We’ve been living inside this for years. The schedules that change week to week. The review meetings where the target moves every quarter. The sudden reorg. The layoff email. The hiring freeze that somehow still expects you to cover two departed coworkers’ jobs for the same salary.

It’s not one bad company or one bad year. It’s a pattern. And companies of the future are eventually going to have to reverse a lot of what they’ve spent the last decade trying to do.

Unpredictability as a business model

The modern workforce is built on instability.

Not just at Starbucks, where you don’t know if you’re working Tuesday or Thursday until the algorithm decides. It’s also the white-collar version: goals that get rewritten mid-cycle, “stretch targets” that were never reachable, performance frameworks that somehow always conclude you need to do more with less.

Then there’s the bigger stuff. Mass layoffs framed as “efficiency.” Hiring freezes that never thaw. The quiet understanding that loyalty is a one-way street.

And now, more recently, there’s AI, sold as a tool to free you up, but in reality, it mostly just means fewer people and more work for those who remain.

What all of this has in common is a lack of transparency and predictability. You’re supposed to plan a life: rent, childcare, groceries, a future, on top of a job that refuses to be planned around.

We bring it home

We spend so much of our lives at work. Of course this stuff leaks into everything else.

When your schedule is chaos, your sleep is chaos. When your job might disappear next month, every purchase feels like a risk. When the goalposts keep moving, you stop trusting institutions, managers, even yourself.

A population that can’t predict its own week is not a stable society. It’s a tired one. An anxious one. One that’s always half-bracing for the next surprise.

Why businesses keep doing it

From the company’s side, this has looked like a win.

Unstable workers accept lower wages. They’re less likely to push back. They’re grateful to have anything. And on the consumer side, people who don’t have time, or energy to cook, clean, plan, or wait will pay almost any price for convenience.

So you get this weird loop: squeeze labor until people are too exhausted to do basic life stuff, then sell them the convenience that exhaustion created. Profit on both ends. I mean, this is ideal capitalism, right?

It works. Until it doesn’t.

What happens when the workers are gone?

Here’s the part that keeps nagging at me.

What happens when there are fewer and fewer workers, and therefore fewer and fewer consumers?

You can’t profitmaxx your way out of a world where nobody has money, time, or stability left to buy what you’re selling. An economy that treats workers as disposable eventually discovers that those same people were the demand side of the ledger.

At some point, firms are going to have to change. Not because it feels nice. Because the model eats itself.

Who blinks first?

The question I can’t shake is how that change actually happens.

Does it take a worker uprising, people finally refusing to keep absorbing the cost of someone else’s quarterly earnings call? Suppressing the desires of corporations and shareholders who are just trying to extract one more point of margin?

Or do the corporations themselves eventually come to this realization? That predictability isn’t a perk. That stable schedules, clear expectations, and durable employment aren’t charity, they’re infrastructure for a functioning economy.

I don’t know which one it is. Maybe both. Maybe neither.

But I do know this: the instability of work isn’t a side effect. It’s the product. And products that destroy their own customers don’t last forever.