The Turn That Had Purpose

I lost my job on September 3, 2023.

For about a year after that, I did what someone with my résumé is supposed to do. I pursued the next role. A dozen or so serious leads. Most of them reached the second or third interview, a few the fourth. None ended in an offer. The market kept telling me, politely and at length, no.

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By the autumn of 2024, I stopped chasing it. Not out of wisdom, out of fatigue. I stepped back and asked a question I had not asked in decades: what do I actually want to do? The answer came slowly. Financial security mattered, but I did not need to earn as much as I used to. I needed to do something I believed in.

So I built it. Through 2025, I read deeply into human decision-making, cognition, and AI. I wrote. I put up a website to host the whitepapers, launched a Substack, and posted every week. For the first time in a long while, I had a body of work that was mine. It had purpose, and it gave me back an identity I could stand behind: researcher, writer.

I will be honest about one thing. It was also a bet. If experience and age were not enough to get me hired, perhaps a distinctive point of view would be. The writing was a life and a strategy at the same time.

The Promise I Kept Dodging

There was a promise underneath all of it. I had told Jen that if I did not have a job by the end of September 2025, I would sign up and drive Uber. We have two sons in college. Her concern was not abstract. September came. I did not sign up. I told myself the writing was working, that subscribers were growing, that the next opening was close. October passed, then winter. I kept dodging the promise I had made.

The straw came early in 2026. A healthcare startup building with AI. I was genuinely excited and, I thought, genuinely qualified. The first conversation was strong. I expected to be called in for a full day. Two weeks passed in silence. When I asked, the answer was clipped: they were talking to people who were a better fit and did not have the employment gap I did.

It landed all at once. Jen’s anxiety, real and reasonable. My best remaining full-time prospect, gone. And a Substack that, after a decent start, had flattened. Three pressures in the same week.

I stopped dodging. I took my first ride on May 7, 2026.

The Thing I Didn’t Expect to Need

I expected it to feel like surrender. It did not.

What I found behind the wheel was the thing a year at my desk could not give me: other people. Not family, not the cats, not the comment section. Strangers, dozens of them a week, sharing a car and a conversation. A schedule I get to set. Usefulness that lands in someone’s actual day, immediately, with a beginning and an end I can see. Someone needs to get somewhere. I get them there. The thing closes in front of me every single time.

Most people want to talk. About work, family, the city, where they are headed, and why. When the conversation finds its way to AI, and it often does, I have a card for the Substack and the website. But that is a bonus, not the point. The point is that I am back in the world.

I am not romanticizing the work. The pay is thin, and the platform holds the cards. But it gave me something the economics were never designed to provide.

For a year, I had tried to fill the hole left by not working, and I had told myself the research was enough. It was not. My world had quietly become very small. Reading, writing, the same four walls, no one in the loop but the people I live with. I had grown claustrophobic without naming it. The car opened the walls back up.

The Blind Spot

I did not expect a few weeks behind the wheel to say anything about macroeconomics. But I could not stop running my own relief through the lens I write about every week: the future of work.

When the displacement comes, the dominant proposal is income replacement. A universal basic income to cover what the lost wages used to cover. I want to be fair to it, because I have lived the economic anxiety it is designed to answer. A UBI would have eased Jen’s worry. It would have paid toward two college educations. That is not nothing. On the income line, it works.

But here is what the contrast taught me. A UBI would have eased the pressure that finally pushed me into the car and, in doing so, might have kept me at the desk, telling myself that reading and writing were enough. Someone will object that I could have volunteered, mentored, or joined something. True. I had the time and the purpose, and I did not. Prolonged unemployment breeds its own inertia, a quiet conviction that nothing you begin will count for much, and only necessity breaks it. A monthly deposit can remove the necessity. It would have solved the problem I could name and left untouched the one I could not.

The gap was never unemployment versus income. It was solitary purpose versus connected usefulness. I had a purpose the entire time. What I lacked was other people, a place to be useful, a world that did not shrink to the size of my study.

I do not want to oversell this. My life is not suddenly solved. It is sustainable for now, and I have gotten back several things that were missing, which is not the same as everything being fixed. I had a cushion that let me wait and a wife who would not let me wait forever, and not everyone has either. What the long pause taught me, and what I had begun working out under the idea of mastery of life, is that the things that fulfill you do not hold still. What mattered most in my thirties does not matter most now, and it would be naive to think there are no more shifts ahead. There are. The work is to notice them honestly and adapt, not to defend a version of yourself that the years have already moved past.

UBI answers the income question cleanly. The trouble is that there was never only an income question, and it does not hold still either. Purpose, identity, and meaning do not arrive in a monthly deposit. They arrive in the doing, and in the company of the people you do it for.

I am an independent AI researcher who drives Uber, and the driver's seat has taught me more about the post-labor future than any forecast I have read. It runs a tight loop of attention, action, and consequence that both the UBI debate and the rush to automate quietly ignore.

That loop, and what we lose when it breaks, is where I am headed next.

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