Every generation has it tough, but some are more burdened than others. Consider the millions of newly minted college graduates entering a labor market that has rarely looked so forbidding, all of them milling about in that unsettling moment when the ocean draws its breath before releasing the tsunami. With AI’s job-killing, human-replacing revolution on the horizon, the unemployment rate for young graduates is already at its highest level since the start of the pandemic — the global scourge that, just six years ago, yanked those same kids out of high school and deferred their first sweet steps out of childhood. One bolt from the blue, then another: It’s enough to make a person think the universe is out to get them.

How one would even start a career now — scarred by the recent past, menaced by a post-human future, and debilitated by early exposure to smartphones — is beyond me. Like many others deep into their careers, I’m apprehensive about what is ahead, too. One school of thought holds that, whatever challenges lie in the future, people will manage to adapt and flourish. This is what we did in the aftermath of other shocks to the system, such as the Great Recession and the obliterative disruptions of the internet, to name the two principal economic cataclysms of my own generation. Others believe that AI will not only alter the very nature of work but further shake the foundations of our society, which are still feeling the erosive reverberations of COVID.

The former paradigm is best represented by How to Start: Discovering Your Life’s Work, by Jodi Kantor, the Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times reporter best known for her investigations exposing the crimes of Harvey Weinstein. This slim book grew from a commencement speech she delivered at Columbia in 2025 in the dour aftermath of a battle between student protesters and administrators that had led to a Trump-backed suppression of campus political activity. The premise is that there are some eternal verities Kantor has learned during her ever-upward road to professional fulfillment and........

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