Building a career in the age of automation can feel overwhelming and difficult to plan. Yet the psychological challenges we face today are nothing new; the 21st century isn't the first era to fear machines subverting or replacing our humanity. We can draw powerful lessons from past thinkers who faced similar upheavals in radically different times.
The rise of industrial automation in the 19th century, for instance, sparked widespread anxiety about whether it would crush creativity, destroy art, and strip people of their agency. These fears were not irrational; the working conditions in many factories and workhouses were appalling.
Yet that same period also sparked a revolution in thought. Thinkers began to reconsider art, work, and human collaboration in new ways. There were debates and innovations in an era that redefined what it meant to create, innovate, and build a meaningful life in the face of rapid change.
One of the most outspoken critics of automation was John Ruskin, who fiercely opposed mechanization's assault on human labor and creativity. His vision of human agency and craftsmanship shaped generations of thinkers and movements—and remains strikingly relevant today.
Ruskin was a polymath. He was an art critic, geologist, vicious social commentator, philanthropist, and professor. He was preoccupied with how industrialization was reshaping work.
He saw the danger in reducing people to cogs in a machine, where work became about nothing more than productivity. For Ruskin, work had a much deeper significance. It was not just a means to an end but an essential part of shaping who we are as individuals. His writings give us a framework for finding meaning in work that seems to be overcome with automation.
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