Decision-making is the defining form of labor for our age. Outside of obvious blue-collar contexts, nothing we do is physically very difficult any more, but it is emotionally so — hence the term “emotional labor”, something I first heard from Seth Godin.

The point is this: finding and implementing ways of handling, compartmentalizing, widgetizing and otherwise improving your emotional labor, your decision-making performance and efficiency, isn’t a manifestation of being goofy or fragile or over-analytical or “sooo Millennial”. It’s just us realizing and dealing with what work and life is nowadays — an endless series of decisions.

And that’s mmmkay. Scratch that, it’s awesome. It’s a great place for us to be, both as individuals and as a more-or-less global civilization. It does still require our attention, though. Similarly to how matter and energy are neither created nor destroyed, simply transformed, automation doesn’t eliminate all work, it just shifts it up to higher levels of abstraction.

We’re still on the hook to work, but it’s a type of work that is easier to turn into play than perhaps any other that has ever existed — if you know how.