Rebundling

The Work Day

I walked into a bank this week and noticed something I have been seeing everywhere. The staff were sitting, waiting, present but unoccupied, the room carrying that particular stillness that appears when nothing much is happening.

It was not neglect. It was not inefficiency. It was simply the new rhythm of many workplaces, where long stretches of quiet punctuate only brief moments when someone needs help. The same rhythm unfolds in dress shops, in small retail spaces, in cafés and restaurants. Most of the day is not movement. Most of the day is waiting.

It brought me straight back to the idea of unbundling that Sanjeet Choudary explores in Reshuffle, and to the quiet question sitting underneath it: if roles are unbundling, what might it mean to rebundle them in ways that honor the actual human being behind the counter? Not theoretically, but practically. Not someday, but today.

In my town, I remembered visiting a small storage unit that doubled as an Amazon returns drop-off. The person at the desk, who handled a trickle of packages, was also reading, or studying. They were using the long quiet patches in their day to complete coursework. It felt so natural, so aligned with reality. Why should someone sit immobilized by stillness when those same hours could hold learning, writing, or creative work?

When I speak with wait staff in restaurants, I always ask what they are up to, and most of them are studying something. Law. Architecture. Science. Design. They are already living multi-layered lives, and yet the workplace often expects them to perform a single, flattened identity while they wait for the next table. It feels strange when you stop to notice it, the quiet hiding of everything else that makes a person vivid.

If a workplace is quiet for long stretches, why is it considered unprofessional for someone to have a sketchbook open, or a reading assignment beside them, or a headset they can slip off when a customer approaches? What if the traditional performance of waiting is not actually serving anyone? What if it dilutes both human potential and human presence?

The truth is that rebundling is not only imaginable; it is already happening. People are creating portfolio careers, working in hybrid roles, and shaping multi-hyphenate identities that blend creative, professional, and personal domains. Research on the future of work suggests that the labor market is shifting toward flexibility, overlapping skills, and distributed attention. We see the beginnings of this in quiet shops and quiet banks, the first subtle signals of a broader societal pivot.

So I keep imagining what it would look like to rebundle roles with intention. Perhaps someone is hired not only to greet customers but also to manage social media or complete administrative work. Perhaps a dress shop becomes a place where the assistant is sketching fashion designs between sales. Perhaps a café becomes a hybrid environment where a law student can read in the corner until the next rush. Not multitasking in a frantic sense, but rebundling in a human sense, acknowledging the depth people already bring with them.

It already happens informally, especially in small businesses where no one has the luxury of a single job description. But I wonder whether there is a more imaginative, more honest way to let that complexity be seen.

Millennials have embraced the idea of many careers, they do not live in narrow roles anymore. They live in constellations.

What if we let those constellations show?

What if it became normal, even welcome, to see someone with a notebook open beside the register? What if someone drafting a book between customers was not judged as distracted but recognized as fully alive? What if this visibility softened us to one another, made us more curious, more connected, more willing to see the person rather than the position?

I keep returning to this: the richest parts of human life are often the parts we hide. The art we make. The ideas we chase. The degrees we are slowly earning. The books we are writing in secret. We tuck them away the moment a customer walks in, as if the fullness of our identity could somehow disrupt the transaction. But what if the opposite is true? What if the world is enriched, enlivened, when we let our real lives breathe a little more openly?

Imagine a shop where the assistant has a sketchbook on the counter because they are a designer. Imagine a bookstore where the person shelving novels is writing one between customers. Imagine a bank where someone is studying marine biology in the quiet hours, and that small disclosure becomes the beginning of something more human than a transaction.

And here is where children come in, quietly, naturally. Children watch adults for clues about what adulthood requires. They notice everything. When they encounter adults whose work and inner lives coexist visibly in the world, the designer sketching, the writer drafting, the student studying, they learn that becoming does not end with childhood. They learn that adulthood is not a narrowing, but an expansion. They learn that curiosity is allowed to continue. They learn that identity is allowed to have depth.

These small observations form part of a child’s understanding of what it means to grow up. And in this way, rebundling becomes something larger than workplace design. It becomes cultural modeling. It becomes a quiet act of permission-giving, showing the next generation that a life can hold many things at once, and that the world does not need to flatten us in order to function.

Rebundling might not be about efficiency at all. It might be about truthfulness. About complexity. About letting the world become more colorful, more honest, more alive. And perhaps this subtle shift, this willingness to reveal the inner threads of our own becoming, is its own form of social enrichment.

A way of reclaiming the richness we already carry, and of recognizing that the future of work is not only about automation or AI or productivity.

It is about modeling for the next generation that a fully human life makes room for learning, making, exploring, and becoming, even in the quiet, ordinary spaces where we spend our days.

Midjourney Prompt: Rebundling - a brilliant photo of the new work day with a millennial happily multitasking at their job, painting, writing, and recording, Happy and fulfilled. In public, at a bank.