There was nowhere to go but in

"We were hungry. We were cold. We lacked. So we went out in search of the things we didn’t have."

Go to any job board and you’ll be met with descriptions and requirements full of hard skills. And those serve a purpose. To do a specific job, you need specific tools. Number crunching, life saving, litigating. Those don’t happen without training.

But in the pursuit of marketable skills, especially those we’re not predisposed to, we can lose sight of what we’re actually good at. We can find ourselves performing what’s expected of us or what we think’s expected of us and wondering why there’s no inherent satisfaction.

When we’re constantly pushed toward paths that are well-trod and well-paid, and when we try to mold ourselves into these spaces and develop the skills needed to perform them, we lose sight of the softer skills that make us us. The skills and qualities that make us fun to be around. The things that make us attractive to the right people and opportunities.

I imagine it has something to do with our very beginnings as a species. We were hungry. We were cold. We lacked. So we went out in search of the things we didn’t have.

Eventually, as we fed and clothed and housed ourselves with greater ease, there was nowhere to go but in, to find out what was missing there, figure out how to fill it in or cover it up, and survive more and better. But instead of nourishing the natural skills we did have, we looked around and saw the things we didn’t.

And maybe that’s why we tend to measure ourselves by scarcity rather than abundance. Why we operate on fear and survival. But we’re due for another evolution. The robots will soon be handling organ transplants and corporate strategy in addition to the math they already do so well and in the economy of crypto and AI, all that we’ll be left with is the way we communicate and empathize and compromise, skills that will never go extinct.