The Epidemic of Wasted Talent

I was listening to Ryan Holiday interview Rutger Bregman. They were talking about bullshit jobs, wasted lives, the peculiar tragedy of talented people doing meaningless work. Then Bregman said something that stopped me cold: “You’re a set of DNA that’s never existed before in human history and will never exist again.”

I had to pause the podcast, run to my computer and write this down immediately.

The conversation kept circling back to one idea. If you stopped doing your job tomorrow, would you be replaced? Would someone else step in and the work would continue exactly the same? Or would something specific be lost?

Most of us are doing work that any reasonably competent person could do. We’re components. Interchangeable parts in a machine that doesn’t need us specifically, just someone with the right qualifications.

I spent a year as a creative director doing exactly this. Good salary. Decent title. Work that needed doing. But nothing that required me specifically. Nothing that used the particular way I see the world. Which is why I always felt like there was something missing from the role, and perhaps why I never felt truly very good at it.

The High Cost of Being Replaceable

There’s something Bregman mentioned that made me understand why so many corporate jobs pay well. They’re not paying you great wages because what you’re doing creates massive value. They’re paying you to forgo the opportunity for meaningful work. They’re purchasing your opportunity cost.

Think about it. Why do management consultants straight out of university with no real experience earn more than essential workers, even though the market for these corporate roles is more oversaturated than perhaps any other field?

Because the work is soul-crushing. It has zero impact. Companies pay for advice they don’t implement. Everyone knows it. That’s why you have to pay people so much to do it.

The salary is compensation for wasting your existence.

Plenty of doctors or teachers would do their job for free. But ask any of these corporate guys to take a pay cut and they’d all quit tomorrow. Because they know in their hearts that the money is to compensate for the fact that what they’re doing sucks and nobody really enjoys it.

This explains the generational divide I explored in the following article. Boomers accepted meaningless work because the compensation made sense - pensions, security, a clear path. That deal is gone, but the expectation that we should still accept it remains.

The Birdwatcher in Minca

Earlier this year, I was in Colombia, in a rainforest town on the northern coast called Minca. We’d signed up for a birdwatching tour.

At 5AM, this jovial old man greeted us with a keen smile and an infectious joy that seemed impossible for that hour. He told us he’d been doing this ever since he was young, spending his days sitting in his garden watching the nature around him, observing. Forty years of this.

We asked him how many rare toucans he’d seen in his time (the bird everyone wanted to see).

“Oh, many many thousands,” he said. “But I’m just as excited each time I see one, because I get to see the joy they bring my customers.”

I honestly felt envious of this man. He didn’t have much. Lived in a small shack in the forest with just enough for his family. But he had found such a genuine sense of purpose in his work that it made me question everything about how we think about careers in the developed world.

This wasn’t someone trying to optimise their career or build their personal brand or hit some arbitrary income target. This was someone who’d found work that was inseparable from who he was. You couldn’t replace him with another birdwatcher. The tour wouldn’t be the same. His specific combination of knowledge, enthusiasm, and humanity made him irreplaceable.

The Future of Irreplaceable Work

Naval Ravikant, the Silicon Valley philosopher, once said something that really excites me: “There are almost 7 billion people on this planet. Someday, I hope, there will be almost 7 billion companies.”

At first that sounds insane. But Naval’s point is that everyone is completely unique. “The combinatorics of human DNA are incredible,” he says. “You’ll never meet any two people who are even vaguely similar to each other, that can substitute for each other.”

Each person has different skillsets, different interests, different obsessions. The internet allows you to find the 50,000 people who need exactly what you uniquely can provide. Technology finally lets individuals leverage their unique perspectives at scale.

In a world heading toward 7 billion companies, being irreplaceable becomes the only sustainable career strategy.

Finding What’s Yours

Most people struggle to identify work that feels like an extension of them. We’re so used to fitting ourselves into existing roles that we forget to ask what role would need to exist for us specifically.

But you already have hints. It’s the problems that bother you more than they bother others. The connections you make that surprise people. The things you notice that everyone else seems to miss. The work you’d do even if the pay was terrible (which, ironically, is often when the pay becomes extraordinary).

Your irreplaceable work might not have a job title yet. Naval talks about how “society always wants new things” but “society doesn’t yet know how to create those things because if it did, they wouldn’t need you.” The work that only you can do might require you to create the role rather than apply for it.

The Waste of Being Replaceable

When Bregman and Holiday discussed that DNA quote, they were really talking about waste. The waste of having something unique to contribute and spending your life as a replaceable component instead.

Every day you show up to be replaceable is a day the world misses out on what only you could build.

I’m not saying quit your job tomorrow. I’m saying start building something on the side that couldn’t exist without you. Start small. An hour before work. Weekends. But start.

The world needs what only you can build.

---

Building TrueNorth: an AI coach for navigating career confusion. Not another job matcher, but a tool for understanding yourself first. Early access opens next month. Join the waitlist.

I’ve also been playing around with the idea of building a community for the professionally lost. No networking, no LinkedIn requests, just honest conversations with people who get it. Sign up here if this is something that would interest you…