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The legend of Sisyphus goes like this: As punishment for cheating death and embarrassing the gods, he is banished to the underworld and sentenced to push a boulder up a hill. As Sisyphus nears the peak, the boulder rolls back down, and he must start over. And the episode repeats for eternity. I risk sounding melodramatic by comparing this story to the plight of the employed in 2026. Fair enough. But consider, if you will, the cycles in which a modern worker finds herself. She masters a new skill, and its deemed outdated. She learns a new software, and is told to use a different one. She gets a new boss, and the company is reorganized. She applies for a job, and gets no response. She lands a new job, and the job is dissolved. The dark core of the story of Sisyphus is not that his toil is repetitive or even that its eternal. Its that the work is erased as soon as its done. The punishmentapparently the worst that the Greek gods could think ofis to accomplish nothing. If our skills and our jobs and the fruits of our labor are simply meaningless, are we not also climbing that hill with our own boulders? The problem of change fatigue Change fatigue is just that: fatigue. This has been studied, quite extensively, by psychologists. A 2024 long-term study of more than 50,000 workers in Germany found that organizational changeslike reorgs, layoffs, outsourcing, and mergersare linked to things like sleep disturbance, nervousness, tiredness, and depression, and that the more changes an individual undergoes, the more likely they are to have these symptoms. Organizational change is often implemented at the cost of employees working conditions and health, the researchers conclude. Dutch academics studied the effects of repeated changes in a big European bank (they wouldnt say which one) and found that the more change that workers experienced, the more likely they were to feel change fatigue. And the more fatigued they felt, the more likely they were to resist the next change. The more resistant employees became, the less likely it was that the companys changes would succeed. But even those who supported the goals of the change were just as resistant as their unsupportive coworkers. The problem wasnt the change itself; it was the knowledge that another change would come along right after it, wiping out the last. The company couldnt be trusted. Says the employee to the employer: Its not me; its you. A 2026 report from McLean & Company called change fatigue an operational nightmare. The scholars who studied the relationship between repetitive changes and employee resistance likened executives tendency to reorganize to a gambling habit. When there is no achievementonly work Work is becoming less repetitive. Automation and reorgs and reskilling mean that what we did yesterday, or the way we did it, is not what well do tomorrow. Software engineers dont have to write every line of code, recruiters dont have to review every application, and customer service reps no longer have to review and tag every ticketan AI agent can do all of that. So the ennui felt in the modern workplace is not the result of tedium, but of constant change that wipes out the progress of the individual. Why climb yet another hill only to find yourself at the bottom again? There is no achievementonly work. In 1942’s The Myth of Sisyphus, philosopher Albert Camus describes two natural responses to the meaninglessness of toil: that the suffering will either redeem or defeat. But he prescribes something else: defiance. Camus believed that the most important part of the story is when Sisyphus descends the hill, fully aware of the useless task ahead. What is he thinking? One must imagine Sisyphus happy, he writes, not glibly. Happy, because he recognizes how absurd his situation is. Happy, because he is free from illusion. Thats Camus definition of defiance. Defiance for the 21st century worker may be rejecting the illusion that work must be meaningful to make the worker meaningful. The gods in the myth of Sisyphus demanded the climb. Todays gods demand the climb, but also the method, the enthusiasm, and the willingness to pretend it will last. They should not be surprised when workers stop pretending.
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E-Commerce
On February 10, the Environmental Protection Agency said it would ditch its endangerment findingthe mechanism that allows the government to regulate climate pollution. It’s “the single biggest attack in U.S. history on federal authority to tackle the climate crisis,” Manish Bapna, president and CEO of the environmental nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a recent press briefing. Here’s a brief primer on what the rule is and what the repeal might mean. What is the endangerment finding? In 2009, the EPA issued a ruling saying that six greenhouse gasesincluding carbon dioxide and methanewere a danger to public health and welfare, citing a mountain of scientific evidence. The EPA issues similar endangerment findings for every pollutant it regulates, from mercury to ozone. (In the case of greenhouse gases, its known as the endangerment finding because it was a landmark decision.) Once an endangerment finding is in place, the EPA is required to regulate the pollutant and propose emission standards. What led up to it? When the Clean Air Act passed in 1970, it tasked the EPA with regulating pollutants that threaten health or welfareincluding the climate. The agency didn’t initially regulate greenhouse gases, but in the late 1990s it acknowledged it had the authority to act. In 2003, the Bush EPA reversed course, declaring that CO2 and other greenhouse gases werent air pollutants. The Supreme Court overruled that four years later, calling greenhouse gases unambiguously pollutants and ordering the EPA to act on science and set vehicle standards. What regulations did it help create? In 2023, the EPA finalized a rule to reduce methane, a potent greenhouse gas, at oil and gas plants. In 2024, the agency created rules to tackle greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, which are responsible for around a quarter of the countrys climate pollution. The EPA also finalized clean cars standards to reduce pollution from passenger cars, light trucks, and vans, and new standards for heavy-duty trucks; transportation accounts for around 28% of U.S. emissions. Now what? The repeal is specifically tied to vehicle emission standards, so that’s what the administration will try to ditch next. Although the methane and power plant regulations also rely on the endangerment finding, those will take extra steps to undo. (Its worth noting, however, that the EPA has already proposed getting rid of the power plant regulations and delayed implementing the methane rule.) It’s likely that the changes could eventually fail in court; since 2009, the impacts from climate change have become even more obvious, from more extreme heat waves to more destructive wildfires, storms, and rising seas. The Trump administration is recycling the Bush administration’s arguments that CO2 and other greenhouse gases aren’t air pollutants, which the Supreme Court already rejected. What do the changes mean for business? Some automakers, including Ford, have argued for stability in greenhouse gas regulations and supported the EPAs vehicle emission standards. Regulatory uncertainty makes it harder for companies to plan. “Undermining the endangerment finding would create more chaos, risk, and uncertainty for businesses already grappling with rising costs, extreme weather, and market volatility,” says Sean Hackett, a senior manager for energy transition at the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund. “We’re thinking about it within the bigger context that this rollback is just the latest in the series of actions that threaten business stability, investment, and innovation.” The American Petroleum Institute has said that although it supports the repeal of emission standards for vehicles, it believes that the EPA has the authority to regulate climate pollution from power plants and other stationary sources. (Legal experts from the Natural Resources Defense Council argue that there isn’t a distinction, and that both types of pollution can be regulated.) API supprts methane regulations and says that the industry is working to reduce emissions. For automakers that are already dealing with the loss of EV incentives, it’s one more factor that could push American companies further behind global competitors that are moving to electric cars. “Repealing the finding doesn’t remove climate risk or investor expectations or global market demandswhat it does do is it removes that stable federal reference point that companies use to plan,” Hackett says. “The regulatory whiplash from removing the endangerment finding would make it harder to sequence their investments in things like engines, batteries, supply chains, and workforce training. Then that uncertainty itself becomes a material financial risk.”
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E-Commerce
We talk constantly about agein politics, in leadership, in debates about retirement and the future of work. Yet we rarely stop to ask a simple question: What is age, exactly? Most of us rely on a single number, as if people were stamped with a vintage year like bottles of wine. But age is far from a fixed or universal metric. It is multidimensional, deeply unequal, and increasingly misleading when used as a shortcut for ability, potential, or readiness. As people live longer, change careers more often, and experience work in different conditions, understanding what age actually measures is becoming essential for companies trying to build fairer workplaces and adapt to demographic shifts. The future of work will not be shaped by older workers alone. It will be shaped by widening age gaps. And by how organizations respond. Chronological age: The number of years since birth This most familiar kind of age governs everything from school entry and voting rights to retirement policies and workplace norms. Yet this way of organizing human life is a relatively recent bureaucratic invention, made possible by modern administrative systems. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/PhotoLVitaud-169.jpg","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/PhotoLVitaud-11.jpg","eyebrow":"","headline":"\u003Cstrong\u003ESubscribe to Laetitia@Work\u003C\/strong\u003E","dek":"Women power the worlds productivity its time we talked more about it. Explore a woman-centered take on work, from hidden discrimination to cultural myths about aging and care. Dont miss the next issue subscribe to Laetitia@Work.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Learn More","ctaUrl":"http:\/\/laetitiaatwork.substack.com","theme":{"bg":"#2b2d30","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#3b3f46","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91472264,"imageMobileId":91472265,"shareable":false,"slug":""}} Chronological age made sense in standardized industrial societies, where careers were linear, life expectancy was shorter, and work was more uniform. Today, it is a blunt instrument. As a predictor of health, performance, motivation, or longevity, it performs poorly. Two people of the same age can have radically different capacities and trajectories, shaped by education, income, working conditions, stress, and life events. But organizations still lean heavily on this number to make decisions about hiring, promotion, development, and exit. In a world of increasingly unequal aging, this reliance is becoming not just inaccurate but unfair. Biological age: The condition of the body and brain Advances in medicine and epidemiology show that people age at dramatically different speeds. Some 55-year-olds have the physiological profile of someone in their forties. Others show signs typically associated with much later life. These differences are shaped by socioeconomic conditions, education, exposure to chronic stress, environmental factors, and levels of autonomy at work. Long hours, repetitive strain, shift work, and lack of control take a biological toll over time. Thats why for some workers longer careers are perfectly sustainable while for others, worn down by decades of strain, working longer can mean never enjoying a healthy retirement. Biological age forces us to confront an uncomfortable truth: Aging is not equal, and work is one of the most powerful drivers of that inequality. Subjective age: All about self-perception Most adults report feeling younger than their chronological age, sometimes by a decade or more. And thats great because feeling younger is often associated with better physical health, cognitive resilience, and emotional well-being. But the gap matters. Feeling moderately younger can be energizing. Feeling dramatically younger can slip into denial, leading people to ignore health signals or overestimate physical limits. Subjective age shapes confidence, ambition, openness to learning, how people interpret feedback, and how they imagine their future. Interestingly, as people age their definition of what counts as old tends to move upward. Its a reminder that age is psychological and cultural, constantly renegotiated. Professional age: The number of years in a company or a craft How long you have been doing a particular role or craft or been working in an industry matters probably more than the birth date on your ID. Its increasingly common to be a beginner at 50, a mid-career experimenter at 60, or a seasoned expert at 30. People retrain, pivot industries, take career breaks, and reinvent themselves in ways that would have been rare a generation ago. Alas, many organizations still assume that chronological age and expertise rise together, which causes a mismatch between talent practices and reality. Experienced beginners are underestimated. Young experts are questioned. The gaps between these different ages tend to grow Gaps grow between chronological and biological age, shaped by inequality and work conditions. Between chronological and subjective age, shaped by health, mindset, and culture. Between chronological and professional age, shaped by career transitions and lifelong learning. Workplaces built on the assumption that age neatly tracks with ability, experience, or stamina are increasingly out of sync with society. As these gaps widen, age-based policies become less sustainable and more discriminatory. And they waste enormous amounts of human capital. Make the workplace more age-agnostic To address these issues, we need to move toward a more age-agnostic approach. For example:1. Stop using age as a proxy for skill, adaptability, or potential. Move away from coded assumptions about being too young or too old. Base decisions on actual competencies, learning habits, motivation, and the cognitive and physical requirements of roles. Chronological age predicts little of this. 2. Redesign work for people who age differently. Introduce more flexibility in schedules and locations, invest in ergonomic improvements, rotate tasks to reduce physical strain, increase autonomy, and offer phased retirement or transitions into mentoring and knowledge-transfer roles. The goal is to reduce the biological cost of work. 3. Treat reskilling as a lifelong process. As career transitions become normal, invest in training without age limits. Support adult apprenticeships and coaching for second- and third-career moves. Fifty-year-old juniors may be among the most underutilized talent pools. 4. Actively audit for hidden age bias. Scrutinize recruiting and promotion practices for coded language (high-energy, digital native) and reluctance to train older employees. Address ageism with explicit guidelines and accountability. 5. Promote intergenerational collaboration. Build mixed-age teams where experience and fresh perspectives reinforce each other through reverse mentoring, cross-generational projects, and shared problem-solving. Age diversity is also cognitive diversity. Age is not a single measure. It is a constellation of biological, psychological, social, and professional realities that rarely align. The companies that will thrive in an aging, unequal, multistage career world are the ones that understand these gaps, reduce the inequalities behind them, and design systems that support people across long, varied working lives. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/PhotoLVitaud-169.jpg","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/PhotoLVitaud-11.jpg","eyebrow":"","headline":"\u003Cstrong\u003ESubscribe to Laetitia@Work\u003C\/strong\u003E","dek":"Women power the worlds productivity its time we talked more about it. Explore a woman-centered take on work, from hidden discrimination to cultural myths about aging and care. 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Category:
E-Commerce
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