Purpose and identity in the age of longevity and AI

What does it mean to find purpose across a longer working life — and what happens when AI threatens the very identities we have built through work? These were the questions at the heart of a recent Thinkers50 Deep Dive event, Re-purposing: Renewing Purpose Across Longer Working Lives, hosted in partnership with London Business School's SARI Foundation Institute for Work, Careers and Longevity.

The panel brought together LBS Professors, and Academic Co-Directors of the SARI Institute, Lynda Gratton and Herminia Ibarra with Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Chief Science Officer at Russell Reynolds Associates, and Gianpiero Petriglieri, Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD.

The existential workplace

For Dr Petriglieri, work has become an existential exercise: a vehicle for self-definition and self-discovery. "You want to be anchored and free at the same time. Purpose is the experience of being in trouble in a good way. We want to experience ourselves at work."

Where organisations once offered a coherent bundle of people, play, practice and purpose, he argued that the central problem of the 21st century is no longer control — as it was in the 20th — but freedom itself.

Authenticity in the age of AI

Chamorro-Premuzic pushed back on the promise of freedom that organisations have sold employees for the past decade or so. "Being told to be yourself isn't an honest command — it's an invitation to erode the gap between your professional and personal self. Most people don't want that."

He raised a sharper concern around AI: sycophantic feedback loops that produce "sanitised versions of ourselves, getting fake feedback from fake people." With companies increasingly optimising work for AI rather than people, he warned that our career identities face an existential threat. "For the first time, we found ourselves — the thinking species — doing everything without really thinking."

His remedy to AI causing people to fake their authenticity: "Engineering serendipity and squeezing out what AI cannot do is now an imperative."

Professor Gratton feels that part of the answer lies in being curious and having adventures, something that AI cannot do. Adventure is an important thread in her latest book Living the 100-Year Life, in which she expounds that a longer life means more time to try new things, but only if people allow themselves to take those chances. She feels that adventure isn’t just for the young, it’s a life thread that people can keep weaving at every stage of life.

Connection over purpose

On the question of purpose itself, Professor Ibarra noted that people find it easier to articulate what they don't want. She sees the process of finding purpose as involving “a lot of endings, new beginnings, and confusing times in the wilderness”. With 70% of people tying their identity to their job, the coupling of purpose and employment has become precarious in an era of rapid job displacement.

Her new book The Bonus Years: Reinventing our longer working lives, out in January 2027, addresses exactly this: how to navigate endings, messy middles and transitions with agency, adaptability and resilience. "People don't understand what a treasure they have in their networks," she said. The importance of networks and human connectivity may be the event's most resonant idea: "The real thing to talk about is not purpose, but connection."