The Last Hug

"My daughter doesn't hug me like that anymore."

A father said this to me at a family dinner in Sydney. His daughter is twelve. Mine was on my lap. She's seven. Wanted to start a band called Chippies and Nuggets.

Same countdown. Different points on the line.

I thought two things at the same time: "I'm so happy right now" and "when does this stop?"

Nobody tells you when the last hug happens. There's no announcement. It just stops one day. And you only realise it's gone after it's gone.

I've spent 20 years in software engineering. Startups, scale-ups, large organisations. There's less consumption now. Less jobs. AI compounds both. And it's not just engineering. It's every information worker wondering what happens next.

Two weeks ago, I resigned from corporate life. Twenty years of building things for other people, and the thing I kept not building was an answer to the question every parent at that table was thinking: what do our kids actually do when the path we followed doesn't exist anymore?

We grow up being told what to do. Go here, study this, become that. The whole system is built around assigning people roles. But what happens when those roles stop existing? I think that's a problem worth working on while she still thinks Chippies and Nuggets is a viable band name.