Work Reimagined: Mount Danxia

[AI-Generated Illustration]

ANALYSIS

There’s a well-known parable of the poor middle-aged Mexican (alternatively a Pacific Islander, Sri Lankan…) fisherman living in an idyllic coastal village. He does not have much more than his family and friends, a modest home, his work routine, and his boat which gives him his livelihood and his health. One day a wealthy investment banker visits the village on holiday. While wandering along the beach to relax and unwind from the stresses of his corporate life, he sees the fisherman return with his day’s adequate catch of tuna.

They have a conversation about the fisherman’s routine and the fish population available in the surrounding waters. Seeing potential in a business, the investment banker suggests to the fisherman that he could fish longer hours to catch more fish, which he could then sell to make profit, and eventually buy a bigger boat, thus expanding the business and profits – he talks of vertical and horizontal integration, branding, technical improvements, and IPOs.

He has already worked out an investment and business strategy for the fisherman to make a fortune, when the fisherman enquires of the banker what the benefits of such a plan might be. The banker, somewhat frustrated by the ignorance of the poor fisherman, explains to him that he could have whatever life he desired; he could relax and do the things that he wanted. To which, of course, the fisherman responds that he already has such a life – fishing every now and again off the shores of a familiar coast to which he belongs, plays with his kids, and enjoys a meaningful lifestyle in the bosom of his family and the village community.

This story puts into contrast the mindsets of scarcity and abundance: One where what one has today is more than enough and provides contentment, and the other of constant hustle for more – more wealth, more things, more status, more social media likes, more assets, more productivity, more throughput…. Paradoxically, even amid material abundance, there remains a drive for more, a cultural value system of status linked to extraordinary wealth accumulation regardless of actual human physical or psychological needs. The globe’s economic systems require such constant growth, individuals do not. And people are starting to push back against the grind and the hustle that they put in service to economic imperatives.

Previously commonly found in their natural habitats of dull and mediocre suburbia or the extreme in-your-face activism of post-growth ideology hippy communes, there is a nascent uprising of an anti-work brigade: a realisation that the fisherman’s life deserves the tick over the investment banker’s. This post-productivity shift is going live mainstream across the world.  Closer to home in the GBA, even, a disquieting anti-work pitch is starting to trend much to the chagrin of the authorities.

Escaping the grind

Just last week, a comment by CCTV host Sa Beining went viral after making a joke at a Guangdong tourism promotional event for Danxia Mountain. As a place well known to relax and decompress, especially for urban workers, Sa’s quip – which can be translated as “As long as I’m not working, I’ll come to Danxia Mountain” – resonated with audiences. It was an axiom so out of place at a tourism promotion event that it highlighted the obvious constraints placed on workers to rest and relax: the pace and demands of our modern working lives.

Within all jokes lies an element of danger, therein the humour. The danger here is the threat to the orthodoxy that requires humans to have a work ethic that contributes to economic growth and productivity improvements. A diminishing willingness to work the hustle, expressed through humour about escaping the 996 grind (9 am–9 pm, 6 days/week), might just be signalling the end of an era.

The age of productivity

As Cal Newport put it many years ago, the Post-Productivity World is the end of what he calls The Age of Productivity: from 2004, Merlin Mann commenced blogging about how to become more productive using technology, eventually achieving effortless work and hyper-efficiency. Just four short years later, Mann changed his mind. Satisfaction and well-being at work come from the meaning inherent in the work. The shift was to the idea of a workplace as a place of purpose and a philosophy about what constitutes meaningful work. It was a rejection of productivity porn – as some would call it – that was central to Mann’s fame. How do we reconcile the demands of the economy with humanity’s drive for meaning and purpose?

We have been here before. As each new technology entered the workplace, visions of shorter working weeks enabled by productivity gains were predicted and promised. Our leisure time was about to increase, or so we thought. Instead, we just kept up the effort and the hours and increased the output with the assistance of more capital and sophisticated technology. The work ethic and the norm to strive, as John Maynard Keynes predicted nearly 100 years ago, and maintaining a competitive edge in the marketplace remain strong forces.

AI and the meaning of work

Enter AI. This time, the technology might be disruptive enough to change the nature of and rationale of work itself. Firstly, fear of AI’s displacement of jobs, coupled with economic downturn and unemployment in the GBA has created anxiety about the instability of work. If the job might not be around in the near future, why invest so much effort? The 2026 Gallup report “State of the Global Workplace” found that worker engagement globally is around only 20%. This can show up in the phenomenon of “quiet quitting” – doing the job but only the bare minimum. In the Chinese context, “lying flat” is a highly controversial and disapproved slang term to describe a similar response. This apparently anti-work counterculture – and thus its danger – is a worker’s resignation to having and expecting less in terms of material success. It does, however, prioritise psychological well-being whilst maintaining a sufficient lifestyle. Its appearance absolutely demands a reconceptualization of work itself. The fisherman’s ethos resurfaces.

The second relevance of AI is its ability to make human efficiency redundant. The exponential productivity gains predicted in the age of AI may attenuate the requirement of workers to be obedient in the service of economic growth. Instead, work – again as our Mexican fisherman knows – acts in service of societal health and wellbeing.  Good Work is not just what is done, but its value to society and individuals.

Work, far from being the problem, is the solution for community well-being, as many workers who denounced it by lying flat now recognise.  The pursuit of Good Work, as described by author and academic Kat Page, is a movement. Page argues that work is more than an economic necessity; it is indeed critical to human health and well-being, and one of the “most powerful public health interventions we have.”

The post-productivity movement is a renouncement of the worshipping of efficiency and human productivity hacks in favour of well-being, community connections, and simple pleasures (anyone for fishing?). Now that AI can deliver the productivity side of the equation, the nature of work remains to be reimagined and redesigned. By Leanda Lee