Every civilization has a story. Ours is killing us. But it doesn't have to.

I have been trying to tell you this story for twenty years.

I just didn’t know it.

In 2006 I moved, bright-eyed, to a little town called Los Angeles to be a rockstar. It didn’t work out, but that was ultimately for the best because I’m definitely not a “night person.” I then went back to school to get an MBA and find a job that would do remarkable things like, you know, pay my bills.

In 2012, I released a book called Igniting the Invisible Tribe: Designing an Organization That Doesn’t Suck. The thesis was simple: Organizations are mostly designed to suck but they don’t need to be, and when we design work around humans extraordinary things happen. I believed that then. I still believe it now.

What I didn’t understand — what would take me another fourteen years to learn, at considerable personal expense — is that the organizations were never really the problem.

The Story was.

The #lovework story

For the last two decades, I’ve described myself as a serial entrepreneur creating a bunch of different companies under one banner:

“Make work not suck.”

I almost certainly don’t need to convince you that work sucking is a real problem; you’ve very likely experienced it firsthand.

In 2018, I started building a tech company called #lovework. The question was: could a person actually learn how to enjoy work, just like we learn to play a sport or an instrument? And then, could we use technology to scale that learning process?

It was a simple, elegant, and achievable answer to a sprawling, global, deeply complex problem.

In the decade prior to #lovework, I had another obsession: flat, self-managing organizational structures. This might seem separate from the “loving work” question, but it is not. They are inseparable because humans crave autonomy and you don’t actually have that if you have a “boss.”

So, in building #lovework, we decided to do it differently. We would design our organization from scratch around the things that make work energizing. No hierarchy. No stupid rules. None of the typical workplace nonsense. Just real humans doing real work in ways that create more life than consume it.

And… it worked. The product did what we said it would do. Leaders wanted it. And everyone who worked at #lovework, I’m not kidding you, truly loved their work.

And then the container ate it.

An expensive seminar

#lovework wasn’t devoured dramatically. There was no single villain, no catastrophic moment. Just the slow, grinding reality that no matter how beautifully you design a product, the system we’re in only runs on one kind of fuel: profit.

In that system — which is what I mean when I say “the container” — profit is the thing that must, above all else, be protected.

#lovework wasn’t primarily defeated by a better competitor or a bad idea, but by the incentives of the system we were operating inside.

My friend Chuck calls these learning moments “seminars.” Apparently, I attended a very long, expensive one.

Here’s what the seminar taught me.

I spent almost twenty years trying to fix the system from inside the system. I was basically trying to make capitalism more humane… by participating in capitalism.

But this “container,” this Organizing Story, doesn’t just eat my last company.

It eats frickin’ everything.

The “Organizing Story”

So what, exactly, is an “Organizing Story”? And why does it matter so much?

Right now, humanity’s primary Organizing Story is “work.” Or “business.” Or “capitalism.” Pick the scale you prefer, because these are all manifestations of the same underlying Story.

Work

personal

Business

organizational

Capitalism

societal

This is the Story that almost every human life orbits.

It determines what gets built, what gets funded, who gets cared for, and who gets left behind — producing these outcomes we all experience, without ever seeing the Story underneath them.

Which means the only question that really matters is whether we can choose a different Story.

I believe we can. I believe we must.

In fact, I believe choosing a new Organizing Story is the most important thing humanity will do in the next century.

This book is my attempt to show you exactly what the last two decades have been teaching me.

The “work” story eats all the others

Work determines where you live. When you wake up. How much rest you get. Who you spend time with. How much future you’re able, or even allowed, to imagine. And if you’re in the U.S., it determines whether you get healthcare or not.

We talk about “work-life balance” as if work is one category among many in your life. It isn’t. Work eats all the other categories.

And here’s the really big problem. We handed “work” the job of “organizing life” and then let that system optimize everything…for profit.

That’s a system failure. Deming said, “A bad system will beat a good person every time.” I spent nearly two decades inadvertently trying to prove him wrong, but I couldn’t.

Warning: once you really, truly see this, you can’t unsee it.

You will start to notice how often leaders have to go against the system to do the right thing. How human-centered wins often require personal risk, repressed rebellion, or moral exhaustion. How the people trying hardest to “fix work” are often the ones burning out the fastest.

Becoming an optimistic futurist

Eventually, I hit that wall myself.

Years of pushing, persuading, and carrying risk finally collapsed me under their weight. Financially. Emotionally. Existentially. I had to face the same truth I was trying to help organizations avoid: we can’t keep servicing debt, human or financial, on the promise that things will magically improve later.

At the end of 2024, I was in serious trouble.

My company was dying; the thing I’d been building for almost a decade was on last-rites life support. I hadn’t officially pulled the plug, but the writing was on the wall and panic was in the air. I was starting to feel the losses scattering everywhere around me. I was on the brink of being company-less. Team-less. Career-less. Purpose-less.

The next six months of my life forced a reckoning, along with a big question. What if the problem wasn’t that I hadn’t tried hard enough, but that I was trying to fix the wrong thing?

Strangely, this dark, depressing time is also what turned me into an optimist.

Some people seem to be born optimists. They come into the world seeing rainbows and unicorns around every corner. I’m… not that guy.

I knew I was outgrowing the self-descriptions I’d used for twenty years, but I didn’t know what I was becoming. Nothing felt obvious to me. There were no flashing signs or deep booming voices or clear messages in my dreams. But when I got quiet, I found myself increasingly drawn to the word “futurist.” Eventually another word attached itself: “optimistic.”

“Optimistic Futurist.”

I decided to try it on. And as I wrote about it, I realized something important: you don’t have to be a “born optimist.” You can be a chosen optimist.

I decided I’d start practicing optimism through a new podcast called Hello Tomorrow. Deconstructing the state of the world every week in an optimistic way turned out to be really frickin’ difficult, as you might expect.

But the world needs optimism, especially when the future gets involved. Humans seem drawn to dark futures, so “dystopian hellhole” visions often live in our thoughts and memories rent-free. Terminators crushing skulls, Black Mirror nightmares, Mad Max cyberpunk grit… our imaginations are full of futures we don’t want.

I decided part of my new mission would be to conjure a vision of the future people would actually want to walk towards. Throughout the rest of this book, I’ll be inviting you to become a chosen optimist, too.

The Story & the system

This book is called Work Will Kill Us All, but I promise you it is not an attack on work. If anything, it’s a kind of “love letter” to meaningful work, and let’s say, a “pre-mortem” on the thing that harms most living things surrounding it, including good work. As we explore together, consider:

1. Every civilization has an Organizing Story.
2. That Story becomes encoded into an operating system.
3. That operating system produces the outcomes we experience as everyday life, and our experiences reinforce the Story.

The Story and the system are mostly invisible, but you can see them, if you know where to look.

Let me show you.