Work, reward, chance and meaning
Is work decoupling from reward? And if it is, what does that mean?
One of the small moments of joy during the enforced remote working period of the COVID pandemic was seeing small children and pets appear on people’s screens. I heard some likely apocryphal stories about Teneo colleagues in other offices having their children walk in and loudly demand snacks while dressed in full princess costumes. It was our private version of the guy being interrupted on BBC News:
That period of remote working smashed work and life together as never before, forcing us to think about our day jobs through different lenses. Plenty of people in comms and advertising found themselves trying to explain what they did all day, which their kids often interpreted as “does phone calls for work” (This Digiday article sums up the sentiment pretty well).
Plenty more people, both inside and outside our world, completely re-evaluated their relationship with work. The re-evaluation heralded the “great resignation”, with millions leaving the workforce never to return and others using the challenge of the pandemic as a catalyst to change careers or launch a business.
The age of the “great resignation” is over, and the job market (particularly in advertising and PR) is more challenging than ever. But, as I’ve written before, I think we’ve underplayed the long-term repercussions of the pandemic on society, and an article I read this week gave me cause to revisit this theory.
It’s called “The Big Decoupling”, and it discusses the various ways that “work is untethering from reward”. Western society, particularly if you live in the US or UK, exists on the fundamental principle that if you work hard, you increase the likelihood of earning your just reward. It’s not a given (a grafter with a terrible task record and weak business idea isn’t going to win The Apprentice), but it’s a mantra that underpins many a success story.
However, as Jasmine Bina points out in her piece, this fundamental principle is being undermined in various ways in our post-pandemic society.
Generative AI allows you to pick up the basics of several different disciplines without years of experience or training.
GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic allow you to lose weight without going through the effort of dieting or adopting new exercise regimes.
Investing in crypto or NFTs means you can get pretty rich pretty quickly, with zero knowledge of investing.
The dominance of entertainment-focused algorithmic feeds means that anyone can be thrown into the spotlight for 15 minutes of fame, again sidestepping the years of slow, steady audience development that characterised cultural fame pre-2020.
As Bina points out, this cultural shift has been in the air for a while. We’ve lived through various fad diets over the past 20 years or so, and there are swathes of YouTube videos that promise to show the “one weird trick” you need to master the hobby you’ve struggled with (my hobby is playing guitar, and there are so many of these it’s untrue).
But there’s definitely something that feels very 2025, very “dark mode” about this shift away from grind to grift. Something about the prevailing culture makes the shortcuts and quick fixes feel more acceptable than ever.
This leads to the obvious question we ask as strategists and comms people - what does “The Big Decoupling” mean, and where does it go next?
Jasmine Bina posits a highly plausible theory with “two concurrent tracks”, namely “worshipping chance” and “playing with meaning”.
We can already see the culture of worshipping chance springing into life around us. The creators and wannabe influencers who spend their days mining trending topics for posts, sharing a breadth of stories, all in the desperate attempt to hit the jackpot algorithm.
We see it in the endless “pump and dump” crypto schemes. Perhaps we even see the worship of chance in the random actions of the US President as he seemingly plays chance with the global financial markets.
The meaning element runs deeper: “When effort is no longer the golden path, we’re finally free to invent purpose that isn’t measured by sweat and grind.” In many ways, this reckoning with the role work plays in our lives is a direct descendant of COVID's effect on many people.
Bringing our work and home lives close together (for the 40-odd per cent of us able to do so), or being furloughed and spending more time at home, fundamentally changed the concept of work for many people.
Looking at it through this hindsight lens, it’s easy to see why the decoupling of work from reward would be even more appealing now.
The problem is that it’s unclear how feasible it is to genuinely achieve the rewards. The data shows that only around 0.08% of YouTube videos reach a million views; the median number of views across YouTube is 40. Leaked data from Twitch a few years ago showed a similarly uneven set of financial rewards for streamers on the platform. The biggest names make the most money, and the long tail doesn’t take home much. It’s allegedly the same on Substack, with big names from traditional media converting their existing kudos into cash.
The economics of the creator economy, of the church of chance, don’t work out. And you have to wonder about the incentive structures at play with the existing platforms offering casino-style payouts for content.
The ever-excellent 404 Media published a fascinating deep dive this week into one particular account using generative AI to worship chance and generate a reward. The account in question, FutureRiderUS, found viral fame earlier this year with a series of fake AI posts focused on the California wildfires.
404 estimates FutureRiderUS, based in Russia, made “thousands of dollars” from its posts. The account has continued to chase further viral fame posting about Palestine and, er, bears eating honey.
If the single goal is hitting the viral jackpot to generate cash rewards, the incentive is for accounts to post as much as possible on as many different topics as possible to see what sticks. This means the AI-generated slop will continue getting sloppier, and the barrier between what is acceptable to rehash will disappear (if it ever existed at all).
Looking specifically at the reward mechanics of the big algorithmic video platforms, there’s also a scale question to be asked here. People loved TikTok in the early days of its fame because it was easier to build an audience relatively quickly than on other platforms. The barrier to hitting people’s FYP was much lower than, say, building a YouTube presence.
As platforms grow, though, and crucially, as more people post, your likelihood of making it big and getting some of that viral cut through grows smaller. And if we’re all chasing chance and reward decoupled from work, that likelihood of cutting through will dwindle even further. You might even end up hitting “the unlikely odds of a band making it big”-type levels (a shameless excuse to share one of my favourite data visualisations from The Pudding).
One of my favourite lines from Jasmine Bina’s piece is when she talks about “surprises in foresight that look like common sense in hindsight”. History tells us that we’re pretty rubbish at predicting the future. The “big decoupling” could be a blip. Increased generative AI adoption could unlock greater productivity and better outputs across the professional world. Or, to quote Jasmine Bina again, “we’re cooked”.
Of course, the point isn’t to predict how the world will go; that’s for the birds. The point is to establish cultures that allow us to be fleet of foot in how we react to what’s happening in the world. Experiment lightly, tread carefully, don’t go all in on one platform or the comms equivalent of “pivoting to video”.
Perspective is also our friend in these times of tumult and change. Everything in history tends towards the cyclical, patterns endlessly repeating in different shapes. The truly new and different, like the COVID pandemic, tend to be irregular, unprecedented (yes, I went there) ‘black swan’ events. We should never miss the opportunity to zoom out and look at what’s happening as a bigger, longer-term picture.
Many people missed that opportunity during the pandemic. We fell into Bill Gates' trap of overestimating what we thought would happen in two years and underestimating what might happen in ten years. We were lulled into inaction, believing the pandemic vibes were the “new normal”. From here on in, it would be all virtual events, deserted cities, pets, and children on Teams calls.
The 2020s didn’t turn out that way, with plenty of pre-pandemic habits roaring back with a vengeance - even if there’s a different, distinctive flavour to our dark mode decade. We’ll need to wait and see if the decoupling of work and reward is here to stay, or it’s a blip of random chance that slides away into a footnote of history.