The Future Belongs to the Storytellers

It's about time I went deep with my catchphrase

I’ve been making the effort to coin the phrase “The Future Belongs to the Storytellers” as my thesis for the next 10 years.

Most people look at me like I’m spouting some nonsense out of a self-help book. But I do believe it’s the best way to communicate what’s gonna help people stand out in the face of the widespread automation that’s looming over society.

Storytelling as a concept has lately been hijacked by consulting firms and influencers to mean “Packaging up your entire being into a product”. And while I do think some tried and tested tactics may apply here, I mean something entirely different when I talk about “storytellers”.

People speak of the 90s as the decade that brought us Globalization at its largest scale. McDonald’s opening up a store in the Red Square, finding a good sushi joint in Medellín, New York, or Lagos, equally effortlessly. The world was truly “connected” through the medium of international commerce for the first time.

Or at least, that’s the story we’re told.

There was another face to globalization, one I believe most of us know implicitly by now, but one that I’ve also noticed very few people discuss in their everyday lives. Globalization opened up the doors for global brands to cast a wide net across the world, but it also led to the institutionalized adoption of automation in the distribution, production, and retail sectors of business, which led to two things:

• Processes have been so optimized that there are actually more people managing the process than people actually doing the job itself nowadays.

• Approximately 1.7 million working-class jobs were made obsolete through direct automation, and countless more were replaced indirectly by being outsourced to vendors with more streamlined processes.

I believe that this shift was the largest contributor to the 2008 crisis, even more than speculation; it also played a huge factor in the subsequent political instability that we’re still living through to this day. COVID was just a catalyst; the house of cards toppled 30 years ago, and we’re only now realizing it.

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Just now, are we starting to question what people are worth in an automated world, but most people outside of the white-collar world have been asking this exact same question for decades now.

The answer now is the same as it was back then:

The future belongs to the storytellers. Or, better said, the future belongs to those with a story to tell.

When blue-collar jobs got replaced by offshore third parties or machines, the people who stayed in business did so because they leaned on their communities, their mastery, or whatever made them unique.

When we question what will happen to artists, analysts, copywriters, designers, and so many more in the coming AI age, I get the feeling the same principle will apply.

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In his 2018 article “Design’s Lost Generation,” Mike Monteiro bemoans a generation of designers who never stopped to question whether they were building something to better humanity. When I first read this piece, I didn’t quite get it. The corporate world was yet to jade me enough to understand why a desk-job designer would sacrifice their creative ideas in exchange for a fat paycheck.

“A designer who loses their hands is still a designer, but a designer who doesn’t offer their client counsel is not.” - Mike Monteiro, f*cking poetic genius.

I’m only now beginning to understand how much was lost when we reduced people’s passion and creativity down to KPIs that are easily digestible in a quarterly deck.

We’ve gotten too used to defining our profession by our titles or the type of labor that we do, but in reality, a human being should be valued by much more than just their hands.

AI may take away your ability to design ad creative, but should you have been slaving away at the 5th A/B test with copy variations anyway? Is that what being a designer is about?

No, being a designer is about having the experience, taste, and context to make decisions based on the core need. Photoshop, Illustrator, Figma, or n8n don’t make you more or less of a designer; if anything, they’re diluting and distracting you from the real toolset you’ll need to excel in your field.

This applies to any profession. Accountants, lawyers, doctors, programmers - you are all valuable because of the unique context and perspective you develop when faced with real-world questions day in and day out. No AI will ever be able to take that away from you, so why lean on what’s *going* to be automated to stand out?

We need to reframe what makes your craft interesting and valuable; only then will you (and the people in charge of hiring and firing you) understand you’re irreplaceable, no matter what new tech gets developed.

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We’re all Artists, Artisans, and/or Designers.

I’ve been playing around with a small framework for the different kinds of “storytellers” out there. Something to help the term sound less vague and marketing-y.

Take it with a grain of salt, but in my eyes, everyone with a story worth telling falls into one of the following three categories:

Artists

People with something to say, no matter their medium. Through spoken word or canvas, they break down the barriers of time and culture to reveal something about ourselves. It’s no coincidence that our most recognized and well-compensated people are all artists in some way (musicians, actors, athletes, politicians).

The tricky part about becoming an artist is that it’s mostly in other people’s hands whether you get to do it or not, as opposed to the other two definitions below, an artist is made when someone else recognizes them as such.

Artisans

Someone who masters a craft across decades, obsessing over the small stuff, making it look easy, though absolute dominion over what they do.

You’ve seen documentaries about Japanese craftspeople, stamp or coin collectors, beekeepers, you name it. If you spend enough time understanding the zen of motorcycle repairs, people will notice and admire you for it.

Designers

(From the Latin “designum,” i.e., to put something in its place) I don’t mean illustrators or product designers, I mean the people with an understanding of a need to address, and the ability to plan an approach to solve it.

Marketing matches existing supply with demand, Design matches demand with new supply.

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This half-baked thesis has driven my every action over the past couple of years. I’ve gone about the job market seeking jobs where I’m valuable because of my unique insight, the stuff I’ve been through, the influences I’ve collected; anything but my hands.

It may be tricky to see how your Excel or Jira talents may help you be recognized as any of the above when the layoff season is upon you, but that’s usually cause you’re not looking at it from a wide enough vantage point.

• If you’re an accountant, your job isn’t to make Excel formulas match up on the books; it’s helping people prioritize how to manage their resources (expense management) and how to participate within their societal constraints freely (tax advice).

• If you’re a project manager, your job is to get people to collaborate towards a larger goal.

• Etc. ad infinitum.

The tools and platforms are irrelevant; you’ve exercised your brain in a way not too many people have. Use that to your advantage, tell that story, and you’ll notice the AI anxiety starts to fade.

Even if many people will end up having uncomfortable HR calls in the coming years, I hope we all use this moment to ask ourselves if what we’re currently being paid for is worth our talents. It would be severely out of touch of me to even insinuate people can live their lives without a job, but the train we’re currently boarding does point towards a lot of us having to make a plan about adapting and coming out on top.

The system will have to change, whether it be an AI workforce, UBI, or any of the other buzzwords; what I see as the constant is that human beings will be perseverant and proud enough to let the world know they’re valuable even if the job market says otherwise, because they are.

So, even if this is an unfinished thought. Whenever the existential dread creeps up and you start to feel like you’re being replaced with AI, how about you challenge yourself to put your story out there? The people around you may begin to notice and admire you a bit more because of it.