thoughts & feelings

On the quiddity of work

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:45:22 GMT

Preface

There’s a particular relief in being busy. At the end of every day, you rest knowing that you completed a particular set of tasks; your inbox clears up, your calendar crosses out completed events, you merge a pull request, etc.

But have you ever stopped and asked yourself what any of it actually was?

If you’re anything like me, you’ll have started to ask that question more and more as AI has become a permanent fixture of our lives.

This short essay is a philosophical discussion on what that means for us as individuals, and groups at large.

I.

To ask about the quiddity of an object is to ask about its whatness. Namely, after you strip away everything it happens to be and the implications it asserts, what is that object? A particular chair is brown and it has 4 legs, but none of these attributes actually define a chair’s chairness. The objective of asking about something’s quiddity is always, once its contingent features are removed, does there exist something essential, or does the thing dissolve into its properties with no core beneath them.

Before November 30, 2022, this question was never asked of work. I argue it’s because the attributes and accidents of work and its quiddity were fused. But AI has since driven a wedge between them. We can now suddenly accomplish a task without doing it, and the aforementioned question suddenly holds much more merit.

The claim this essay defends is that work’s essence was never the doing. The doing was just an accident of work, an erroneously time-consuming accident, but an accident nonetheless. What survives is not a residue or a remainder. It is what work essentially was, now visible because the AI removed the accidents that obscured it.

II.

To see the salient part of my claim, start with the ordinary conception and watch where it breaks. The ordinary conception identifies work with activity. With this view work is a set of performances: the writing, the calculating, the assembling, the corresponding. To work is to expend effort across time toward some output.

This framework is largely intuitive to us because for all of history this was the case. And it was the case because the execution of valuable tasks was scarce, difficult, slow, and requiring trained human labor, and so execution and value moved together. Valuable things were always harder to do and hard things were usually valuable to some degree.

Unfortunately, our first disservice to our future (aka today) was to mistake that correlation for an identity; to treat the doing and the value as one thing and call the union work. But correlation is not identity, and the test is whether the two come apart. The answer is that for all of history they could in principle, and now can in fact.

Consider what is wanted at the end of any piece of work. No one wants the report; they want the decision which the report informs. No one wants the contract drafted; they want the agreement it secures. The artifact is a means, and the doing is the cost of producing the means. The end–the decision, the agreement, the cured patient, the working bridge–was never the activity itself. This is not a modern observation. Aristotle distinguished praxis, action whose end is internal to itself, from poiesis, making whose end lies in the product. Most of what we call work is poiesis: its point is outside it. And if the point is outside the doing, then the doing is not the point.

III.

It’s at this point that you might identify an objection. The objection is that for some work the doing genuinely is the value, a type of work which is both praxis and poiesis, where the activity is not a mere means but is constitutive of the good produced. The craftsman at the bench, the surgeon’s hand, the writer in the sentence: surely here the execution is not separable cost but the very substance of the achievement. To strip the doing from these is to destroy the thing, not to reveal it, and so its quiddity is well defined.

However, I argue that there’s some conflation happening. Take the craftsman. What we admire is said to be the work of the hands, but watch closely and the hands are in service of something prior: a discrimination, repeated continuously, between the cut that is right and the cut that is wrong. The skill of the hand is the transmission of a judgment of the eye. Where the craftsman’s hand is steady but their judgment is poor, we get competent, lifeless work; technically executed, badly judged. Where the judgment is keen, we forgive a great deal of unsteadiness in the hand. The doing, even here, is the medium through which a judgment is expressed; it is not itself the judgment. What is rare and what is essential is the discrimination, which foreshadows the core argument I make in the next section.

IV.

Now that the claim is sufficiently supported, let’s move to its implications. Namely, if the doing is accidental, what is essential? I want to propose that work’s quiddity, once the executable accidents are removed, resolves into three core subjects, none of which is doing in the ordinary sense.

Before the work: the choosing of the end

The election of ends composes the first part of the essence of work. Execution selects among given options; determination invents the option and draws the frame the options will appear in. It can’t be specified in advance, because to specify an end is already to have determined it. And it answers to nothing above itself: when you execute an instruction, the instruction can absolve you, but the one who sets the end stands at the head of the chain with nothing upstream to absorb the error. This is the part of work that bears the most and conceals the least, which is exactly why we have so little appetite for it. Much of what we feel as busyness is the comfort of having ends handed to us.

Within the work: the discernment of its quality

Knowing, when set before a result, whether it is good. One expects that if execution is cheap, the value moves to specification: write the brief well enough and the right thing comes out. But no specification is complete. Any description detailed enough to follow still needs interpretation, which needs further description, without end. We missed it as a separate thing only because, doing our own work, we exercised it silently and called the whole event skill. Take the doing away and it stands alone, the thing the skill was for.

After the work: the bearing of the answer

The assumption of responsibility for it — standing behind what was made, vouching for it before those it touches. This one differs in kind. The other two are capacities: improvable, in principle imitable. This is not a capacity but a relation — the standing of a self that can be held to account, that bears the cost if the work fails. A machine may one day match us at choosing ends and judging quality. It cannot match us here, not for want of skill but because it has nothing at stake.

V.

These three acts share a feature that explains why they were so long concealed, and it is the crux of why we ask the aforementioned question.

None of them has duration. The determination of an end can happen in an instant. The recognition of something as good or bad is nearly immediate. The act of standing behind a piece of work takes no time at all — it is complete the moment one commits. They are, in a word, durationless, and this is precisely the property that made them invisible in the old arrangement.

A job, in the economic and social sense, had to fill time. It had to occupy a day, a career, a life. The essential acts of work, being durationless, could not by themselves constitute a job; there is nothing to fill with an instantaneous judgment. So they were necessarily embedded in the doing, which supplied the duration the judgments lacked. The hours of execution gave judgment a body to inhabit and a surface to show. We only measured the hours because the hours were measurable, and we came to believe the hours were the work, when the hours were only obscuring the work.

VI.

When the accidents are stripped away, does a thing dissolve, or does an essence remain? Well… it depends.

As we’ve shown, for work, an essence remains. But the more honest question is why we hid it so well, and why its uncovering feels more like a loss than a discovery.

Here is the answer: we did not bury work’s essence by accident. The burying was the point. The three acts that make up the real work are also the three that expose us most: to choose is to have no one to blame; to judge quality is to risk being the one with bad taste; to answer for the work is to be the one a grievance lands on. In probably one of the most ironic ways, the reason we felt relief doing work was to not have to answer for it. And busyness was the cover. The endless executable doing (the inbox, the tickets, the meetings) was never just how the work got made. It was where we went to avoid the part of the work that exposes us.

This is exactly why AI does not feel like relief, whatever it promises. By taking the doing, it takes the hiding place. It returns us to the exact thing the doing let us avoid: the choice with no cover, the judgment with no rule, the answer no one else will bear.

This is not only a private reckoning. Whole organizations were built on the doing — headcount measured in hours, value inferred from activity, the busy ones presumed the useful ones. When the doing is cheap, those proxies stop working, and a team is left facing the same exposure an individual is: what was actually worth doing, was it any good, and who stands behind it. The hiding place was load-bearing for institutions too, and it is being pulled out from under all of us at once.

I’ll admit the personal version of this took me longer to see than the argument did. Writing this, I realized how much of my own sense of being useful had quietly become a sense of being busy — and that the two had almost nothing to do with each other. The work was never the busywork. It was the part I’d been using the busywork to avoid.

If you made it this far and liked it, come say hi at adam.cm, or email me at adamghaida [at] cmu [dot] edu !

i'm 20.

Wed, 10 Jun 2026 23:56:00 GMT

Today, I turn 20. I’d always assumed it would feel surreal, but I woke up feeling remarkably underwhelmed. I spent this morning reflecting on the past 20 years and I noticed a few things, some of which I’ve compiled into short essays below.

hardship is overrated*

*if you don’t take it right

Over the last few years, I’ve had the privilege of going through a few really difficult events. Prevailing wisdom says “everything’s a lesson,” or “every bad thing is secretly a gift,” etc. People seem to love that. It apparently “builds character.”

It can; but I’ve watched the same hardship make one person sharper and another person bitter, and I don’t think the hardship gets to decide which. That part’s on the person. The event itself is neutral. It just sits there. What you do in the months/years/decades after is the whole game.

I was listening to Theo Von’s podcast with Mike Tyson when I was shaving out of all things, and a line really hit me: “god broke me before he crowned me,” and I really want to have had the life experience to be able to say that when I’m 60.

the deep end

One of the best things to ever happen to me was Twitter, and by extension Orchid. Not many people know that I first reached out to Nizzy for an internship I was rejected, but I was a persistent fucker and a short while later, I got this message:

And so I became the newest intern at Orchid, which was 0.email then. I wasn’t the best, i made a lot of mistakes, and I pissed a lot of people off. I also worked entirely for free for around a month! Many other people around me would’ve never done that, and though it was really hard, I threw myself in the deep end and told myself that it MUST pay off eventually.

That first month was incredibly exciting and I got a taste of what I now think is going to be the rest of my life: building. But it would’ve never happened if I didn’t throw myself in the deep end. Funny enough, Sonith and his cold-dm movement on twitter was the catalyst for all of this, and to him I’m incredibly thankful!

private victories

We live in a weird quasi-triumphalist society that seems bent on showing off. The LinkedIn microcosm is, on a large scale, what our society looks like today. I always hated that because the thing about the wins that actually changed me is that none of them would make a good tweet. And even then, publicizing wins always has a minimizing effect on them.

Public victories are loud, they feel amazing, but they’re mostly luck wearing a costume. We learned this really early on at Orchid, so we started building in private, and though we felt it could’ve been the wrong move I now am so glad we did that. Our wins were entirely ours, and we started becoming incredibly thoughtful about what we were building instead of chasing trends and bullshit. Nobody can give them to you, but most importantly, nobody can take them away.

The same thing applies to people, I think. Building in private taught me to live more in private too, and I stopped narrating my life to an audience that didn’t really care, and started just… having it. It’s hard to explain, but I found that not conforming has made me a lot more intentional about what I do.

people I’m grateful for

on the off chance you’re still reading this and you’ve had an impact on my life, you’ll probably find your name here

nizzy, adam, dani, ghinwa, jad, sonith, angie, rudolph, danny, ralph, ryan, rayan, iman, ahmet, rashid, sherkhan, sudais, karl, kj, sabine, garry tan, paul graham, sophia, zaid, joy, dika, furqan, emu, peter, tala, zoya, milo, theo, rich, maya, dilshod, arlan, paul, eduardo, moe, christos, laila, yasa, adam, wassim, salman, douglas, amy, fasial, minh, abner, celine, cas, zeina, marco, jana, yasser, mits, jacob, fernando, dana, dakari, daniel, mehdi, kelly, nour, michael, fouad, anas, sami, yasma, milad, sami, mariam, outdoor boys, montezemolo, sargeant hill, mark carney, cryz, rodha, rowana, oshin, ms. zeina, roy lee, kyle kashuv, alex, alexis, camille, hatoon, jennah, omar, waaris, baylor, cory, henry, hayden, jonah, mantra, aaron, aiden, josh miller, ali debow, sky, bilal, jessica, sara, sarah, alec, shamdoo, zayn, james, layla, michael, rania, daniel, malik, andrew, tariq, ryan, idris, david, hana, john, dalia, matthew, leen, chris, mira, sam, soraya, ben, yara, jack, dunya, luke, lina, will, sahar, tom, talia, nick, rima, alex, mona, joe, amani, paul, dina, mark, salma, peter, nadia, henry, lulu, george, reem, charlie, hiba, jake, aya, max, sana, kyle, lara, sean, joud, evan, anwar, dylan, ziad, eric, taha, scott, fares, brian, sela, kevin, raed, justin, nael, adam, tania, greg, owen, cole, ethan, noah, liam, jacob, tyler, brandon, aaron, eric, josh, nathan, simon, robert, steven, patrick, dean, craig, ross, neil, gary, philip and so, so many more.

is ai the only i?

Tue, 14 Oct 2025 22:33:12 GMT

i’m scared of ai, and i think that’s okay to admit.

i’m a cs major at carnegie mellon, supposedly one of the top schools in the world, and consistently in the top 3 for CS in the world. but i’m entering a world that feels completely different from the one i started college in. every day i see people around me using chatgpt to write their essays, complete their assignments, even answer discussion posts. and honestly? it’s terrifying.

not because the technology exists - that part is actually pretty incredible. i’m scared because of what we’re losing in the process.

what i’m seeing in the classroom

i’m a teaching assistant for an intro to cs class, and almost all my students’ work is clearly ai-generated. fuck, most of what i touch is entirely AI generated: professors’ slide decks are ai-generated, lecture notes are ai generated, papers are ai graded; professors don’t care anymore! students will get grades for work they didn’t do, thoughts they didn’t think, learning they didn’t actually learn; and professors are oblivious, or they just aren’t interested in teaching anymore.

ai produces work, and then ai evaluates and grades said work. humans are basically out of the loop (wtaf).

and that makes me wonder - what’s the point of any of this anymore?

i’ve spent years developing my writing, my critical thinking, my ability to wrestle with complex ideas and articulate them clearly. years working incredibly hard on perfecting my craft, but now it feels like i’m competing against machines that can do it faster, cleaner, and without the messy human process of actually figuring things out.

thinking about tomorrow

the academic stuff is just the beginning. what really keeps me up at night is thinking about the future.

my parents built their careers in a time when skills felt more permanent. you learned something, got good at it, and could rely on that expertise for decades. now i’m about to enter a job market where entire industries might be automated away before i settle down.

i think about my little brother, who’s still in high school. what world am i leaving for him? will there be space for human creativity, human connection, human work by the time he’s graduating?

my friends and i talk about this stuff sometimes, usually late at night when the existential dread hits hardest. we’re all feeling it, this sense that we’re standing at the edge of something massive and unpredictable, and at the same time feeling like we have absolutely no control over it.

some people tell us we’re being dramatic, that every generation faces technological change. but this feels different. this feels like everything is changing at once, faster than we can adapt.

maybe there’s another way

i don’t have answers. i don’t know how to navigate a world where the skills i’m developing might become obsolete before i graduate. i don’t know how to compete with tools that can write, code, analyze, and create without breaking a sweat, and 100s of times better and faster than i can. but maybe that’s the wrong way to think about it.

maybe instead of competing with ai, we need to figure out what makes us irreplaceably human. maybe we need to double down on empathy, on genuine connection, on the messy, imperfect, beautiful process of being alive and thinking and feeling.

maybe our generation’s job isn’t to stop the future from happening, but to make sure humanity doesn’t get lost in the transition.

i’m still scared. i think i always will be. but i’m also starting to think that fear might be exactly what we need right now; not paralyzing terror, but the kind of healthy fear that makes you pay attention, that makes you fight for what matters. there’s no hiding the fact that this transition won’t be easy, but it isn’t supposed to be.

welcome to tnf!

Wed, 23 Jul 2025 01:29:15 GMT

wtf is tnf?

writing has been a core part of who I am forever, and I’ve always found comfort in cementing my thoughts and feelings in text. tnf, i hope, will become an extension of that. i don’t know exactly what I’ll be writing about, and i definitely won’t be writing consistently, but i nonetheless hope it can bring value to you.

but tnf is much bigger than just writing. i’ve always found it difficult to convey what i believe to be true and meaningful without concerted effort, and i’ve also found that the easiest way to do that is through writing. people find it easier to understand me when i write, and, at the risk of sounding pretentious, i find it easier to understand myself and what i believe in when i write.

thinking is inextricably linked to writing, and writing is inextricably linked to thinking. without one, you cannot harness the other. i also hope to help others realize that and take advantage of it!

the catalyst

a few months ago, as i was reading sama’s blog post titled the gentle singularity, and i was struck by the following line: “…most of the path in front of us is now lit, and the dark areas are receding fast.”

it felt a bit naive, maybe even arrogant, but it also resonated deeply. we’re not just blips in history, but we’re playing an active role in defining and, for better or worse, creating the future. that’s a pretty awesome thing to be a part of and it felt right memorialize my thoughts and feelings today in a little corner on the internet.

managing expectations

i’ve been coding since i was seven, and am a computer science major, so tnf will probably be home to a lot of tech writing. i also research ai at cmu, and i’ll probably be talking about my work here.

i play the guitar, take photos, and am weirdly interested in fringe philosophy (zizek and the sort). i also hyper fixate, and bounce between random shows / franchises / conspiracies. i’m also falling in love woodworking and 3d printing.

point is: tnf will be realllllyyyyyyy random; tnf is as much of a place for me as it is for you. anyway, i really hope you enjoy reading about whatever i feel like writing about!