07/31/2025

As Old Ways Break Down, It's Time to Seek Inconvenience

The traditional business knowledge system is giving way to AI disruption

There's a quiet unraveling happening in our companies, boardrooms and personal lives, a slow erosion of what used to work. Leaders feel it first. A little more tired. A little more overwhelmed. A little more disconnected. For decades, we have built business leadership on the promise that knowledge, speed and certainty were our greatest assets. That if we just mastered more — more analysis, more credentials, more tools — we would find meaning, mastery and control.

But the game is changing. And for those of us who have built our identities around propositional knowing, our intellect and our cleverness, this shift doesn’t just feel professional. It feels existential.

We are living through the death of a knowledge system. That’s the argument Nicolas Michaelsen makes in his recent essay. He maps the collapse with sobering clarity: a billion global knowledge workers, $1.7 trillion in student debt, an entire society built on the primacy of abstract information, all suddenly made fragile by the arrival of artificial intelligence and a deeper cultural fatigue. But beneath the statistics lies something more intimate: a quiet grief. Many of us were not just taught what to know; we were taught how to be through knowing. And now, that scaffolding is dissolving.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Rolling Stone.