The Shift: The Future of Work is Already Here

However, I’m going to assume that by 2025 neither of these ‘transhuman’ adjustments has taken place. Instead what we can imagine is the slow but continuous disappearance of face-to-face contact at work, bringing with it the possibility of deep loneliness and isolation.

The dark side of the future is a working world of isolation. Advances in imaging, holographs and virtual technologies, combined with developments in the Cloud, have put the most sophisticated techniques into the homes of people like Rohan and Amon. They no longer have to go into the office to access information – it’s all available to them on their handheld device or through their personal home computers. Theirs is a virtual, global existence. Their clients, patients and teams are scattered around the world – their colleagues are not in the next office cubicle, and they may not even be in the same city, region or country.

It’s not that their colleagues are strangers. Ask Rohan about his peers in China and he will tell you much about them – after all, he has been leading the Chinese team in these specialist operations for more than a year and has twice spent a week with them. From his encounters over the year he has learnt whom to trust at certain times, whom to keep an eye on and who will need the most counselling after the operation. As fellow professionals he has a keen eye on their strengths and weaknesses and in the case of a couple of them has even gone so far as to mentor them outside the operating theatre. He knows them pretty well and would count a couple as friends.

However, like Amon, Rohan’s relationships with his working colleagues are more often virtual than face-to-face. In the past he went to conferences around the world to meet up with other specialists in his field, but increasingly the carbon tax on flights is such that these are now being held virtually, so he simply briefs his avatar about whom he wants to meet. In his own hospital there are few people with his deep expertise and so he does not spend much time there. For Amon, his work is completely virtual. He works from his home all of the time and has never met the other programmers with whom he routinely collaborates.

Taking families out of the mosaic of work

Our relationships at work are an important part of the mosaic of our whole life relationships. However, they are only one part. For many people, what compensates for the possible lack of relationships at work is their relationships with their family members.

Work and home life can spill over in terms of energy and emotion.

(#litres_trial_promo) Our work and our lives outside work are rarely hermetically sealed from each other. More often, there is a spillover between the two that can be an emotional spillover, or could be the spillover of networks and competencies.

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On occasions the spillover between the two is positive. Our family home can be a place where we feel relaxed, authentic and loved. These are the positive feelings and emotions with which we enter our working day and they create the emotional foundation that plays an important role in helping us deal with the stresses and strains of working life. This positive cycle between work and home life can also be reversed. Instead of positive home emotions spilling over into work, it is our positive experiences of work that spill over to the home. We leave work and enter the home feeling positive and uplifted. Work is a place where we can gain valuable networks, develop new skills and deepen our knowledge, and these are competencies and connections that can be brought back to home as we enter it in the evening.

Of course there are also occasions when the spillover between the two is negative. Our work becomes a place where we feel angry, under-appreciated and wound up. It is these negative emotions that we bring back home, and it is these caustic emotions that can have such a negative impact on our capacity to find happiness at home. Or the caustic cycle can start with our home – perhaps it becomes a place in which we feel insecure, guilty and overwhelmed by the demands of others. So it is these that become the emotions and feelings that we bring into work.

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There has also been a spillover in how relationships are developed. Over the last couple of decades, relationships at home have become increasingly ‘negotiated’ and worked out. In part this reflects the growing economic independence of women, and also profound changes in the roles of men and women. The point here is that as we develop more relational ‘muscle’ at home, so we use these same relational muscles at work. If future generations become increasingly skilled at negotiating their relationships with their partners, so we can expect them to become more skilled and indeed inspired to negotiate their relationships with their co-workers, managers and businesses.

Work and home are also intimately connected in other more physical ways. If you have work that takes you physically away from the family – in overnight trips or longer projects – then this impacts on the family. If you leave early in the morning and return late at night after a long commute – then this impacts on the family. And of course the decisions you make about where to work will be influenced by the impact it will have on your family and your own personal goals for them.

So, if we want to really understand the future of work, we also have to at least acknowledge, indeed understand, the ways in which home and family are likely to change over the coming decades.

This endeavour is not as difficult as it might at first seem because what constitutes a ‘home’ and a ‘family’ began to change significantly from the time of the Industrial Revolution, and this transformation in many ways set the scene for what is to come.

Rewinding to the past: changes in family structures

To get a feel for the magnitude of the transformation of family life, rewind to the past by taking a look at your own family tree for the last two generations. As you do so, you may want to ask the following questions. How many children did my parents and grandparents have? Did any of them or their parents divorce? What is the current family structure?

For myself, both my grandmothers, Annie Evans and Minnie Stanwell, came from families of seven children. Their own childhood was interrupted by the First World War, and as a consequence in both families a number of their sisters remained spinsters because their sweethearts were killed in the early battles of the war. Those that married had smaller families than their parents – Annie had two children, one of whom, Barbara, is my mother; Minnie had only one child – my father David. None of my grandparents’ brothers or sisters was divorced. Sure, there was much family gossip about a couple of marriages that had obviously hit a sticky patch – but in the main these families stuck together through thick and thin. The unravelling of families began in my family in my own generation. Of the four children that my parents Barbara and David had, only one stayed with their first partner. All the other three children divorced, and two had second families.

Perhaps your family history reveals a steadier matrimonial environment. But if it has, then it will be in the minority. In much of the world divorce is becoming the norm, not the exception, and even in countries such as India, in which divorce is still very much frowned upon, some of the old ways of staying married are breaking down.

So let’s take a closer look at how Rohan and Amon relate to their family members, particularly when their daily work is complete. Like the majority of people in 2025, both live in cities – far removed from their parents and from their childhood friends. By 2025, families, even those in India, have shrunk in size. Amon has one sister, and Rohan an older brother who moved some years ago to Brazil to set up an internet trading company. They get to hook up their holograms on family birthdays, but it’s been years since they actually met. Neither Amon nor Rohan has parents who live in the same city. Rohan moved from his home town of Jaipur to study at the Mumbai Medical School and left his parents there. Amon also moved from his home town to be educated.

And like many other people around the world, both Amon and Rohan have parents who live far away from them – so surely they can come and stay? Here is the other reason why Amon and Rohan see so little of their parents. Both their parents have been caught in a series of demographic trends which has meant that – even though they are now in their late 60s, early 70s – to some extent or another they continue to work. It’s not that their parents wouldn’t love to see them, it’s just that they are still working and they live hundreds, even thousands of miles away. Rohan’s parents are now in their mid-60s and both work full time; his mother teaches at the local primary school and his father mans the family store. The same is true for Amon’s parents. They divorced when he was a young child – his mother moving back to the home town of Luxor in southern Egypt, while his father moved to join the extended family in Canada, and while they are now almost 70 both are still engaged in work.

So when Rohan closes down his avatar station and Amon switches off his computer, both are on their own. They are far from their family, and from their working colleagues and peers. Theirs are isolated lives with very little human contact.

So one of the real potential downsides of this steady erosion of real (rather than virtual) relationships that could be the case in 2025 is that the positive energy flow from home to work ceases, and with it some of the opportunity to tolerate work-related stress. My guess is that if we took a closer look at the health and well-being of Rohan and Amon, both will be suffering from anxiety and possibly also depression.

The forces that created isolation

When you look at Rohan and Amon’s working life, at first glance they look interesting and meaningful, and in many ways their working lives are. However, as we peel back and observe their working lives in the context of their whole life, the extent of the gaps becomes apparent. And it is not just Rohan and Amon. Around the world we can anticipate that many billions of people will live isolated working lives. How did this happen?

Some of the clues can be drawn from their stories. Did you notice that Rohan and Amon both live in one of the many megacities of the world in 2025? Like billions of others, in the course of the last 100 years their families moved from rural villages to urban sprawls. Isolation came in part as a result of the world becoming urban. Another clue is that both of them have family members that migrated, Amon’s father to Canada, and Rohan’s brother to Brazil. The migration of vast numbers of people has also served to break up the family ties that can be so important to reducing isolation. But it is not just the globalisation forces of urbanisation and migration that are impacting on the lives of Rohan and Amon. It’s also the increasing cost of energy and fuel. Two decades earlier, and Rohan would have flown to spend time with his colleagues in China and Amon may have made the trip to his clients in Brazil. But with a strong focus on the cost of carbon footprints and the rise of virtual technologies, they are both more inclined to stay at home rather than to commute or indeed to fly to meet others.

There is also something deeper going on in the working society of 2025 that we can glimpse in the stories of Rohan and Amon. Perhaps the most obvious is that the traditional families that Rohan and Amon’s grandparents grew up with have been replaced with rearranged families in which divorce has become much more prevalent. In the case of Amon’s parents, once they had separated his father remarried in Canada and Amon now has three stepbrothers and sisters in Toronto. But it is deeper than this. Perhaps some of the loneliness and isolation of both Rohan and Amon is that they are the members of a global society that simply does not trust each other. Amon notices how cynical people are about ‘big business’, and that’s one of the reasons he decided to work independently – he did not want to line the pockets of one of the ‘fat cats’. Rohan, as a surgeon, is in the world’s most trusted profession, but like Amon he distrusts the government and is worried about corruption and sleaze.

Another general emotion in the societies in which Rohan and Amon live is a feeling of unhappiness. Rohan notices this in the patients he treats, and Amon knows himself the quiet desperation he can sometimes feel. There are many pundits asking why so many people are unhappy, and one of the reasons people have pointed to is that so much leisure time is spent passively watching television.

Together these pieces form a particularly potent recipe for isolation. From the globalisation force, the pieces around urbanisation and global migration play a role; from the carbon and natural resources force, the piece around soaring energy costs puts a break on travel and encourages virtual working; from the demographic force the piece on the rearrangement of families breaks many of the natural bonds that keep isolation at bay. Finally, the societal force brings three pieces – ebbing trust, declining happiness and increases in passive TV watching. It’s a toxic brew that could potentially bring isolating work to billions of people by 2025.

The force of globalisation: the world became urban

One of the key drivers of isolation has been the explosive growth of cities and urban areas across the whole globe. In 1800 just 3% of the world’s population lived in urban areas, and by 1900 this had only increased to 14%. Yet by 1950 – when the Baby Boomers were born – it had moved up to 30%. The extraordinary fact is that in their lifetime that percentage had shifted to 50% – and there is no evidence that the trend will decrease. By 2010 in many Western countries more than 75% of people lived in an urban area.

Urban and rural living have different communities and rhythms. In the mid-nineteenth century in Europe or America most people lived in the countryside, on a small farm or in a small town. The typical family grew some of its own food, raised livestock and took their surplus to the market to exchange for goods they did not produce. If, like me, you love the novels of Jane Austen or Henry James, then their vivid descriptions of life in the nineteenth century resonated with the scale and domesticity of life. Jane Austen’s Emma and Henry James’s Isabel do occasionally go into town – but remember that in the 1860s London was home to 3,189,000 people, New York to 813,000 and Boston to 177,000. Had our heroes been explorers, when they entered Bombay or Shanghai they would have found cities of around 600,000 and 700,000.

This all changed in the West around 1870 when a host of innovations in transportation, energy creation and manufacturing created remarkable industrial growth, which sucked the population into the towns. The great chroniclers of this migration, Charles Dickens in the UK and Émile Zola in France, described both the excitement and the misery that this created. Between 1870 and 1900 New York’s population tripled from 942,000 to 3.4 million and London’s nearly doubled from 3,841,000 to 6,507,000. In the East, Bombay (now Mumbai) and Shanghai also grew – from 645,000 to 813,000 in Bombay and from around 600,000 to 1,000,000 in Shanghai. 2008 saw the balance tip from a majority of rural to a majority of urban world inhabitants. By 2030 it is estimated that the number of people living in urban spaces will have risen to almost 5 billion.

(#litres_trial_promo) In China, by 2010, it was almost half and half between the urban and rural populations, although of course the 54% of the population living in rural China produce a much lower share of its GDP.

What this move to the cities means is that more and more people are dislocated from their roots, living in cities where they know very few people, often in neighbourhoods with very little community spirit and activity. It’s from this dislocation that isolation grows. But it is not just the migration to the cities that could be a cause of isolation – there are other migration patterns that could impact on the way we relate to work and our working communities.

The demographic force: global migration increases

The isolation that many workers feel in 2025 has also emerged from the dislocation of families and communities as people migrate to get better jobs or to escape war or natural disasters. It is true, of course, that people have always migrated ever since the first homo sapiens ventured from Africa across Eurasia 60,000 years ago; people have continued to migrate in order to establish new communities, move their existing communities and join other communities.

(#litres_trial_promo) Since that time the pace of migration has accelerated as a consequence of commercial and technological developments, and is often spiked by occasional grand economic ventures, as well as political and ecological crises. The colonisation of the Classical period, the forced migration of the transatlantic slave trade and the mass emigration from Europe to the New World were all significant in determining the present distribution of cultures across the face of the globe. We can anticipate that while the direction and strength of migration flows are unpredictable, migration will increase. The actual rate will depend on environmental factors (rising sea levels forcing people to migrate, earthquakes leaving areas uninhabitable, drought decimating areas), political factors (refugees moving away from war-torn regions) and technological developments (labour-saving inventions putting people out of work).