Nescafe and knowing thyself
Article #4 on identity in the age of AI
Midway through this first season of The Reinventor’s Mindset, I put down the interviewer’s notebook and turned the mic on myself.
No guest. Just me, answering the questions I use to grill other people. The last one undid me: what childhood belief did you have to let go of to become who you are today?
My answer was a jar of Nescafe.
My father got cancer when I was born. The interest rates of the early nineties finished what the cancer started - he lost his packaging factory in Brookvale. We lost the family home in Fairlight and moved into housing commission.
My parents retired on the age pension. No super. No insurance. No safety net. For years, the morning was instant coffee at a kitchen table - until their children were old enough to buy them a home and top up their income.
That is what involuntary transformation looks like up close. Not a forecast. Not a statistic. A jar of Nescafe at a kitchen table, and the belief I built my whole life around: never put my family through financial insecurity again.
It’s why a teenager who wanted to write chose accountancy. What I had to let go of, sitting at that microphone, was the belief underneath that vow: that if I just made the right financial decisions, I could control what happened to the people I love.
I couldn’t. No one can. Three times in my life I’ve had no money to my name and found a way through.
What I learned about myself is that the way through was never the bank balance. It’s knowing you can rebuild. That matters more than the number ever did.
🎙️ Listen to the mid-season reflection on Spotify and Apple or watch below
The identity machinery we need
I’ve spent twenty years inside Australia’s retirement system. The closest thing I have to a specialty is what happens to people when the role that defined them ends. I’ve built products that millions of Australians will land on when they hit that moment.
None of them solve the problem. The financial machinery is in place. The identity machinery is not.
Most readers of this series will, in the next ten years, undergo a transformation they didn’t choose. Three million Australians approaching retirement this decade. Tens of millions of roles will be reshaped by AI before 2030. Different triggers, same question:
Who am I now, and how do I become someone new without losing my self?
The slow work
The capacities that carry you through take years to build - self-knowledge, a domain you own, ground truths that hold under pressure, the ability to keep your own counsel when a confident machine offers to keep it for you.
The person who starts the morning their role ends is too late.
And the work isn’t exotic. A notebook. One domain where you do the slow work yourself. The walk where the weak ideas die. The conversation that never becomes a transcript. The people who can mirror you back to yourself when you’ve stopped recognising the reflection.
It’s the practice of being someone - in the time before the role you built that someone around is taken away.
Know thyself
The Greeks carved it above the temple at Delphi.
Gnothi seauton.
Know thyself.
Most people file it under fridge magnet. I think they meant it as a survival instruction. The decade coming will test the people who enter it. The ones who know themselves will navigate it. The ones who don’t will be navigated by it.
As the involuntary transformation decade arrives, knowing thyself is the antidote to a world that will try to average away everything special about you. My parents found their way to the cafe in the end - carried there by their kids.
The country I’m writing for is the one where the next generation doesn’t need carrying. It gets built one self at a time, by people who did the work before they needed it.
The hardest question I asked that episode is the one I’d put to you:
The role you’ve built yourself around - who would you be without it?
— AJ