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Topic: Ageism (7)
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Listen to Richard’s story as you read it (below).
Dawn drove north, past winter fields and lines of bare oak trees and finally parked next to a snow bank in her grandfather’s driveway.
She checked her email before getting out of her car.
“Position update.”
The company had “shifted to an AI-driven workflow” and no longer hired junior designers. A link followed.
At her grandparents’ farmhouse, the kitchen smelled of coffee and browned butter. Richard met her with a hug. His hands were thick, his fingers slightly bent, as if they were still expected to guide the cutting knives in a vat of cheddar cheese in the making.
They sat at the table. Dawn set her laptop down.
“You’re graduating in May!” Richard proclaimed.
“Yeah, and I thought I was all prepared to design book covers,” Dawn replied. “Now it feels like I’m late to my own future.”
Richard waited, giving her room to find the words.
She turned the screen toward him. “AI tools,” she said. “Companies generate covers in minutes. They don’t need people like me. It’s spreading across the kinds of jobs we were told would be safe.”
Richard leaned closer, squinting. “Commodity,” he said, as if tasting the word. “That has a history for me.”
Dawn had heard stories about the family’s small, rural cheddar cheese factory in Wisconsin, the one his father had started and he later operated.
“What happened?” she asked.
Richard’s gaze slid toward the window, toward snow ridges along the fence. “We made cheddar,” he said. “Good cheddar. People in town bought it because they knew us. Then bigger manufacturers got faster. New automation. Bigger equipment. They could ship nationally and still undercut us.”
“So you couldn’t compete,” Dawn confirmed.
“Not on price,” he replied. “Cheddar started selling like flour. Something people grab without thinking. When you compete on price long enough, you start shaving off the parts of yourself you used to protect.”
Dawn felt the word “shaving” settle into her ribs. “That’s what design is becoming,” she said. “Fast output. Not a craft.”
Richard stood and opened the refrigerator. He returned with two small wedges wrapped in paper and set them on the table.
“This is cheddar,” he said, touching the pale one. “This other one kept the lights on.”
He unwrapped the second.
“We switched,” he said. “Not to be fancy. To survive. We made cheeses that still needed hands. Cheeses where someone had to decide when the curd was ready, to notice the day’s milk. Automation could do volume. It could not do certain kinds of care. There were customers who paid for that care because it meant something to them.”
Dawn took a bite. The flavor made her pause, then sit up straighter. “So you found a niche.”
“We found value,” Richard said. “We stopped trying to win a race built for someone else. We sold to small shops and restaurants – and developed stop-in traffic. People who asked questions. People who wanted a place and a person behind the product.”
Dawn looked down at her own hands, the ones that had learned type and color and the quiet confidence of a clean grid.
“I’ve used the AI tools,” she said. “They can throw out options fast. But they don’t know what to keep when restraint is the whole point. They don’t know why a blank margin can make a reader feel lonely in a way that is honest.”
Richard nodded, then surprised her. “Teach me,” he said. “How does a cover earn trust nowadays, when people scroll past so many?”
Dawn blinked. She had come for reassurance – not to go through a lesson plan. Still, she leaned forward. “A cover is a promise,” she said. “It signals genre and mood. It respects the reader. It feels chosen, not produced.”
Richard listened like he was back in the factory, learning a new process. When she finished, he slid a notepad toward her. “Write down what you think still needs a human,” he said.
Dawn wrote: taste, judgment, context, responsibility.
Richard tapped the page. “That’s your challenge,” he said. “Find the job skills that will stay in demand as AI reshapes markets. Skills that turn noise into meaning. Skills tied to trust, reliability, accountability and caring.”
He explained. “Automation made cheddar cheap and available everywhere. It also made certain cheeses more valuable to the people who wanted them because they required more time and more care. AI will make some design cheap and available everywhere. Your work is to find what is going to become rare.”
Outside, snow began to fall, small and steady. Dawn closed her laptop and carefully slid her grandfather’s notepad into her jacket’s pocket. In retrieving the notepad, she felt the grain of the solid-wood table under her fingertips and wondered whether her future family members would purposefully continue to choose and pay a premium for such craftsmanship.
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Age: Our greatest asset!
Jim Hasse, ABC, GCDF retired, author of “52 Shades of Growing Together”
Weekly Stories About Insightful Aging
“It’s impossible not to love someone whose story you’ve heard.” - Mary Lou Kownacki
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AI won’t replace soft skills in the workplace. In fact, AI is going to make soft skills (emotional intelligence, for instance) even more valuable than it ever has been in the modern world.
So, now is the right time for new job searchers to develop their communication, leadership and interpersonal skills by absorbing what Dale Carnegie began publishing 90 years ago.
One of Carnegie's core ideas is that it’s possible to change another person by changing your own behavior with that person. That requires trust and caring, two attributes we desperately need to revive in our society.
What a challenge that is for today’s young people! I think they'll meet that challenge. They are going to harness AI for tremendous social, economic and political changes based on renewed trus*t and caring.
Based on your experience, what tip do you have for young people who are about to transition from school to work?