By Anne Hendershott
Catholic social doctrine does not consider work as a burden that must be eliminated through engineering, but as a central part of life in which the human person is formed. From Genesis to the Laborem exercens, the Church teaches that the dignity of work does not reside in how new or efficient it is, but in how it forms character, skill, and commitment to the common good. This is precisely what Arthur Brooks overlooks in his essay in Free Press titled “It’s 2028: AI Has Made You Much Happier.”
Brooks imagines a future in which artificial intelligence frees us from what he calls the “complicated” tasks of life. In fact, Brooks treats routine intellectual work as if it were a mere nuisance: email, writing, data processing, repetitive problem sets, the slow accumulation of skills.
Brooks’s vision starts from a premise that the Catholic tradition has long rejected: that work is primarily a burden from which one must escape. In Catholic thought, work is not an obstacle to human flourishing, but one of its main drivers. It is the realm in which we cultivate moral character and responsibility.
For a faithful Catholic, work is the daily practice through which we participate in Creation and contribute to the common good. A society that treats work as a problem that must be eliminated misinterprets both human nature and the moral structure of ordinary life.
Brooks draws a sharp line between “complicated” tasks (solvable, mechanical) and “complex” ones (relational, existential). He seems to believe that these tasks are separate. But in practice, both are intertwined.
The complicated work of preparing a lesson, grading an exam, writing a report, or creating a budget is not alien to the meaning of teaching, tutoring, leading, consulting, strategizing, or forecasting. It is the very substance of the vocation.
When AI eliminates the substance, it risks eliminating the vocation. Brooks fails to see that these tasks are not incidental to learning; they are learning itself. By celebrating a future where artificial intelligence frees us from what Brooks calls “heavy work” or routine tasks, he treats such work as if it were spiritually empty.
However, the Catholic tradition sees the opposite: the slow and repetitive labor of writing, revising, practicing, quantifying, memorizing, and persevering is how our intellect is shaped. It is how we forge character and discipline, and learn to take on responsibilities.
A world in which AI does all the “heavy work” of an online university course—as Einstein promises—may make students feel momentarily happier by being freed from what they may consider the “tedious task” of responding to discussion forums and textbook questions. But it will not make them wiser. And it risks emptying the very disciplines that prepare us for the deeper and “complex” dimensions of life that Brooks claims to value.
When students are introduced to Einstein, they are assured that Einstein is an AI with a computer. He logs into Canvas every day, watches the lectures, reads the essays, writes the papers, participates in discussions, and submits assignments automatically.
While Einstein assures students that “he will work while you sleep,” critics have suggested that, “at a very basic level, Einstein was simply a distillation of what more general-purpose chatbots or AI agents already offer to students: the ability to stop learning anything or doing any academic work themselves, while still holding out the prospect of earning a university degree.”
The biggest flaw in Brooks’s “AI Happiness Theory” is the assumption that leisure, and not work, is the primary driver of human flourishing. The Catholic tradition has always insisted on the opposite: that meaningful work orders the soul toward purpose.
As early as 1963, Josef Pieper warned in his book Leisure: The Basis of Culture that a culture obsessed with escaping work ends up losing the capacity for authentic leisure; the kind of leisure that springs from an inner life shaped by purpose and discipline.
When we treat work as a problem to be solved rather than a practice that forms us, we end up with neither: neither the leisure that was promised, nor certainly the dignity that we abandon by allowing machines to do the work that we should be doing.
In some ways, Brooks’s essay brings to mind the failed university discipline of the 1970s called “Leisure Studies.” As a sociology student at that time, I enrolled in sociology courses called “Leisure Across the Life Cycle” or “Sociology of Leisure” and, of course, the memorable “Sociology of Play.” The content of the courses was based on the belief—now widely discredited—that automation would drastically reduce working hours and create a surplus of free time, and that we would all need help learning to use that time well.
The prediction of an excess of leisure collapsed a decade later, as working hours never decreased, leisure did not expand, and the field quietly shifted its image toward recreation and tourism management.
The fiasco of 1970s Leisure Studies should have taught us that utopian forecasts about abundant free time almost always misinterpret human nature and economic reality. We do not feel more fulfilled when we are freed from effort; we become less formed, less capable, and more dependent.
Brooks’s claim that AI will finally bring the leisure society imagined in the 1970s repeats the same mistake, confusing the absence of work with the presence of meaning.
The real crisis is not how to fill free time, but how to recover a moral vision of work that resists both technocratic utopianism and the despair it inevitably engenders. The promise that AI will free us from the burdens of work is just the latest version of an idea that has already failed before.
Catholic social doctrine offers a much more realistic vision of human flourishing. A culture that hands over all its formative work to machines may gain in comfort and save money, but it will lose the very habits that make genuine leisure possible.
The task ahead is not to escape work, but to reclaim its dignity, so that we remain capable of achieving the meaning and joy that no technology can create.
About the author
Anne Hendershott is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio. She is the author of “The Politics of Deviance.”