Meta's CTO says morale is the worst in 20 years, after layoffs to fund its AI race. Jesus asked what it profits to gain the world and lose your soul.
For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and forfeit his soul?
Mark 8:36
Meta is one of the richest companies in the history of the world. It owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp; its founder is worth more than some nations. And by the admission of its own chief technology officer, the people who work there are about as unhappy as they have ever been. In an internal meeting this month he said morale was probably the worst in his twenty years at the company, comparing it to the lowest point he could remember. The cause is not mysterious. The company laid off about a tenth of its staff to pay for its race into artificial intelligence, and reassigned another tenth to build the very systems many of them feared would replace them.
There is a question Jesus asks that was made for moments like this. What does it profit someone to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? He was not talking only about money. The word for soul means your life, your self, the living center of you. The trade he names is the one where you get everything you were reaching for and discover, holding it, that the thing that made you alive has quietly gone.
A company cannot have a soul the way a person does. But it can have a spirit, a sense among the people inside it that the work means something and that they are valued in it. Meta has gained the world by almost any measure and seems to be misplacing exactly that. And the question does not stay at the corporate scale. Most of us run a smaller version of the same trade, chasing the next rung, the next number, the next win, and wondering on the way up why the climb feels so joyless.
The world is worth a great deal. The question Jesus leaves open is what you are spending to get it, and whether you will notice the price before it is paid.