The Relevance Study

Why I am building this

I used to think the ultimate dream was to stop working. I fantasized about a life where everything was handled and I was free to simply exist.

Then I took a three month sabbatical. I had genuine free time with my finances covered and all my obligations lifted. By the fifth week, I was actively bargaining with myself to find problems to solve. The silence inside my own head had become genuinely unbearable.

That experience taught me something I have been sitting with ever since. The dream of absolute freedom and the psychological reality of it are two completely different things.

Right now, we are watching artificial intelligence advance at an incredible speed. The conversation usually focuses on economics. People worry about losing jobs, shifting industries, and adapting to new tools.

I think we are missing the most profound impact of this technology. We are not just automating our tasks. We are automating our sense of relevance.

Society runs on the belief that humans want endless leisure. We talk constantly about beaches, early retirements, and long holidays. The truth is that leisure only feels good as a contrast to effort. It feels good the same way sleep feels good because you were awake all day.

If you strip away the effort permanently, leisure stops being a reward. It becomes the default texture of existence. Our nervous systems were sculpted over millennia to find that lack of friction deeply uncomfortable.

The people who will suffer the most in a future of AI abundance are not the people we typically expect. They are the highly educated, high achieving, deeply career identified individuals. These are the people who have built their entire identity around professional contribution. When that structure collapses, the grief that follows will be profound. It will be a mourning for a version of themselves that always knew exactly why they mattered.

I am launching this study to understand how we are going to navigate this massive psychological shift. I want to know how you find meaning when you are not being productive. I want to know what you do for love rather than reward. I want to know what you are afraid of losing that has absolutely nothing to do with your income.

This research project asks the questions nobody else is asking right now. It requires you to pause, look inward, and be entirely honest.

The survey opens soon. If you are ready to explore what happens when the work stops, I would love for you to join this project.

Take care,

Om Rajguru