Research on AI and the future of work consistently shows that cognitive labor is no longer uniquely human. More importantly, AI challenges the instrumental justification for human worth: "I am valuable because I produce better outcomes than machines."
As this justification erodes, societies face a deeper question: If productivity is no longer the core measure, what is of value to human life?
Current research largely stops short of answering this, focusing instead on reskilling and economic mitigation. The existential dimension remains under-theorized. That gap is precisely where a new movement becomes necessary.
What Research Already Shows
Decades of research in psychology and psychiatry converge on a clear finding: humans require meaning to function sustainably. Key findings across meaning-in-life research show:
- The presence of meaning is strongly associated with wellbeing, resilience, and psychological stability
- The absence of meaning correlates with depression, anxiety, nihilism, and disengagement
- The search for meaning often intensifies during periods of transition, disruption, or institutional breakdown
Crucially, meaning here is not reducible to happiness or motivation. It functions as an orienting framework, a justificatory structure for action, and a stabilizer across time. In other words, meaning allows humans to hold themselves together across uncertainty.
Modern institutions have largely outsourced meaning to economic success, individual preference, entertainment, and short-term optimization. The research strongly suggests this is insufficient.
Agency Under Strain
Research on autonomy, self-determination, and action theory converges on a critical insight: agency depends on conditions, not just willpower.
Human agency requires real perceived alternatives, the capacity to form intentions, the ability to revise action based on reasons, and ownership of consequences across time.
Modern systems increasingly constrain these conditions. Algorithmic management reduces perceived alternatives. Institutional incentives fragment responsibility. Short-term metrics collapse long-term ownership. Role-based identities disconnect action from selfhood.
As a result, many people experience themselves as busy but not agentic—active without authorship. This is not a failure of motivation. It is a failure of institutional and cultural design.
A Beginning, Not an Answer
This paper does not offer a theory of the good life, nor a blueprint for the future. It offers something more modest and more demanding: a recognition that existing meaning systems are insufficient, an insistence that human agency and coherence matter, and a commitment to steward inquiry and experimentation responsibly.
An organization oriented toward what is of value to life exists not to provide certainty, but to ensure that the deepest human questions are neither ignored nor trivialized at a moment when they have become unavoidable.
In that sense, this movement is not an answer. It is a beginning.