Narrative Reconstruction of Work Identity

Work is narrative practice—the steelworker constructs a story about himself as someone who does hard things and leaves lasting marks on the physical world. This story is not incidental but constitutive: it organizes thousands of particular decisions and experiences into a coherent identity. When AI absorbs the tasks around which the narrative was built—the implementation work, the hands-on craft, the embodied expertise—the story breaks. The worker is left holding fragments: the old competence (still real but no longer scarce), the new role (valuable but not yet felt as 'mine'), and the gap between them where identity used to live. Narrative reconstruction is the effortful, often painful process of assembling a new story from these fragments—a story that accommodates both the loss of the old practice and the possibilities of the new one without dishonestly erasing either. Some workers accomplish this reconstruction and emerge with identities more expansive than before. Others cannot and drift in what Terkel would call 'a sort of dying'—employed, functional, but estranged from the sense