The employee role that everyone seems so comfortable with has only been around for about 200 years...
…and it’s not going to be around much longer.
Most people have just accepted employment as a rule of society, but human civilization has flourished for thousands of years without this kind of life-long survival relationship.
The salaried job is no more than a blip on the civilizational timeline.
For most of human history, workers were split into two general classes: specialists and servants.
At some point we collectively decided (for the best) that slavery is unethical, and the two roles merged into a grotesque, adulterated combination of the two.
And for the last 200 years, the elites that have been reaping the benefits of this ugly marriage have convinced the masses that this is the natural order of society.
But now in the late 2020s, we find ourselves on a trajectory to return to the dual-role system of the past.
Humanity has a new form of slavery, and how you respond will dictate whether you thrive as an agent, or merely survive as an NPC.
Part 1 - The Old Way
For most of human history, human work has existed in two forms.
There were the artisans - the smith, the carpenter, the mason, etc.
Artisans owned the skill, the tools, the product and the price. They answered to customer and craft, not to a manager. That means when they worked harder and got better, they would earn more.
Then there was the servant - the slave, the serf, the field hand, etc.
The only thing the servants own is the time they trade for survival, and what they produce belongs to someone else (the overlord) instantly.
And then there were the masters - the vassal lords, plantation owners, and wealthy families. They owned the servants and their output.
Unfortunately, most of what we call civilization was built on coerced labor. Even empires with basic wage economies were bolstered by unfree work at the edge.
In medieval Europe, every lord and vassal claimed a workforce of serfs to tend their land. Those serfs were tied to the land, and when that plot was sold, the serfs went with it. In exchange for their labor, the lord would provide them with protection (aka survival).
American colonial empires were built on indentured servitude and slave plantation labor.
People fleeing Europe would buy passage over the Atlantic by signing a contract to work for a master for a fixed period of time in exchange for food and shelter (aka survival) and the promise of “freedom dues” upon completion. While many emigrants signed these contracts voluntarily, there were droves of individuals and families sold into the system involuntarily.
And the system was pretty quickly abandoned after the 17th century in favor of an even more cost-efficient workforce - slave labor. Especially in the tobacco and cotton states in the South, plantation owners realized they could get an even better deal if they eliminated the freedom dues and made the time period indefinite (aka barely survival).
On the other side of the world, the Soviet Union used the Gulag, a huge forced labor system, to extract valuable raw materials and build massive infrastructure projects. The system operated under the secret police from 1930 to 1960 and served as a captive sub-economy meant to fulfill quotas under the Soviet five-year plans.
Even the Dutch Republic, which built a huge maritime trade empire on commerce and financing, and rarely leveraged unfree labor directly, is guilty. A big chunk of that empire’s wealth is attributed to the slave trade that supplied American colonies and plantations with slaves.
Both Rome and Greece had massive chattel slavery workforces, and Athens famously had the Okios, or household slave economy. Unless they were impoverished, most Athenian families owned an average of 3-4 slaves that lived in the home cooking, cleaning, and helping raise the children.
This domestic workforce alleviated the load of time-intensive labor, allowing free citizens to participate in the agora, politics, and philosophy.
And we’re starting to experience this ourselves in a much more modern and ethical manner.
The Compromise - An Ugly Marriage
Fast forward to the 18th and 19th centuries, and the Industrial Revolution breaks this dual-role system.
No longer could operators reap the sweet fruits of free labor. Now they had to pay everyone.
And a factory couldn’t afford a thousand artisans. Their rate of output was often incredibly slow. And while what an artisan lacks in speed, they make up for in quality, the factory concept is all about maximizing rate of output.
So the new masters (factory owners) made a compromise. The other two roles were fused together into the factory worker.
It combined the artisan’s skill (the precision, the specialization, the education) with the servant’s dependence. You own nothing, you control nothing, you are paid what you need to keep showing up, and the product of your labor belongs to someone else.
Adam Smith saw it coming in the 18th century. In The Wealth of Nations he writes about this very concept using the example of the pin factory.
He notes that a factory only needs to employ 10 workers. By restricting their work to 2 or 3 distinct operations, they could produce dramatically more pins than if each were producing pins start-to-finish.
“Those ten persons, therefore, could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day...But if they had all wrought separately and independently, they certainly could not each of them have made twenty, perhaps not one pin in a day”
The result is 10 workers who generate high output for the factory owner, and yet don’t own any of the pins they produce. They only own the hours they trade.
That’s the employee. Skill without ownership.
A specialist asked to behave like a servant.
It was never the natural order. It was a compromise between the masters and the workers because it was the most profitable arrangement the factory could legally run.
And it worked so well for the people on top that they spent nearly two centuries convincing you it’s normal.
You are living inside that compromise right now.
The Cage
Salary Slavery: An agreement to provide a fixed duration of labor and all outputs to an overseer in exchange for the means of basic and minimal survival, only keeping the worker alive enough to keep coming back to work.
Employment wouldn’t resemble slavery until later, but it has essentially devolved into a form of indentured servitude.
Not because bosses are whipping workers, or because people are chained to their desks, but because all you can do is trade time for survival.
The salary came about to give workers a way to save and buy their freedom from the indentured servitude of employment, like the “freedom dues” of old.
But over time the gap between paycheck and the price of freedom grew too big for many to bridge. You can technically leave any time, but in doing so you are cutting off your only means of survival.
That’s the genius and the horror of it. You’re paid enough to make ends meet, but not enough to stop needing the next paycheck.
The salary pays the bills and the rent and the groceries and the beer after work. The stuff that keeps you alive to live another day. To work another day. To survive.
This is the indentured part of it.
Most people miss this because they’re too close to it. Because you can technically leave at will, it feels less like a cage. But it is a cage, and the cage is a loop designed to be invisible from the inside. You trade your best hours for money and spend that money to keep yourself alive enough to keep trading your best hours.
It’s bonded servitude with a 401(k).
The worker keeps coming back not because they’re forced, but because every other option is priced out of reach.
Nobody is literally chained to the cubicle. That’s what makes it work.
And for nearly two centuries this grotesque marriage of specialist and servant survived because there was no alternative.
Until now.
Part 2 - The Expiration
The thing about a compromise is that it only lasts as long as both parties need it.
Employers needed employees because artisan-level workers take too long to produce output and because free labor was no longer a legal option.
But now that’s changing.
The New Slavery
The new slavery: Every job no human ever wanted to do, but had to be coerced into doing, will be handled by AI, robotics, and automation.
Employers needed human hands and human judgment in one worker, and they were willing to trade a wage for both. But what happens when they no longer need one of those things?
The employer now has a choice between human labor and nearly-free labor. And they choose the cheaper option every time.
It’s not a hypothetical. It’s already happening.
The “servant half” of the compromise is being automated out of existence.
Robots run the warehouses, factories and home vacuums.
Driverless taxis are tooling around Austin, Texas, completely unsupervised.
And algorithms read documents, answer tickets, write code and copy, and schedule all the work.
These are the parts of your job that made it feel secure. The rote execution, the predictable thinking, the task you were hired to show up and do every single day.
What that automation cannot easily replace is the artisan half. The judgment. The taste. The human decision. This means the compromise is being dismantled, right in front of us.
The servant half is being handed to machines, and the artisan half is about to be the only part left that’s worth anything.
We are not heading toward a world where nobody works.
We are heading back toward the world we left: skilled artisans who own their output, and a servant class to support mass production.
The only difference is that the servant class is now made up of automatons instead of human beings.
This is the new Oikos that will free humans up for deeper more meaningful work experiences.
The philosophers, agoraios, and artisans (thinkers, entrepreneurs, and skilled creators/craftsmen) will survive the dismantling. Everyone else will be dependent on whatever system holds their means of survival.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to leave my survival up to chance.
The question is not “will I still have a job in 5-10 years?”
It’s “what path do I want to pursue right now?”
The one that will be obsolete before retirement is even on the horizon?
Or the one that makes your life’s work feel like retirement every day?
The Quiet Death
Don’t let this decision sneak up on you, or you won’t get a chance to make the decision at all.
In the same way a gallon of milk transforms from fresh to spoiled, the compromise of employment will expire gradually and cumulatively.
The death of the salary will be a quiet death.
Just like there is no singular moment that spoils the milk, there won’t be a single dramatic moment where all the jobs get killed all at once. No mass layoffs you can point to on the news and say “it really happened.”
What there will be is automation instead of replacement.
Companies will stop backfilling one vacancy at a time. The job opens up, the work still gets done, and nobody ever sits at that desk again.
The wave will start at the bottom of the ladder and cascade upward. Only the positions that still demand human judgment or taste will be backfilled, and those are fewer than you think.
The employee doesn’t lose their choice because the job disappears.
The employee has been choosing all along, by default, without even knowing it. What looks like stability is actually servitude. Every day you let financial autonomy wait for “someday,” you’re casting a vote for dependence.
And when your votes are tallied up, they don’t buy you the stability you thought you had.
The layoff won’t even be the biggest threat. It will be the perpetual job search.
The pool of service jobs available to humans will continue to shrink, while the pool of human workers continues to grow, unless those humans wise up and pursue a source of independent income that hinges on judgement and taste.
Employers are faced with a decision: expensive human labor, or cheap, efficient labor. Unless it requires a significant amount of taste, judgement, or fine motor skills, they’re going with the cheap efficient labor every time.
At the end of the day you’re just another number on the balance sheet. The employer has a margin, and your salary is a line item. If it’s the most expensive option, it gets cut.
It’s not if, but when.
Which raises the question: what do you do when the income stops but the expenses don’t?
Rent is still due on the first. You can’t miss a car payment. You need groceries and medication and clothing. You need electricity and water and heat.
How long could you afford to be stuck in the job search?
When your entire life is organized around that paycheck, it becomes your only leg to stand on.
And when that leg is kicked out from under you, you’re left on your ass with nothing but a cardboard box of desk belongings and nowhere to go.
Unless you have another leg to stand on.
And it is much easier to get a head start than it is to play catch up.
The Second Leg
A salary is dependent income. It gives you one leg to stand on.
If that leg gets pulled out from under you, you land on your ass.
Solution: grow a second leg.
The New Slavery includes the job you’re worried about losing to AI.
It’s the same job you were complaining about before all this AI stuff came around anyway. Be honest: do you want the damn job or not?
I’d argue that a growing majority of the wage labor and salaried jobs that exist today, not just will, but should eventually be handed off to automatons.
If it’s unsafe, unreliable, or unfulfilling for a human to perform the task, let it be automated.
The coal miner worried about losing his job to a robot mining operation has not stopped to consider how this could actually be a positive.
And I don’t blame him. He’s always survived on that paycheck. He built a family on that paycheck. Automation threatens his only leg to stand on, and you don’t lecture a one-legged man about posture.
But step back and actually consider what losing this job means.
No more risk of lung cancer or shaft collapse.
No more backbreaking work in the dark.
The miner might lose his source of income, but now he has time to spend with the family that he’s been providing for his whole life. If he had a second source of income, this would look less like a threat and more like an early retirement.
The problem is, most people probably won’t take that deal.
Even once the quiet death has come and gone, many will cling to the old ways, the role of servitude.
Not because it’s better than the alternative but because it’s more familiar. It’s the only half of the equation they’ve ever known.
If you don’t wake up, you don’t get to be the artisan.
You’ll be left to squabble over the shrinking pool of service roles, fighting with automatons for your means of survival.
You literally have to choose to be less than human, and then fight with the sub-humans for the right to claim that title.
That doesn’t sound like a future fit for a human.
So how do you make sure you end up on the artisan/agoraio side?
Not by quitting your job tomorrow with no plan B. That’s just trading one dependency for another.
The better way to make this transition is to stop relying on a single source of income before you’re forced to.
Don’t get a job to make it a 40 year career. Get a job to last you 18-24 months while you build a source of independent income. Something that depends on judgement and taste.
It’s simple. The job is not the destination, it’s a stepping stone to independent income. And independent income is a second leg to stand on.
With two legs you have a much better chance to still be standing when the dust settles.
It’s much easier to get a head start than it is to play catch‑up. Don’t wait.
The Jump
“Living without a salary is dangerous”
Yeah.
So is jumping out of a moving school bus.
But if that bus is barreling toward the edge of a cliff at 90 mph, I’m going to take my chances jumping out the window.
The quiet death is coming.
Those who are willing to jump from the bus will survive.
You don’t have to have it figured out. You don’t have to quit tomorrow.
The real move is to start building something you own and earn income that doesn’t require your hours, before the choice is no longer yours to make.
And you don’t have to make it alone.
If you’re looking for more guidance on how to actually build that independent source of income, come join the rest of us jumping from the bus in the Future of Freedom VIP Community.
I’m building this group specifically for people who renounce a life of indentured servitude to take their autonomy seriously and start building a future of freedom.
It’s completely free to join. Come in and ask your questions, make connections, share insights, and access all our trainings.
See you inside,
Tim