Living on Your Own Wavelength

1The problem

It was predicted almost a century ago

In 1930 John Maynard Keynes wrote that within a hundred years humanity’s economic problem would largely be solved, and people would then face their permanent problem: “how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him”.¹ He also warned that humans had been shaped for ages by the struggle for subsistence, and a world without it would take away their habitual bearings.

Today it is raised by those who build the technology

Elon Musk says that probably nobody will have a job, and then “the question will really be one of meaning”.² Dario Amodei, the head of Anthropic, ends his essay on a future with AI with a section on work and meaning.³ The philosopher Nick Bostrom devoted an entire book to a “solved world” in which human effort is no longer needed for any practical purpose.⁴ The historian Yuval Noah Harari warns of a class of people whose labour is economically unnecessary.⁵ The economist Daniel Susskind writes that work has become almost the only source of meaning and identity for modern people.⁶

Money is not the main thing

As early as the 1930s, the psychologist Marie Jahoda, studying the unemployed, showed that besides income, work gives people a structure to the day, contact outside the family, a share in a common purpose, status and activity itself.⁷ Meta-analyses confirm that unemployment noticeably harms mental health, and the effect grows with its duration.⁸ Basic income experiments in Finland and the United States showed that unconditional payments reduce anxiety and improve well-being, but do not by themselves create either occupation or meaning.⁹¹⁰

Free time is not the answer

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi found a paradox: people want more leisure, yet they experience complete absorption more often at work than at rest.¹¹ Viktor Frankl described the “Sunday neurosis”: the depression that sets in when the busy week ends and an inner emptiness becomes apparent.¹² Take work away from millions of people and Sunday becomes permanent.

The proposed answers are too general

A culture of leisure, games, relationships, creativity, a state “leisure policy”.¹³ All of this is true on average and says almost nothing to a particular person. Games fill one person and drain another. One needs people around, another needs solitary inquiry. One flourishes when asked for help, another when left alone.

2The model: where a person’s energy comes from

The model grew out of my years of work with people: relationship analyses, personal consultations (I have recorded more than 150 of them) and regular open meetings. I do not consider it a proven theory. It is a working hypothesis, and in section 6 I propose how to test it.

The starting point is happiness

I start from a simple assumption: everything a person does is aimed at being happy. Everyone knew this state in early childhood: joy without conditions, simply because you exist. Growing up, a person begins to separate themselves from the world, the world begins to seem threatening, and that state fades. From then on, life becomes a search for the way back, and everyone’s way is their own.

The childhood scene

Somewhere between the ages of three and seven, a child sees their parents quarrel. Conflict between adults is inevitable: they are two personalities with different goals. But the child experiences the rift between them as a rift inside themselves, and does two things:

• notices how one of the adults disrupts the relationship: shouting, withdrawing, pressuring, belittling. This becomes their trigger;
• invents how the other adult should have fixed it: outshout, wait it out in silence, talk it through, embrace, restore order, leave with an ultimatum. This becomes their purpose.

I call this pair a relationship program: trigger plus purpose. The child does not remember it as a decision, but from then on trains the invented method all their life: in kindergarten, at school, with friends, at work. By adulthood they do it better than most people. This is usually called talent or character.

An example. One parent had outbursts of anger that came without warning. The child could not prepare for them and learned to read them in advance: from the voice, the look, small details. This grows into fine empathy and intuition, a real strength that the adult applies in work with people.

What seems to be innate is only a motivation: pleasure in a certain kind of action. The skill itself is trained. That is why children in the same family, witnessing the same conflict, take different things away from it.

Energy

Every time a person successfully applies their purpose, the subconscious seems to relive a story in which the childhood rift is mended. The person feels a surge of strength, joy and clarity: “I am living my own life”. When the purpose fails again and again, a decline follows: irritation, fatigue, a sense of meaninglessness, up to prolonged depression.

I use the word “energy” as a convenient name for observable states: vigour, motivation, mood. It cannot be seen under a microscope, but it is easy to notice in oneself: in your mood after a conversation, in an involuntary smile, in whether you want to return to the task tomorrow.

What charges a person is usually one subtle nuance of a situation; the rest is scenery. A field doctor, an animal tamer and an auditor do very different things, but a person whose purpose is “to bring order where there is chaos” is fed by all three equally. So an occupation should be chosen by that nuance; the name of the profession says little.

Radioactive people and environments

If purpose is a way to defuse the trigger, there must be situations where the trigger is stronger. These are people and environments that, by their very make-up, do not let a person’s purpose work. I call them radioactive: for you.

Why not “toxic”? Toxicity sounds like an absolute property: the person is bad for everyone. Radioactivity is selective and invisible: the same person may be harmless or even pleasant for someone else. It is a property of a pair, not of a personality. Two consequences follow: no one is to blame, since the loss of energy is caused by a mismatch rather than ill will; and you yourself are radioactive for someone, because a purpose that inspires some people drains others.

How to recognise a radioactive situation:

• after a meeting the person “stays in your head” for several days, whereas after an ordinary unpleasant conversation you recover within minutes;
• irritation arises, a sense of “nobody hears me”, “it’s all in vain”;
• day after day in this environment you feel you are living someone else’s life.

Two phases

Here the model takes a less obvious step. In the first half of life, the subconscious itself pulls a person towards their trigger: difficult people and circumstances serve as a training ground for the purpose. Hence a familiar pattern: a strong attraction to someone who causes pain, and boredom next to a “right”, calm partner.

Once the skill is trained, a turning point comes. Pain from the trigger stops producing growth and becomes simply pain. A person can leave the “gym” and start choosing environments where their purpose does not fight but works and is valued.

Not a “comfort zone”

Living on your own wavelength does not mean living without difficulty. An environment with no trigger at all does not charge you; it is empty. A person needs a manageable dose of their trigger: exactly the amount their purpose can cope with. What is radioactive is an overwhelming difficulty of a particular kind.

3Living on your own wavelength

The model leads to a practical culture: a set of skills that can be learned the way people learn hygiene or financial literacy.

1. Know your “trigger and purpose” pair

   Without it, people explain their slumps by chance, by other people’s characters or by their own weakness. It is enough to reconstruct the childhood scene precisely: which adult disrupted the relationship, whom you felt sorry for, and what, in the child’s view, should have been done.

2. Keep track of your energy

   Notice after which people, conversations, places and activities you have more energy, and after which you have less. A simple test of work: if you have more energy after the working day than in the morning, the work fits your purpose.

3. Choose your environment

   Move towards places where your purpose is needed: people, tasks and communities that need exactly your subtle nuance. Avoid radioactive situations, or at least do not get into them often.

4. Interrupt

   Leave a situation quickly once it starts to “emit”: end the conversation, change the subject, postpone the decision. This is ordinary hygiene.

5. Compensate

   Energy is shared, “like air”: a loss in one environment can be made up in another. If a radioactive loved one cannot be avoided, you can cut down on the “resonant” topics, meet when you have plenty of energy yourself, and recharge in other company. Concessions then become respect for their own path to happiness.

6. Recharge deliberately

   Do not wait for life to offer a chance to use your purpose; create such situations regularly, in a dose that charges rather than exhausts. Otherwise the subconscious will stage a drama where you least expect it.

7. Understand others

   Behaviour that hurts is most often explained by someone else’s program: a person going towards their happiness in their own way. Understanding does not cancel distance, but it removes resentment. Many conflicts begin with projecting one’s own sense of “good and bad” onto someone else.

8. Protect the family with distance

   Parents are the prototype of their children’s program, so close together they are often radioactive for each other. Adult children and parents are often better off living apart: at a distance, closeness remains instead of friction.

In my observation, a person who has mastered these skills recovers from hard situations many times faster. I have seen it in myself: since school, a difficult episode could knock me off balance for a month; now it takes a day.

4Why this answers a world without work

Work was a crude intermediary

For some, work happened to match their purpose: they were absorbed by it and did not tire. For others it was a radioactive environment where they lost energy for years. Most people received from work what Jahoda described, structure, people, a common cause, and paid for it with a mismatch. When work goes, the intermediary goes too. What remains is the direct question: where, and with whom, does my purpose work?

Purpose cannot be automated

Machines will take over professional skills: calculation, analysis, production, everything a machine does better. Purpose is a person’s way of engaging with people and the world: to figure things out, to explain, to bring order, to support, to protect, to stand one’s ground. A machine will deliver the result faster; the value of purpose is that the person is alive in doing it. It does not matter that AI does something better: a person needs to do what feeds them.

People will not “go idle”

A common fear is that without work people will sink into passive consumption. The model predicts the opposite. Purpose can only be realised through other people, so it will push a person towards people: into communities, clubs, joint projects, mentoring, research, creative work. The task for society is to help people find their communities. There will be no need to “keep them busy”.

What society needs

• Literacy in purpose. Explaining to people, from school to retirement, how their strengths and vulnerabilities work. This is basic self-knowledge.
• Infrastructure for communities. Places and platforms where people gather not by profession but by the kind of activity that feeds them.
• Matching environments. Services that help people find others, tasks and communities where their purpose is needed, including with the help of AI. Matching by mutual “charge” could become for a world without work what the labour exchange was for the industrial world.
• Research. Testing the model on large data and refining it.

5Going deeper

The model has a second path, for a few. If a person studies their program long and honestly, they may see that the childhood scene rested on a mistaken premise: the child decided the world had split because the parents quarrelled, whereas the unconditional joy of childhood faded simply because the child grew up and began to separate themselves from the world. Understanding this mistake, together with practices of attention and contemplation, can loosen the program’s grip: the person no longer feels compelled to prove, to fix, to fight. The skills remain, the compulsion goes, and a great deal of energy is freed for creative work and inquiry. Contemplative traditions, Buddhism among them, have long described this path; what I add is its link to the relationship program.

This is a hard path that takes many years of inner work; in my experience, few complete it. For most people something else is enough, and valuable: living on their own wavelength.

6Limits of the model and how to test it

What the model is not

This is not a medical or clinical theory. It does not replace psychotherapy, treatment or medical care. Chronic stress is known to affect health; whether living off one’s wavelength is part of that is a question for dedicated medical research, not for claims.

What the model connects with

How to test it

I propose an open research programme:

1. Reliability of diagnosisTwo specialists independently determine the purpose and trigger of the same person. How closely do their conclusions agree?
2. Predictive powerThe model predicts in advance in which situations a person will lose and gain energy. The person then records their state during the day for several weeks. Do the predictions match the observations better than chance?
3. InterventionPeople who have learned their purpose and are learning to live on their own wavelength are compared with a control group on life satisfaction, low mood and sense of meaning after 3, 6 and 12 months.
4. A pilot in a world without workParticipants in unconditional income programmes receive a diagnosis and help in finding communities. Do their sense of meaning, activity and well-being change compared with those who receive only money?

An honest test requires agreeing in advance what counts as confirmation and what as refutation. The hypothesis about a person’s purpose is formulated before the test and compared with their actual behaviour at work and in relationships; a person’s disagreement with the diagnosis is treated as data, not as resistance.

7An invitation

The question of meaning after work is being asked today by some of the most influential people alive. I believe it has an answer, and the answer begins with the person: with how they are made, and where they live on their own wavelength. The state and technology can only help.

I would like to invite into this conversation:

• researchers of the future of work, psychologists and sociologists, to test the model;
• the builders of AI, so that technology helps people find their environments, not only replaces their labour;
• those who design social policy, so that unconditional income comes with a real chance to find meaning;
• everyone who already feels they are living someone else’s life.

About the author

I graduated from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) and spent sixteen years as a systems engineer and software developer in large companies and banks. Today I work for myself, building websites, backends, scripts and analytics.

Alongside this, I study how childhood experience shapes an adult’s strengths and vulnerabilities. I have conducted more than 150 personal consultations, host an open meeting once a month, and run the weekly sessions of the “On Your Own Wavelength” club, where participants learn the approach together and apply it in their own lives. The model described above grew out of this practice.

Another source of the model is contemplative practice. For many years I have practised meditation and studied Tibetan Buddhism, travelling to India several times to receive initiations and teachings from the Dalai Lama and teachers of several Tibetan Buddhist schools. This experience shows most in the path described in section 5.

I am not a therapist or a physician. This essay offers a hypothesis to be tested, not a clinical method.

References

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