We live in a wild, wild world. Gone are the days when life at work was predictable. Today, nothing is. One day there is a tariff war. Then there is peace, with a treaty to boot. And celebration of a win on both sides of the trade border. The next day, there is a tumult once again as the US Supreme Court turns it topsy-turvy again.
Uncertainty is the norm. Nothing is permanent. But permacrisis is here for sure. A term that elevates crisis to a state of deep permanence. We might as well get used to it.
A lot of crazy things have been happening. Apart from the tariff war, gold, silver and copper prices have run amok. Indians who traditionally saved gold and silver under the guise of festive splurges, women’s cravings, wedding gifts and other excuses are today laughing all the way to their bank lockers, or to their ‘Godrej bureaus’. All of a sudden, the personal wealth of gold- and silver-conscious Indians has gone up. This applies to the great Indian middle, lower and upper income groups—in that pecking order.
And then there is the permacrisis in the job market. Everyone is suddenly insecure about their jobs. In the old days—that is, five years ago—it was the middle manager in the organisation who was worried. He or she had put in some 20 years of work and was in their late forties or early fifties. Youngsters and new recruits in their early thirties were replacing them. The jobs could be done at cheaper salaries and lower employee-carrying costs.
Voluntary retirement schemes were the talk of the town once again. A whole host of the challenged took this option and sat on the bench. This time in their homes, trying to dabble with other forms of earning to supplement the VRS corpus. The young employee who replaced this middle manager was laughing all the way to the bank. Their salaries looked good and their jobs secure.
Come 2026, and all this is challenged. Permacrisis is here in the jobs market for the young as well. In fact, the current crisis challenges the young more than the old. The remaining older folks in organisations are much more secure. They are happily not in the middle anymore. They are the decision-makers at the top. Their jobs are secure till the devil of sentient artificial intelligence enters the game.
As of now, the most insecure people in jobs across realms of work are in back-end data generation, sales and customer service. The entry-level is reducing in numbers and jobs at the back-end of sales, logistics, finance, legal and a whole host of verticals are being shaken, stirred and replaced by AI-enabled enterprise strategies.
Add to it the fact that organisations big and small are using the bogey of AI to foreclose a whole host of jobs they found unsustainable, and the permacrisis for the young is complete. The status of jobs is what we witness in your refrigerator. Eggs waiting to be beaten and chicken waiting to be eaten. Not as rough as that yet—but wait. The future will be tougher still.
Even as Vinod Khosla talks straight and loud, everyone else in the IT market is talking a language best understood by those with twin-tongues. It looks almost as if no one knows of the permacrisis ahead, or everyone knows and wants to present a comfort-façade that all is well. I wonder why.
The young are, therefore, challenged all across. This job insecurity is not only in engineering and technology enterprises. It is there in every allied territory. And which piece of work is unallied to technology today? Even the Uber driver is worried of income drop as people use smart apps to compare prices and crunch cab-sharing schemes to book the cheapest ride. While AI is a great big angel for a small host of those in the developer economy, it’s the big devil for a bigger host of people in the working class. Their incomes are getting crunched and their jobs are at risk, even as AI aggregators at the top are getting the valuations of their enterprise cranked up and running.
What then is the solution? How are the young and the dispossessed (of jobs) going to handle the crisis? And what must the young and the tense do?
Solution one is the need to re-skill, up-skill and cross-skill across the new technologies that are emerging. But remember, even this shall pass. Your new skill is only as new as the next big move in the work space.
As AI stops being a discipline on its own and an important component in every piece of work—suave and rustic included—your job is forever at the risk of redefinition. Therefore, constant redefinition of your skills and upgrading yourself from being a back-end being to a front-ended one may be a necessity.
Being a mind alone is not enough anymore. Work is getting cleaved. At the bottom end of the work pyramid, it is important to be a mind and a pair of legs and hands for sure. At the top end, it is still prudent to be that superior mind planning all this and the demise of a whole host of jobs as AI promises better efficiency and profits. In many ways, the top manager is actually planning the demise of the organisation as we know it today: people-dependent, people-heavy and people-expensive.
And what is solution two? I do believe every youngster at work needs to have a second gig to support him in tough times. Many youngsters of the peak work age are going to lose their jobs in the near future. They need to have a second and maybe a third gig. Time to plan your finances and investments too. Time to get a passive income stream going. Something that works for you without you working on it even.
Time to make your assets earn. Time to do a lot of financial planning. Time to shed the attitude to buy things without having the immediate money to pay for it. Time to make way for “simple living and high thinking”, as my father would say all the time.
A maverick positive I see in the future is the possibility of a lot of people from urban areas wanting to return to the rural and deep-rural spaces of our country. A lot of folk will want to return to that peace and quiet. A less-expensive, pollution-free geography to live in.
I really do hope this happens. Our urban agglomerations need to de-magnetise. But then, even as you do that, you will find AI in the midst of your cows and buffaloes too, thanks to efforts such as Amul’s just-launched Sarlaben AI app. It connects the over-300-million bovine population of the country to a network that manages health, artificial insemination, pregnancy, nutrition, lactation, productivity and more as the next white revolution gains traction.
But watch out here as well. The next permacrisis in this realm could be a future habit that has more people not wanting to drink milk. Milk is for the cow’s calves, not greedy humans like you and I. Touché.
Harish Bijoor | Brand guru & founder of Harish Bijoor Consults Inc
(Views are personal)
(harishbijoor@hotmail.com)