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One of Michaels friends told him recently, Im not burned out; Im just feeling empty. She shows up, meets deadlines, and manages to smile in meetings. But her work feels weightless and disconnected from purpose. Shes not alone. Gallups 2025 State of the Global Workplace report found that only 21% of employees worldwide are engaged, and just one in three say theyre thriving. Thats not a blipits a warning signal for leaders and cultures. When emptiness shows up at work, our reflex is to pathologize: Is this burnout? Do I need a diagnosis? Sometimes, yesclinical conditions require clinical care. However, many of todays struggles are fundamentally philosophical, centered on issues such as purpose, values, identity, and the meaning of life. Those dont always need a medical label; they need better questions. Why We Need a Different Lens Disengagement is expensive. Gallup estimates that low engagement costs the global economy $8.8 trillion annually, nearly 9% of global GDP. Manager engagement is also slipping, dropping three points in 2024, with a ripple effect on teams. The human cost? Teams feel flat, leaders are running on fumes, and organizations are mistaking busyness for progress. Cognitive scientist John Vervaeke refers to our current moment as a meaning crisisa cultural shortfall in making sense of our lives. That frame helps us see that the emptiness that many feel isnt always a disorder; often, its a signal. Therapy is essential when theres a clinical risk. But when the primary challenge is purposenot pathologyphilosophy can be the right first (or parallel) step. What Philosophical Counseling Looks Like at Work Philosophy at work doesnt show up as abstract debates about Plato in the break room. It shows up as structured reflection in moments when leaders feel stuck, conflicted, or unclear. Unlike traditional coaching, which often emphasizes goals and performance, or therapy, which focuses on healing emotional wounds, philosophical counseling creates clarityhelping you slow down to examine the ideas, assumptions, and values that drive decisions. In practice, this means creating a conversational space where leaders can explore the deeper questions that often remain unaddressed in quarterly reviews or strategic planning sessions. Its not about diagnosing or prescribing. Its about holding up a mirror to how you think, and then gently but persistently asking whether those patterns are serving you. Sometimes, testing your core ideas against a contrary philosophical position helps you change your mind, but it also helps you formulate your idea with better precision and focus. So, a philosophical counseling session isnt about advice. Its an inquiry guided by questions like: What do you mean by success here? (Define the concept before you chase it.) Which assumptions are you treating as facts? (Surface the hidden rules youre following.) What obligations follow from your values? (Tie action to meaning, not mood.) One VP I worked with felt behind in her career. She wasnt looking to change jobs; she was questioning whether she should. From the outside, her role was a success story: she was leading complex cross-functional work, mentoring future leaders, and shaping long-term strategy. But because her peers seemed to leapfrog into splashier titles, she had internalized the myth that a career only counts if it moves in a straight, upward line. Together, we explored economist David Galensons distinction between conceptual and experimental innovators: some leaders peak early with bold, disruptive visions, while others build mastery through experience, iteration, and depth. When she looked at her own path through that lens, she realized her current role was giving her exactly what an experimental innovator needsbreadth, autonomy, and repeated opportunities to refine her craft. Her progress wasnt stalled; it was accumulating. Once she saw her trajectory as cumulative rather than delayed, the pressure loosened. She didnt need a new job; she needed a new narrative. And with that reframing, her energy and her confidence returned. Another founder I worked with was trapped in performative productivity, equating worth with constant output. After interrogating his deeper purpose, he shifted from chasing vanity metrics to making value-aligned bets. Hiring became more intentional. Product decisions became braver. And his leadership became far more sustainable. Practical Steps for Leaders & Organizations The goal isnt to turn executives into armchair philosophers. Its to equip them with tools that help cut through noise, clarify assumptions, and ground decisions in meaning rather than momentum. Philosophers have long been aware of their reputation for getting lost in thought. As Plato recounts in Theaetetus, Thales once fell into a ditch while contemplating the heavens. Leaders dont need another abstract framework piled onto their already full plates. Philosophical counseling brings philosophy back to the ground, connecting it with everyday problems and offering clear practices that create space for reflection and insight without derailing productivity. When leaders bring this lens into the workplace, they not only strengthen their own claritythey normalize purposeful inquiry across the culture. Here are some concrete ways to start weaving philosophy into your leadership tool kit and organizational systems: Run an Assumption Audit. With a partner, list current dilemmas. For each, ask: What must be true for my conclusion to hold? How else might I interpret the facts? Institutionalize Socratic Stand-Ups. Once a month, replace a staff meeting with a facilitated dialogue on a first-principles question (e.g., What are we optimizing for?) and publish the reasoning behind the decision, not just the outcome. Offer a Meaning Map workshop. Help leaders chart their values, obligations, and behaviors. If values dont result in better choices, theyre not valuestheyre slogans. Use AI thoughtfully. Employees increasingly confide in chatbots. Health experts caution against relying on generative AI for mental health, as it lacks safeguards and nuance. Organizations should establish policies and direct people to seek human assistance when needed. Return-to-office and hybrid work have scrambled the social fabric. However, micro-rituals matter: leave five minutes for human check-ins on Zoom, host optional philosophy salons, or design in-person days around connction. These arent time-wasters; theyre trust builders. Philosophy provides leaders and teams with a disciplined approach to thinking about what mattersenabling them to act with clarity, rather than merely coping. Your colleague who feels empty may not need a diagnosis. She may need to reorient her thinking by asking more effective questions. And those questions may be the most practical tools we have for navigating the complexity of modern work.
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Finding the perfect (and legal) image for your blog post, social media update, or presentation is about as fun as doing your own taxes. You want something high-quality, relevant, and most importantlyfree. Fear not, budget-conscious content creators. I’ve been using free images for years now, and Ive routinely leveraged three dynamite resources that specialize in stunning, royalty-free imagery. So, put away your wallets: Were going content hunting. Unsplash First stop: Unsplash. This site is a veritable goldmine of breathtaking, high-resolution photography, all generously contributed by a community of talented photographers. Whether youre looking for sweeping landscapes, intimate portraits, or artfully arranged still-life photos, chances are good that youll find it here. The search functionality is top-notch, and the sheer volume of images means you’re almost guaranteed to find something that perfectly fits your needs. Plus, their licensing is super straightforward: free to use for commercial and non-commercial purposes, no attribution required. Pexels Pexels is another heavy hitter in the free stock image space, and for good reason. Like Unsplash, it boasts a massive library of beautiful, high-quality photos and, as a bonus, the site offers free stock videos as well. The user interface is clean and intuitive, making it a breeze to browse and download. What sets Pexels apart for me is its excellent curated collections. Need images for a tech blog? They’ve got a collection for that. Looking for food photography? Yep, they’ve got you covered. It’s a great way to discover new and relevant visuals without having to dig through endless search results. Pixabay Rounding out our trifecta of free image collections is my personal favorite, Pixabay. This site is a true jack-of-all-trades, offering not just photos, but also illustrations, vector graphics, videos, music tracks, and even sound effects. The sheer variety here is impressive, making it a great go-to when you need a little more than just a standard photograph. Pixabay’s community of contributors is vast, resulting in a diverse range of styles and subjects. Their search filters are also quite robust, allowing you to narrow down your results by orientation, color, and even type of media.
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Somehow, it didnt leak. When I caught up with Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe after the companys AI & Autonomy Day keynote on December 11 at its Palo Alto headquarters, he marveled that the company had managed to keep the events news under wraps until it was ready for its big reveal. It didand there was a lot to discuss. At the keynote, Rivian unveiled its Gen 3 platform, which will turn the maker of EV trucks, SUVs, and vans into an autonomy company, a focus he says will subsume the whole business of transportation. Debuting late next year in a version of the upcoming R2 SUV, the Rivian Autonomy Computer platform is powered by a chip the company designed itself, the RAP1 (Rivian Autonomy Processor). The R2s self-driving features will also draw on data from a lidar unit that sits inconspicuously at the top of the windshielda far cry from the spinning lidar towers atop vehicles such as Waymos. (Controversially, Teslas cars dont use lidar sensors.) Rivian also showed off a new voice-controlled user interface called the Rivian Assistant that will be available as an update for its current vehicles as well as for the R3. A bet on the future of car interfaces shifting toward talking rather than tapping on screens, it features integration with Google Calendarhinting at the kind of productivity-related features that might become more useful as cars take over more of the work of driving themselves. I spoke with Scaringe about all these topics and more. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. At least in broad strokes, how much of what you announced today was part of the original Rivian vision and road map? Well, that was 20 years ago. But something like today is the result of many thousands of people working on it for the last few years. Development on the platforms we showed today started in 2022. One of the threads connecting a lot of your news is you doing stuff yourself rather than being dependent on other parties. Was there a period where you werent sure which way to go? Maybe the way to answer that is that when we launched in 2021, we had what we call our Gen 1 architecture. And it was a very different approach than what went into our Gen 2 and, of course, what’s going into our Gen 3. We had a perception platformsome of which was our own, much of which was not our ownthat fed into a planner, which was our own, and made a set of rules-based decisions around how to drive the vehicle. It was very basic driver assistance: low level two features. And by virtue of that being the architecture, we had a natural limit. We realized that as we approached the launchthat the world was going to shift away from these more deterministic and classical systems to a true AI-based system. Its sort of ironic. When we say self-driving, we might think historically it’s always been AI. But in the beginning, actually, there was no AI. Some of it was very sophisticated if-then statements with good machine vision. What its shifted to now is true AI, and that happened in the early 2020s. As that was happening, we came to the view that we needed to completely shift our approach. And when we made that decision in early 2022, we approached it as a clean sheet. With that clean-sheet approach, it was, Let’s design our own perception platform. Let’s design our own compute platform with Gen 2, leveraging Nvidia as a supplier of the chips themselves, the inference platforms themselves, and go build a data flywheel that will allow us to build a neural net-based approach. The vehicles ultimately launched in the middle of 2024, a little less than a year and a half ago. And then, in parallel to that, we also kicked off some big hardware efforts, the biggest of which is an in-house chip. To go from zerono chip design team, no chip in-house, no chip IPto launching a chip takes time, it takes many hundreds of millions of dollars, it takes a very, very large organization. But we made the decision in 22 and we’ve been working towards it. Somehow, it didnt leak. But it’s now nice that we can talk about it publicly and it’s going to be in the vehicles next year. An AI-centric approach required this vertical integration of perception. It doesn’t necessitate owning compute, but owning compute allows you to deliver it at a lower cost level and, in our case, a higher performance level. We just have such a conviction that [autonomy] isnt just a part of the auto industry. If you look out a little bit, this is the whole business. And so we built this view that where we deploy most of our R&D should be this category. Was it completely obvious you needed lidar? There’s a thinking around lidar that needs to be shed, which is that they’re expensive and mechanically complex. The old Velodyne lidars, even what you see on the roads today, they were really complex sensors. But they’re now very low cost, extremely reliable, and solid-state based. Ten years ago, the best-performing lidar you could buy was maybe $70,000. Five years ago, it was maybe $5,000. Today it’s in the low hundreds of dollars. And so it’s become so cost-effective at turning the entire fleet into a ground truth fleet. It’s really helpful for training your cameras, especially in adverse conditions. When you peel back the onion and you look at the cost trajectory of the sensor, it’s become this sort of strange debate, because Tesla’s taken such a stance on it. But it wasn’t really a debate. If it was a $10,000 sensor, it would’ve been a different story. But when it’s a few-hundred-dollars decision, it’s much easier to make. Your new assistants Google Calendar integration made me realize that if I don’t have to spend quite as much time thinking about driving, there’s a lot of opportunity to be productive in the car. To what degree are you trying to build a richly powerful assistant? Google Calendar is just one of what will become many instances of integrations. Today there’s a limited set that have been set up to go agent-to-agent. But any platform that’s going to truly survive, and not just get gobbled up by an AI platform, will need to become very, very capable in terms of enabling agent-to-agent. Effectively like SDKs [software development kits] that just make it very easy to plug in. The goal is that essentially any app that you might want to use, we’ll be able to plug into our agents and it’ll be seamless. So you can reach across apps like you saw today. You talked to the car, the car was able to reach into Google and find the calendar. We were able to tell it to move something, and it reached back to Google through an agent and moved eveything around. It’s the tip of the iceberg. All these things will start to become so natural where the car becomes like a personal assistant. If you want to move your schedule or order food or schedule someone to come to your house to fix the plumbing, all this stuff just becomes very, very easy to do. And if you are no longer driving the car, you may want to be able to use the car to help you with more of these things. Do you have any sense as to what the future looks like in terms of robotaxis and autonomous private vehicles coexisting? I definitely think they’ll coexist. Theyre anything but mutually exclusive. The existence of level four [autonomy] is what enables both of them, and the technology from a level four point of view is the same. We’re focused on the tech, and the initial instance planned is a personally owned vehicle. But it doesn’t preclude us from doing robotaxis or rideshare. Rideshare today is such a small percentage of miles. I used to be of the view that we’d go from 99% of the world’s miles being in personally owned vehicles to 50% being in personally owned ones and the other half of the world’s miles being in shared. Maybe that happens, but I think it’s probably more likely to go from 99% to 90%. Maybe that’s because I have kids now, and the complexities of car seats and soccer balls and soccer outfits. I think it will be different country to country. When you look at the wealth level in the United States, if you can afford a car today, a lot of people would still rather own one and have the simplicity of it always being available for them and their family. But I actually don’t need to have a strong conviction on this either way. If theres a heavy shift in the model of consumption, we’re equally ready for that. Im surprised how much attention the business model gets. If one end of the spectrum is traditional ownership as we know it today, and the other end of the spectrum is pay as you go, we’re not being very imaginative. There are going to be a lot of things in the middle. Maybe I own the vehicle during the daytime and somebody else uses the vehicle at night. Maybe the vehicle’s mine during the week and another family’s during the weekend. Maybe the vehicle’s shared among five or six people as opposed to infinitely shared. There’s just going to be a spectrum of new ways to consume mobility, the moment the vehicle can drive itself. And our view is we’re going to exist across that entire spectrum. But the only thing that’s absolutely certain that’s necessary for any point on that spectrum is level four. Robotaxis dont work with level three. Personal level four obviously doesn’t work with level three. You need level four. So that’s what we’re focused on.
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