Why Work Was Never Supposed to Feel This Empty

Could the very thing that drives us be what’s missing from today’s workforce?

It’s often quoted that we spend a third of our lives at work — 90,000 hours. True or not, the haunting figure captures a growing dissatisfaction with the status quo that many of us already feel.

Done with waiting for the clock to strike five and the padded four walls of a cubicle, Americans jumped ship from corporate America two years later in record-breaking numbers during what’s now called The Great Resignation.

For some, it was retirement or relocation, but for others it was a new start, a way to get out of the stale business roles that had nearly cost them their sanity and to find their voice in a world where they’d lost theirs.

While The Great Resignation may be behind us, it’s no secret that the term “employee engagement” has practically become an oxymoron, with engagement now down to a paltry 21% for employees and 27% for managers. But why is that? Should we blame Herman Miller for the cubicle farms that made us feel like subjects in a psych experiment gone wrong, or Henry Ford for the mind-numbing eight-hour shift or the Industrial Revolution’s 80-hour weeks for making America think a “mere” forty was somehow acceptable?

Productivity and long hours aside, who or what is driving the disengagement, and is there any hope of resuscitating the American workforce, or should we even try?

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The case for creativity

Part of the problem behind the quiet quitting epidemic may be the pay, the hours or the windowless walls, but could the bigger issue with employee unhappiness be that the roles we were handed forced us to leave a part of ourselves behind?

Could the confines of corporate America have kept us from producing anything that was a reflection of us, our voice, or the way we saw the world?

In other words, what if our misery stemmed not from the jobs themselves but because doing what we do best—bringing what we alone had to offer to the table — was off the table? Quite literally and figuratively fenced in, our creative juices were drying up before we could even clock in.

Over the past 14 years of working in marketing, I’ve seen one thing consistently breathe new life into how my team and I approach our work—the art of creating.

Recent studies show that people who embrace their creative side are undoubtedly happier. Why? Because creativity fosters not just a sense of agency and empowerment, but also resilience to stress. Before you reach for that paintbrush, keep in mind that creativity comes in many forms — whether crafting clever ad copy, pioneering a new perspective or showing up in the world in a way that’s so you, so innovative, it would make your younger self proud.

Lest this quest to embrace our creative side sound like little more than a callback to the free-spirited ethos of the 70s, happy people are not only healthier, they’re more productive, and increase company value by nearly double that of their counterparts.

Perhaps this quest for happiness and this hunger for self-expression explain the rise of the influencer culture today — a league of creatives vying to be heard on their terms. Tired of not having the artistic agency they longed for, they built communities that celebrated what they had to offer. Sure, at first glance, the monetized, over-stimulating reels, shorts and feeds feel nearly narcissistic in nature, but take a closer look and it’s people doing what they do best — creating.

To brands, the larger-than-life, addictive nature of the digital world has proven to be a robust revenue stream. With a projected $37 billion spent on influencers last year, creator ad spend has become a strategic performance driver for brands to drive engagement and, ultimately, sales.

By “sharing the pen” and introducing voices outside their own, brands can leverage trust that’s already been hard-earned without having to do the brunt of the work.

The case for authenticity

Influencer-brand matchmaking may be love at first sight, but a shotgun partnership could also come with long-term consequences. Pick an influencer with jaw-dropping numbers who’s not the right fit, and your customers will be wondering which intern was left to run your marketing department.

Pick the right influencer, but feed them a rigid script that strips away their creative autonomy, and their audiences — your potential customers — will feel the disconnect. Either way, it’s not just your budget that will take the hit. With your customers’ trust eroded, you’ll be left trying to claw back your credibility.

This “match-up hypothesis” of partnering with the right influencer is where the biggest challenge with strong brand-creator partnerships lies. Engaged and loyal digital communities are formed not just by influencers who produce an endless stream of content, but by those who use their storytelling to provide their audiences with an authentic, personalized experience rooted in transparency. Without that transparency, even the best brand partnerships leave audiences with an unsavory “sold to” aftertaste.

Instead of turning to mega-platforms with seemingly endless reach, many social-first brands are turning their efforts to niche markets — micro or mid-tier creators who are already producing content that’s a natural fit for their offerings. That means saving our starstruck moments for the red carpet, and instead capitalizing on the parasocial relationships cultivated within influencer communities, where creators are already shaping their audiences’ buying behavior.

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The case for humanity

With the rise of influencers comes an unwelcome truth that’s become glaringly apparent — we can’t always trust what we see or read. It used to be just influencers pretending multi-million-dollar content homes were their own, but today products of AI fill our social feeds, from deep fakes to ChatGPT-generated content, to rage bait videos. Even with over half of consumers able to spot AI-generated copy, it’s hard to know what to believe.

Influencers and brands may assume that AI’s biggest user, Gen Z, will overlook the lack of transparency, but they won’t. In fact, already notably critical of advertising, Gen Z has emerged as one of AI’s most discerning skeptics — calling brands that use AI for advertising everything from “inauthentic” to “fake.” Take the backlash from Guess’s AI-generated model ad or Coca-Cola’s latest Christmas commercial, for example.

As the demand for authenticity and trust continues to grow among younger generations, it’s important to remember that trust starts with us and that nothing can ever replace the human element. Will 90% of content become AI-generated as some have predicted, or will we create a different reality?

If the product of AI will always be little more than a response to a keystroke, then AI may be able to support humanity’s self-expression, but it can never replace it.

We are the ones who create to say “I was here,” to leave the world better than we found it. At best, AI will always be a mere echo of us, a shadow of the beauty we alone can release into the world.

In time, we may find that the future of work isn’t really about advances in technology or brand partnerships, but about cultivating environments where people are encouraged to move beyond their job descriptions and create a new future for themselves and the businesses they serve.

Life is art. We are the artists. As economist John Maynard Keynes once said, what’s stopping us from “cultivat(ing) into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself”?

Could the very thing that drives us be what’s missing from today’s workforce?

It’s often quoted that we spend a third of our lives at work — 90,000 hours. True or not, the haunting figure captures a growing dissatisfaction with the status quo that many of us already feel.