensions also were more common in the days before we all got told 401, K is the way to go. You don't want a corporate or government backed pension. That's boring, that's limiting. What you really need is to put your retirement into the stock market. And for some people, that has worked out for others, like the ones who were taken in the Enron scandal, I'm sure they would sing a different tune. There also tended to be clear career ladders. You got in at that company, and you pretty much knew what the next rung on the ladder looked like, if you stayed there and you had skills that were tied to specific. Industries. This could be manufacturing or factory type jobs. It could be corporate middle management, like, I'm going to go from being an underling to being a mid level manager to being an upper manager, maybe to trying to be like in the C suite one day. Could be journalism or newspaper careers, maybe somebody that was writing for a paper that wanted to work themselves. Into an editor position, or it could be a long term government role. I want to keep moving up through these different pay grades until I get to a point where my pension is going to be pretty cushy at the end. So the deal used to be, theoretically, at least, if you give us your loyalty, if you trade those prime working years of your life to us, we will give you stability in old age. And in fact, you don't even have to wait for old age. We'll give you the stability of a job, a regular job. If you continue to show up every day, we'll give you that paycheck, and then we will also help to take care of you in old age. Now, obviously we know, those of us in the younger generations. For me, being born in the younger part of Gen X, it was just never on the table for me, and I knew that, especially seeing the Enron scandal, I was thinking my 20s when that happened, I was like my God in heaven. No, no. I do not want that to be me. I don't ever want to be dependent on some company that can absolutely shank me in the gut. How awful. So for the Xers, the millennials, the Gen Zers, I think those of us in the younger generations, we we've already known for a while that the old model is dead and gone, and it just wasn't going to be feasible for us. But let's talk about why. Why has the old model broken down? For one thing, maybe a number one, technological disruption, automation, AI software. I've talked before, and I'll drop a link to it again, because, without fail, some yo yo will be like, this is just a conspiracy theory. I'm like, Dude, you can watch the video. You've all Noah Harari very plainly said, like back in 2023 he plainly said that the advent of AI is the end of human dominated history, and he actually compared it to an alien invasion, except instead of being little green Martian men, it's going to be AI and robotics. And I think one of the reasons, well, there are several reasons, okay, but one reason why people want to say that's a conspiracy theory is because they have their head up their butt and they want to live in denial. They don't want to imagine this being like another version of the Industrial Revolution. We think about that from the past. We have some sort of Dickensian image in our mind, and it seems so remote to us, but for the people who live through that, it was terrifying to be a laborer, to have a job that you felt like was stable, and then all of a sudden, these machines are invented, and they're replacing you and displacing you that had to be hard as hell that's coming for us. I think another reason why people want to bury their head in the sand is because they feel like it hasn't happened on a massive scale yet, and so maybe it won't. Here's what I add to that, what John and Jane Q Public have access to. As far as AI goes, it's bound to pale in comparison to what the military industrial and military intelligence complexes have their hands on, the governments of the world, the billionaires, etc. You can bet your last nickel that they have access to AI that would blow everything else out of the water. Go back and look at DARPA. They had access to the internet before John and Jane Q Public had ever even heard of the internet or the World Wide Web. They were using it years ago. So you can bet that the defense contractors, these these power brokers and military complexes, have AI that would make chat, GPT and Google Gemini look like a complete joke. So just because it hasn't happened yet to the kind of extent that Harari is predicting doesn't mean it can't happen,

and it may start on what we would typically consider to be

repetitive, type jobs, customer service automation software that replaces data entry and admin clerical type of roles, AI that can replace like routine and repetitive knowledge work, the jobs that have been Built around those repetitive, more rote type tasks are increasingly fragile even now. But that doesn't mean that other forms of labor won't also become fragile. Another facet to this is corporate volatility. Companies disappear faster now. More than they did in the past. Startups. Look at startup culture, here, today, gone tomorrow. That's one of the things. Whenever I was involved in freelance HR work, I really tried to steer clear of I'm telling you that I'm a startup company, but really I'm one guy in grandma's basement working in my boxer shorts all day calling myself a startup because it sounds cool. People like that would go broke. I mean, in no time, you might do $1,000 worth of work for them and never see a penny of it, because they were already out of business by the time you sent the invoice. But even more structured startups rise and collapse quickly. There are mergers and acquisitions. It's like what Warren Buffett said, when everybody else is getting greedy, that's the time to panic, but when everybody else is panicking, that's the time to get greedy. So we, and I predicted this in some earlier episodes on this podcast. You can go back and check me out on that. I predicted that we would see more mergers and acquisitions. You'd have companies that were struggling, that were being bought out by other companies that were more solvent. And you would also have two companies that were struggling that thought, if we join forces and somehow we marry the two train wrecks together, we can make it we have seen that play out something else that's very important. We now see layoffs as just a routine business strategy, just very like, ho hum blah, say, Oh yeah, just, we'll just cut like 10% of the workforce. It's whatever. Who cares. It makes the shareholders happy. It makes our stock go up. So who cares about those peons that has become routine. It's no longer the stuff of a massive news story. Like, Oh, this company is laying off 10% of their workforce. Have you ever heard of such a thing? We must be in a recession. This is really bad. It's just commonplace. Now. We also want to think back to large firms that when these firms were around and you were a kid, it seemed like they would never go away. Sears is one that sticks in my mind. I've told you before that one of my grandmothers worked for Sears Roebuck for years as a telephone operator and switchboard operator, and then as like a catalog order taker lady. I'm sure there was a more fancier name for it, besides catalog order taker lady, but that's that's what she did, and getting the Sears Christmas catalog, OMG. BFD, back in the day as an excerpt, oh yeah, you could not wait to get the Sears Christmas catalog and start circling all the stuff that you wanted. But even other catalogs, other times of the year, picking out your school clothes and stuff like that, it was a big deal. I remember there used to be a Sears surplus store not far from where we lived when I was a kid, and my mom kept that place so hot she loved the Sears surplus store. So when I was a kid, if somebody had told me back in the 80s, like the day is coming where Sears is just basically gonna I would have thought you were crazy. Same thing with blockbuster. We kept the blockbuster hot back in the 90s. That was, that was your entertainment, going to Blockbuster, getting your snacks and renting your movie. That was entertainment, man. That was what you did on a Friday or Saturday night. And it was frustrating when you get there and you'd be all geeked up to see a movie, and they wouldn't have it. You'd look behind the they always had the dummy holder, you know, with the Styrofoam in it. And you look behind and be like, oh, all the movies are gone. But there were many, many a night in the 1990s where that's what we did. It'd be like, let's get a pizza and go to Blockbuster, or let's get a pizza, go to Blockbuster, and then also get a bunch of junk food at Blockbuster on top of the pizza that we're going to eat. Can't do that in your 40s anymore. Let me tell you. Pay for it with your metabolism. But if somebody had said like the days coming where streaming is going to totally X blockbuster off the map and you just be able to rent movies from your own TV, you have a smart TV connected to this thing called the internet, and you're going to be able to just stream stuff on demand in the 90s, like when I was in high school and then college, we would have thought you were insane. So a lesson we can extract from all of this is that stability that you have tied to a job or a particular company or even a particular field of work is an illusion. Whenever I reviewed Ken actually his book How to quit your day job and live the life of your dreams, that's one of the things that Ken talks about. You have to decide, do you want to get the illusion of freedom, or do you want to get the illusion of stability? Sometimes you can have both, but not always. A third thing I want to mention is global competition. Work can move anywhere, remote work and global talent pools equals companies that hire in other nations, jobs that shift geographically entire, departments that get. Outsourced. There was like an expose type article of a automated restaurant where they were bringing in cashiers remotely who were working in the Philippines for like three bucks an hour. That is crazy to me, and yet it was happening. Companies are going to take advantage of that. It doesn't matter the hue and cry from the public. They're going to do it because, as I've also told you before, they don't answer to us. They do not answer to John and Jane Q Public. They answer to people like the shareholders and the Board of Directors, but they don't answer to us. So we can say, Oh, I'm mad about that. That's awful. And they're like, I don't care. Your opinion means nothing to me. Okay, so there's that. Here's what I mean by living on your wits. To emphasize it's not about panic. It's not about, oh my god, Armageddon is happening tomorrow and we're all going to die. For me, it's about personal resilience, and you can look at this spiritually or not spiritually. I try to have an inclusive program here. If the G word gives you a panic attack, you don't have to include that. You can look at it spiritually as your source is God or Jesus or Allah, whatever, whatever higher power you believe in. It could be that it's your higher self. It could be that it's source energy, divine providence, the universe, etc. But the idea there is that there is some higher power, or some higher consciousness, and not just your job, your boss, your company, your training, your college degree, etc. Because when you put your faith in those systems, those very temporal, shaky systems, and then they fail, it hurts. It really hurts. If that kind of thing, if the idea of a higher power or a higher consciousness makes you want to break out into hives, then you can say my faith is in myself. I don't have to worry about my boss or trying to always keep the boss or the company happy because they may not even be here tomorrow. I'm focused on myself and what I can do, and that's personal resilience, some of the important core concepts for that are traits like adaptability. I typically don't answer those LinkedIn polls very often. I think they're corny, but there was one that somebody I actually knew had run about the most important job skill in modernity, and like 80% of people, including me, had chosen adaptability. You had better be able to pivot, because if you can't, you run the risk of being left behind. Having good judgment, knowing what matters and what doesn't, being a good communicator, being able to explain ideas clearly, and my God in heaven, being able to read the room, having my publishing business, there are times when I hire freelancers because I can't and also don't want to do every single thing on my own. I do some things. I do a lot of things. As a matter of fact, I can't believe that I draw. I still come back to that because it blows my mind. Like I know how to draw, I know how to paint. That's crazy. How did that happen? There are things that I do on my own, but I don't do everything. I don't want to edit all of my own work. I want a professional editor to do that. I don't want to proofread everything on my own. I want a professional proofreader to do that. I don't want to format books on my own. I want to hire a professional formatter to do that. Sometimes I design cover art on my own, and sometimes I hire it out. So the point I'm making here is that there are times that I hire freelance labor to do things that I either can't do, don't want to do, don't have the time to learn how to do, etc, and something I have noticed, I'm trying to be polite here, but like, something I have noticed is I feel like our society, with the the advent of AI chat bots and like customer service that's run by AI, we've gotten spoiled to things being on demand and also things being polite. Because even if you're getting heated with an AI chat bot, or you're getting heated with an AI customer service drone, like they've been trained and programmed not to bring the heat back to you, and I think that that's making people less receptive to a person who comes across as abrasive. So if you are running your own freelancing desk, you're running your own business, and you have any kind of contact with clients or prospective clients, and you don't know how to talk to them, you don't know how to read the room, you will go out of business. I am predicting it right here and right now. If you don't know how to talk to people, you. You're going under because people are just not putting up with it anymore. I was at a job once that I totally hated. Not going to say where I was or what kind of job it's this has been years ago, but I was at a job that I hated, and I remember this guy that I worked with told me, everybody likes to have their butt kissed. It doesn't matter if it's the janitor or the CEO or somebody in between, everybody likes to have their butt kissed. And one of the reasons why I was floundering at that job was because, in my opinion, it seemed like the owners wanted to have their butts kissed. I didn't respect the owners that much, and so I wasn't good at kissing their butt. And the Job did not go well. Accordingly. A lot of people, you know, throw rotten tomatoes at me if you want to. But a lot of people are getting accustomed to having their butts kissed, whether it's from an AI chat bot or charlatans who've just figured out how to read the room and massage the right egos. They're used to having their butts kissed. And so if you don't know how to talk to people, if you come across rude, hateful, abrasive, you're not going to get hired. People will just say, I'd rather go with somebody who's maybe less competent but more polite than somebody that sounds competent but also sounds like a complete a hole. Just my two cents. Relationship building will also matter. There are our employers now saying we're tired of resumes. So many resumes have been written by chat, GPT or Google, Gemini that they have no meaning anymore. So networking, being able to tap in to your social stratosphere, your social network, whether that's online or offline, it can absolutely matter more than a resume on a piece of paper. Creativity also hugely important. Being able to see opportunities that other people miss. I did an entire mini series talking about Julia Cameron's book, The Artist's Way. And one of the things that I said every time I recorded an episode is, do not count these episodes out. If you're not an artist and you don't want to be, because creativity is absolutely crucial to your success, you're going to have to think on your toes and be creative if you're going to make it. If we wanted to summarize this part of the episode, we could really say the safest place in the modern economy is not inside a company or inside a job, it's really inside your own mind and being able to tap into your own resources and live on your wits. I want to mention the psychological shift, which is important, because people resist it, especially if you were raised in a household where your parents or grandparents, aunties, uncles told you, security is employment and employment is security. Independence is risky. Independence and freedom and trying to go out on your own and do something new and different, that's that's just too risky. You have to stay where you feel like you're getting a sure thing. However, the current reality is really shifting towards independence, being resilience, and that doesn't mean quitting your job tomorrow or shutting down your company or doing something wild and wacky and then going splat at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, which I've done before. I really want to emphasize that, in my opinion, it's important to not assume that that job or that company, or even your own business, will always be there have some practical strategies, and this can include things like building portable or transferable skills, developing more than one income path. And no, I'm not going to sit here and tell you what all of that looks like for you. You can find plenty of YouTube people to do that. Some of them are legit. Some of them are Grifters. I'm not an expert. I'm not a fine financial planner. So I'm not going to sit here and say, Oh, well, here's the income pass you should do. I don't know what works for you and what doesn't. I would just highly encourage you to have more than one income stream. Stay intellectually curious. The more nimble that you can be, not only with your actual labor itself, whatever you're doing with your time, but also with your brain, that makes you less fragile. And then don't forget to build those relationships and not just your resume. Opportunities can come through people you know, as opposed to flinging a PDF out into space and hoping that somebody sees it and responds, maybe they will, but maybe they don't, and I'll give you a real life story on that. Whenever I wanted to leave my corporate job to start to freelance, go out on my own to do HR and staffing work, back in 2020 I knew that I wanted to do that, but I was struggling to figure out exactly how. And that's so many times in life the how is where we get hung up, isn't it? One day out of nowhere. Seriously, it was a bolt from the blue type of situation. I got a phone call from a friend who said, I know that you're looking to pick up freelance. Work, and I've heard about an opportunity. I know the people at this company. They're good people. I like them. They like me. If you're interested in meeting with them and talking about this freelance gig, I'll put in a good word for you and make a warm introduction. I was over the moon. I immediately said yes, and thanked her profusely, and I was able to take that freelancing gig, and it actually lasted much longer than they predicted. They thought that it was going to last two or three months, maybe six months at the most, but I partnered with them on and off for like, two years, and securing that first real bill paying freelance role is what enabled me to get out of corporate America and go out on my own. That did not happen because I was flinging resumes out in space. It happened because someone I knew, somebody where there was already that know, like and trust factor, said, I think you'd be good for this. Do you want a recommendation? So don't forget the importance of getting to know other people and figuring out the best way to talk to them to cultivate that relationship. I'm not saying be Machiavellian and use them to your own ends. I'm saying Be smart about how you talk to people, because people, more and more, are getting their egos massaged and their butts kissed by these AI bots. And if you come in like, I'm the expert and you must obey me, hahaha, people are like, no thanks. And then they go back to their chat bot. You bot. So think about this way modern life, the modern career, is less like the ladder, the I'm upwardly mobile, look at me, ladder from the past, and it's more like an open terrain. You might even say it's more like a supermarket, like, maybe today I'm buying milk, maybe tomorrow I'm buying bread, maybe tomorrow I'm selecting fruits and vegetables. There may be less of that predictability, but ultimately it becomes predictable in the sense that you will always know you can count on yourself if you want to bring a higher power into that equation. That's totally cool, but you don't have to the world. I think in this next phase is going to ultimately belong to people who know how to live on their wits, stay safe, stay sane, and I will see you in the next episode.

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