Read the full transcript of Carla Cuglietta’s talk titled “Why We’re So Anxious About The Future of Work” at TEDxRRU 2024 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Shift from Excitement to Anxiety
CARLA CUGLIETTA: There once was a time when thinking about life after high school filled you with excitement, not anxiety. There once was a time when thinking about your career filled you with possibilities, not knots. I became a high school teacher in 2001, and about 10 years ago, I noticed a distinct difference in how young people were feeling about life after graduation. Excitement had turned to anxiety.
There were just too many options to think through, and the world of work was changing much too fast. But then I noticed it wasn’t just young people feeling worried about the future of work. It was my friends, my colleagues, it was leaders of organizations. Something was happening.
Independent of age, people went from being excited to being anxious. Why is that? And why would we let being anxious about the future become the new normal? I imagine being 17, or 47, or 57, looking out into the future, unsure of what it looked like and what that would do to my feelings and my outlook on life and on work.
A Global Journey of Discovery
So I decided to do something big. In 2018, I left being a teacher, and with a small film crew, embarked on a global journey around the world to try to make sense of the changes we were seeing. It was an 18-month journey that spanned 150,000 kilometers in 15 different countries to have hundreds of hours of conversation. And we made a very important discovery.
There is no way to tell what the future of work will look like. There’s just too many things going on, from changes in demographics to artificial intelligence, from the migration of people to geopolitics, from climate change to hybrid work. There’s too many things happening all at once to make sense of it. In fact, throughout our journey, we met with some of the world’s top thought leaders.
And when we asked them what they saw coming in their field in five years, in their most honest moments, they would say that they didn’t know. But then it hit us. We could not predict the changes we would see, but we could predict the challenges we would face. And that slip in thinking opened up a world of possibilities.
Challenge One: Human Connection
We discovered that there are three main challenges that we’ll face in the future of work, and we’ll dominate that for everyday people. So pack your bags and come with me on a mental journey around the world to uncover the three challenges in the future of work. First stop, France. We were in the Alps.
Cows grazing, rolling hills, church steeples in the distance. We were there living with the head farmer of a cooperative at the time. And we said to him, “Wow, if we ever die and come back in another life as a farmer, we hope it’s here. Look at this place.”
“It’s beautiful as it is. Our community is struggling. In fact, we have depression and even suicides right now,” he chuckled. Then he went on to say, “Farming’s always been hard. It was hard for my grandparents and hard for my parents and hard for me.”
“But back in the day, you would care for the cows. And the cows would produce milk, and that milk would go down the road and turn into cheese. And that cheese would go to the market and be sold, and people would buy the cheese and taste the cheese and say, ‘Pierre, you did it again, another year of great cheese.’ And there was fulfillment there. My hard work was recognized by the person who ate the cheese. Now farming’s still hard. Care for the cows, and they produce milk. And now a truck comes by and picks up that milk. And our milk gets mixed in with the other farmers’ milk. And all of the sudden, my hard work is anonymous. No one says anything anymore.”
Challenge Two: Staying Relevant
That conversation shed light on a challenge that we were seeing all over the world, the challenge of human connection, and all the ways that work is changing the way we interact with people. We’re becoming disengaged. You see, we can’t predict the change, but we can predict the challenge.
Come with me to Italy, specifically a region in the south called Puglia, where they live the dolce vita, the sweet life. Here, 80% of the businesses are still family-run. They take four to six coffee breaks per day. And the lunch break in the workday is three hours long. They have mastered the art of human connection and kept it as a top priority.
We were there presenting our findings with a group of professionals, and specifically, we were discussing the decision to keep a three-hour lunch break in the workday with new technology and business models taking hold fast in countries all around them. And then they said to us, “Okay, we know we have a beautiful work-life balance, but you’ve been all over the world. You tell us, are we in danger of becoming irrelevant?”
Technology, AI, new business models, they’re taking hold fast all around us. There’s no avoiding it. But it doesn’t mean we need to fear it because they can bring with them new opportunities, new earnings. Gone are the days where the same skills you had at the beginning of your career will last you all the way until the end.
Challenge Three: Staying Healthy
Thirty years ago, jobs and skills were stable, but not anymore. New technology is driving the need to learn new skills. Technology may change what you do in your career, but it will definitely change how you do it. The problem is, it’s tough to know how or when that change is coming.
For challenge number three, let’s head to Korea.