A note before we dive in.
If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you may notice something looks a little different today.
For years, I’ve been writing a Career Economy Newsletter — tracking labor data, breaking down jobs reports, and giving you my honest take on what the numbers meant for your career, your business, and your life. I loved writing it. And then the world became a dumpster fire, and talking about labor statistics started to feel like narrating a slow-motion train wreck nobody asked for.
So last fall, I started shifting.
Less data, more perspective. Less “here’s what the Fed did” and more “here’s what it means to be a human navigating all of this.”
And somewhere in that shift, I realized the newsletter had already become something different, and it needed a new name to catch up to the fact.
So here we are.
Human on Purpose.
Same writer, same voice, same commitment to giving you something worth reading. Because if there’s one thing I know about this moment in history, it’s that staying human isn’t happening by accident. It has to be intentional.
Welcome to the next chapter. Let’s get into it.
The Pendulum Is Swinging
This past week, I had the privilege of closing out the Career Thought Leaders Conference as the ending keynote speaker in a room full of coaches, career professionals, and practitioners who spend their days helping humans navigate the world of work.
The theme of the whole event was essentially navigating what’s now, so we can build what’s next.
When we talk about the future, it’s natural to have a lot of conversations about AI – “how do we bring this into our businesses,” “what tools should I be using right now,” and “what does this mean for our clients.”
But I gotta tell you, it doesn’t matter whether I’m in a room of coaches or at a conference full of AI nerds, I find we all keep coming back to the thing I talked about in that closing keynote:
People aren’t just looking for better tools. They’re looking for each other.
The future of coaching is human. And honestly? The future of most things worth doing is human. Not because AI isn’t powerful (it clearly is) but because something is happening in world culture that I’m not sure anyone expected, and the data is starting to prove it.
The pendulum is swinging back – to humanity.
What the Numbers Are Actually Telling Us
Let’s start with Gen Z, because they’re leading this in a way nobody predicted.
This is the generation that grew up entirely digital, which is why everyone expected them to be AI’s biggest cheerleaders.
Guess what?
A brand new Gallup survey released just this month found that excitement about AI among 14 to 29-year-olds has dropped 14% in a single year. Ok, fine — maybe they’ve gotten over shiny object syndrome? One might think, until you look at the fact that Gen Z’s hopefulness about AI fell 9 points, and anger rose from 22% to 31% last year alone.
Not only is Gen Z missing the mark on the whole cheerleader thing, but they’re just downright mad at it!
Only about half of Gen Z use AI daily or weekly, but even those who do don’t trust it. Less than 3 in 10 Gen Z workers trust AI-assisted work, and virtually none trust work done by AI alone.
This isn’t technophobia. This is a generation that has lived inside digital everything their whole lives, and they know better than anyone what gets lost when you outsource human.
And it’s not just Gen Z.
According to Pew Research, half of all U.S. adults say increased AI use makes them feel more concerned than excited. Just 10% say they’re more excited than concerned, and A YouGov survey found that 53% of Americans don’t trust AI systems to make decisions or take actions on their behalf.
[Anyone else relieved by that? 😏]
Stanford released its AI index just two weeks ago, and the report sums things up pretty well.
👉 There’s a growing disconnect between expert optimism and public anxiety.
The people building AI and the people living with it are looking at two completely different realities.
We’re using it more, trusting it less, and ever-so-quietly watching the pendulum swing on what I have called the AI-Gold Rush.
Hello, course correct.
What I’m Seeing on the Ground
The data confirms what I’ve been watching in real time.
Raw, unpolished video content is outperforming produced content. Typos in an email get better response rates than carefully crafted, edited content. I once accidentally sent out a template email that had never been filled in — a completely wrong send — and it generated more replies than a newsletter I spent hours on. 😂
Why? Because it felt (and was) clearly human.
I’m seeing it in other areas as well. Live events are filling back up. The phone isn’t as scary as it once was, and people are otherwise seeking out in-person connections with an urgency that feels almost corrective.
Here’s what I think is actually happening:
The digital revolution — social media, always-on mentality, the performative nature of content — already had our heads spinning. We’ve been lonelier and more disconnected for years, even if we didn’t want to admit it, and now AI has come in and dumped fuel on that fire.
The result?
A workforce that is anxious, skeptical, and quietly exhausted by the pace of change, and a growing, unmistakable hunger for things that are irreducibly human.
Conversation, presence, imperfection, trust, love.
We don’t just want efficiency. We want to feel something real.
What This Means for You
Staying human on purpose means making deliberate choices about how we lead, how we communicate, and how we show up — choices that affirm the parts of you that no tool can replicate.
It means trusting your instincts over the algorithm.
Having the hard conversation instead of sending the automated follow-up (or ghosting!).
Being present in the room instead of performing for the camera.
It means reaching out to the person you keep thinking about instead of assuming they know you’re thinking about them.
📲 Which brings me to your challenge this month:
Text someone you’ve been meaning to reach out to.
Right now.
Just say you were thinking of them.
Not an email. Not a LinkedIn message. A text.
Or take it one step further, and *gasp* make a phone call! 🤯
How’s that for being Human on Purpose?
