The Gaziza Lens | Issue No. 2 What the Ocean Teaches You About AI-Era Careers
Sunset in Hikkaduwa Beach, Sri Lanka
Hey,
I'm writing this from Sri Lanka.
Every evening, I've been watching the sun set over the ocean. Colombo. Mirissa. Unawatuna. Hikkaduwa. The Indian Ocean stretching endlessly in front of me.
There's something about the ocean that resets your sense of scale. It reminds you how small we are. How finite everything is.
Just before coming here, I lost a friend to cancer. It was fast. Final. Disorienting.
And then I landed here. In a place where the ocean reminds you every day that time is limited.
But it does something else too.
It makes you present. Awake. Fully here. The warmth. The sound of waves. The salt air.
It doesn't let you dwell on grief too long. And my friend wouldn't have wanted that anyway.
And it clarified something I've been circling for months:
How absurd it is that we spend our finite lives optimizing spreadsheets and attending meetings that don't matter.
Especially now, when AI is about to make that impossible to ignore.
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The Question AI Forces Us to Ask
Last issue, I wrote about what becomes scarce when AI makes everything abundant.
The answer was simple: judgment, curation, relationships — the human skills that require our humanity.
But here's the uncomfortable truth:
Most of us aren't doing that work.
We're doing the work AI can automate — reports, decks, optimization cycles that feel productive but create little meaning.
So the real question isn't: "How do I stay employed in the AI era?"
It is: "If AI takes the soulless tasks, what will I do with my reclaimed humanity?"
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What the Ocean Reminds You
Standing in front of something vast resets your priorities.
Your performance reviews shrink. Your LinkedIn profile fades. Your career anxieties lose their urgency.
What matters is how you spend your finite time. Who you connect with. What you create. How you make people feel.
Most corporate work doesn't require that. It requires execution, optimization, task completion.
All things AI will do better, faster, and cheaper.
So the real question becomes:
What kind of work is worth your finite life?
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AI as Liberation (If You Let It Be)
Marc Chagall once said: "Work isn't to make money; you work to justify life."
That only holds when the work connects to something larger — mastery, service, creation, contribution.
A craftsman or an artist spends years honing their skill. A doctor saving lives. A chef perfecting a dish for an experience.
Much of modern corporate work doesn't. It connects to quarterly earnings and cost reduction.
And here's the sad part:
AI isn't the threat.
The threat is the humans at the helm — optimizing for profit and power, not for liberating people from meaningless work.
Corporations will be the first to automate. Not to free you. To cut costs.
But you don't have to accept it.
Used well, AI can liberate us from meaningless work — but only if we choose to reclaim that space intentionally.
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Three Questions Worth Asking
What work energizes me — not just pays me? The work that requires judgment, perspective, relationships, and insight is the work AI can't replace.
If AI did 80% of my job, how would I use the remaining time? Don't think in terms of relevance. Think in terms of meaning.
Am I optimizing for a career — or for a life? At the end, people remember how they lived, not how busy they were.
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The Takeaway
Life is fleeting. The ocean doesn't care about your OKRs. Neither does cancer.
AI will automate the soulless tasks. That's not a threat — it's a forcing function.
It asks us to stop optimizing for productivity theater and start choosing work that requires our full humanity.
So let me leave you with this:
If AI automated 80% of your job tomorrow, what would you want to fill that time with?
Hit reply and tell me. I'm collecting reflections from people questioning what they're optimizing for.
Gaziza
Writing from Sri Lanka, watching the ocean, thinking about what actually matters.