Cal Newport

Because especially in the American context, I mean, the knowledge economy is now a massive portion of our GDP.

And the knowledge economy itself is shifting more towards cognition-intensive work.

So, you know, knowledge work can capture anything where you're not building things.

But now all the lower level knowledge work is being outsourced or automated.

A lot of it has been replaced over the last 30 years by software.

We don't have support staff and assistants and secretaries like we used to because, well, you can use Microsoft Word and email.

We don't need separated people.

And so the work that's left in our economy, the knowledge economy, has been getting more and more cognitively demand.

And so the number one skill is I'm used to straining my brain, learning hard new things and maintaining focus.

That's what I would train.

You have to think about employment.

Ultimately, it's a marketplace.

There's a lot of obfuscation and fog and smoke, but it's ultimately a marketplace, right?

You're paid money.

In exchange, you produce things that have economic value.

That's what makes that exchange make sense.

There is not ultimately an underlying economic value.

to the coordination activities by themselves.

There is no actual economic value to the speed of your Slack responses or the number of meetings you go into or the number of like bullet pointed emails with those sort of chat GPT emojis that you put out.

That itself doesn't generate economic value.