Shawn Sowinski thought losing his job meant losing everything.

At forty-five, with two decades of IT management experience, he never imagined he'd be replaced by an algorithm. But when the layoff notice arrives, Shawn spirals—watching his savings dwindle, his purpose evaporate, and his family struggle to understand why a good worker can't find good work anymore.

His eighteen-year-old son, Mack, is working at a bike shop, watching his father fall apart and wondering if there's any point in planning for a future where jobs are disappearing faster than they're being created.

His seventy-year-old father, Jack, is drifting through retirement, volunteering at the county political office, and feeling increasingly irrelevant in a world that's moving too fast for him to understand.

Three generations. One family. All facing the same question: What do you do when the economy doesn't need you anymore?

But instead of giving up, the Sowinski family does something unexpected.

They stop trying to fit into a broken system—and build a new one.

Mack creates Circular, a community-driven platform that helps people find purpose beyond paychecks. Shawn discovers that his value isn't measured by productivity, but by the lives he touches. Jack starts a movement that spreads across the country, proving that people don't become obsolete—systems do.

Together, they pioneer what Jack calls "The Last Economy"—not the final economy, but the economy that comes after jobs. An economy built on three revolutionary principles:
Purpose Over Productivity
Community Over Competition
Meaning Over Money

Based on the groundbreaking ideas of Jeremy Rifkin (The Zero Marginal Cost Society), Emad Mostaque (The Last Economy), and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Flow), this novel imagines a near-future where AI doesn't destroy humanity—it liberates it.

Obsolete: The Last Job is a story about what happens when we stop measuring human worth by employment and start measuring it by contribution. When we stop competing for scarce jobs and start collaborating to build abundant communities. When we stop chasing money and start creating meaning.