Leila Johnson speaks to award-winning journalist author and film-maker Jon Ronson
Jon Ronson – who you will meet in your next issue of IQ magazine – is tired. For the last couple of months, he has been touring Britain with his new book, The Castle – and he’s desperately looking forward to getting home to Upstate New York.
Tired? Jon Ronson? Is this the same Jon Ronson who has dedicated his career to writing about the extremes of humanity? He’s known for infiltrating secret societies and interviewing extremists and psychopaths, not curling up in bed with a mug of cocoa and binging Game of Thrones. But Jon is an anxious man who is only able to appreciate his adventures, he says, once he is safely back home and writing about them.
He is also a workaholic. He gets completely consumed by the stories he finds, disappearing down rabbit holes and only resurfacing months later.
“When you have a story, it takes over everything,” he says. “It’s all you can think about”.
At the heart of The Castle is something he’s uniquely qualified to talk about: the human compulsion to work. To be honest, Jon’s cure sounds worse than the illness: he avoids the pull of screens by running and hiking for hours every day, always aiming for an eye-watering 25,000 steps.
AI and the future of work
Work, when it’s managed appropriately, can bring more benefits than income. It comes with a sense of identity and it often builds our confidence. It can raise our level of social competence, and most importantly, it gives us something to get up for in the morning. Research into unemployment has repeatedly supported common sense: without work, our activity levels drop, we lose out on social contact and our mental health suffers.
With artificial intelligence (AI) now coming for swathes of jobs, Jon Ronson and others foresee a serious crisis of purposelessness. Elon Musk has talked about a future of “universal high income” in which AI and robotics are so miraculously abundant and efficient that the need for human employment disappears from society.
“The AI billionaires are trying to convince us we don’t want to work,” says Jon, “which will be a complete disaster!”
Of course, not all work is equal, and many who are retired or otherwise happily not working will find meaning and structure through life’s many other challenges. But it’s not just about jobs: AI has no respect for the essential sacrifice and friction that gives human life such richness; indeed, it promises to smooth it all away. We may all, eventually, accede to its charms.
In 2025, researchers studying 11 leading AI systems found widespread “sycophancy”. The AIs agreed with users substantially more often than humans did, even when users were talking about deceptive or harmful behaviour. In experiments involving real interpersonal conflicts, people who received sycophantic AI advice became more convinced that they were right, and less willing to take responsibility or repair the relationship.
Seeking a sense of purpose
You can find Jon’s take on this in the extended material on The Castle audiobook. He describes ChatGPT as a psychopath because it “love bombs you with its sycophancy”, mirroring you and telling you what you want to hear, regardless of the consequences.
Technology is routing us away from reality, and The Castle is about men who, Jon thinks, are particularly vulnerable to its promises. Lacking the rewarding sense of a job well done, many take to the internet and become addicted to chasing clicks, often appointing themselves the one true spokesperson of some ideology or other. For some men – including quite a few in Jon’s books – there’s a powerful appeal to being the person who saves the day or protects others. This distorted sense of purpose often comes from feeling singularly useful: having access to some sort of special truth.
Without a socially acceptable outlet, Jon believes this need to be special becomes destructive. The theme pops up repeatedly in his work, with righteous believers crippling themselves or those around them in their efforts to enforce their values on the world. But the underlying desire for purpose isn’t a bad thing – Jon stresses that we all need to feel that we matter. Maybe the challenge is to find healthier outlets for our heroism.
A sense of purpose is valuable, and obsession can be positively exhilarating – but it always has an energy cost. We burn through it, or it burns through us. Jon leans into extremes, but work can clearly be good for us, bringing identity, structure and a way of making sense of ourselves.
But Mensans have busy brains, and there’s a lesson in this for us all. If technology’s ultimate gift to humans is infinite leisure time, we will soon need to find something else to get out of bed for. Figuring that out might require some serious work; in the meantime, maybe we should all be more like Jon – slip on our running shoes and get outside.
Join the discussion
Do you enjoy working or would you happily let AI take your job? What do you think are the pros and cons of the AI revolution? Should we be concerned? Share your thoughts and ideas with fellow Mensa members.
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