Why Is Everyone In Tech So Sad?

Credits Aaron Horwath is the director of AI operations at a creative technology company where he is focused on implementing AI in a way that supports both humans and business. On a recent morning commute, I sat on a train in one of those awkward four-person configurations with a shared table. Across from me sat a typical commuter: early 30s, slacks, dress shirt, dirty white sneakers, hair a little disheveled, AirPods in, basking in the glow of an open MacBook. For over half an hour, I listened to this young man as he was on a call explaining, in painfully monotone detail, EBITDAs, margin expansion opportunities, cost structures, ARR, etc. On and on he went until the screeching of the train’s brakes signaled our arrival at the final station. But as everyone else around us began shuffling to disembark, I watched the man begin digging frantically through a leather bag at his side. Intriguing! I wondered what he’d pull out. A copy of “Atomic Habits”? A framed portrait of Gary V? A Mac mini running OpenClaw? None of the above. Instead, he took out two long knitting needles. Between them dangled a mound of pink yarn. He explained to me that he was making a winter hat for a niece. And for the first time that morning, I noticed a glint of pride and excitement in his eyes. The hat was a project born from a desire, as he put it, to do something. Among my Knowledge Worker peers, I am hearing this more and more often: people who want to pick up pottery, painting, crochet or other old-timey analog hobbies. In coffee shops and in the low-lit corners of bars, professionals are sharing dreams of “disappearing” or “living on a farm somewhere” or “going off the grid.” These aren’t fantastical daydreams; they are visions of escape shared in a tone that betrays an underlying existential angst, a fundamental doubt about work and careerism inspired by a seemingly increasingly common experience: waking up one morning at an existential precipice, struck with a sudden sense that knowledge work is, and perhaps always has been, pointless. Perhaps you too have felt such a feeling, a rising tide of overwhelming, indescribable melancholy, slowly threatening to envelop you in your Ikea office chair. “Among my Knowledge Worker peers, I am hearing this more and more often: people who want to pick up pottery, painting, crochet or other old-timey analog hobbies.” This disillusionment is infectious. One person speaks of it and others begin nodding: They too have felt it, the drop in motivation, the sense of being distant from their work, the lack of sleep, the concerns about the future. These conversations inevitably turn to fundamental questions about careers: What the fuck are we actually doing? What the fuck is the point of all of this? We are, it’s true, living through a time of disruption. But what seems to differentiate this period from those of the past is the nature of the angst itself. Yes, AI is threatening jobs and disrupting industries. But Knowledge Workers have faced recessions, outsourcing, new technology and automations of many kinds before. Recent graduates always worry about breaking into the job market. Millennial professionals have navigated economic uncertainty their entire careers. What’s different about this moment is that the questions are not just economic but existential, the kind of questions that cause high-earning technical professionals to contemplate throwing it all away to start a goat farm in Washington or become a surf instructor in Costa Rica. It strikes me as significant that the people who are usually the most insulated from economic upheaval, and seem to be well-positioned to ride out AI’s near-term impacts — highly paid executives and senior professionals with decades of institutional knowledge — are also uncertain about the future of their careers amid the rapid change nearly every industry is undergoing. Some will say: good, fuck ‘em. In the 2010s, Knowledge Workers told everyone to learn to code while they sipped kombucha and played Xbox in beanbag chairs. Then, Knowledge Workers sat inside during the pandemic while frontline workers risked their health to make Amazon and Uber Eats deliveries. Now, those same Knowledge Workers are building AI that threatens to eliminate work for humans across industries and make a very few people wealthy beyond imagination. And these same assholes want pity now? To that I say: fair enough. But this sweeping disenchantment begs a fascinating (or terrifying or sad) set of questions: What is this angst plaguing Knowledge Workers? And what happens to a society and its industries if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers overnight? Workism: Praise Thee In 2019, Derek Thompson wrote in The Atlantic about “American Workism” where he described a trend among Knowledge Workers, particularly in the U.S., of increasingly seeking fulfillment, community and a sense of meaning from work that previous generations had garnered from religion. As Thompson wrote, Workism is “emotional — even spiritual. The best-educated and highest-earning Americans, who can have whatever they want, have chosen the office for the same reason that devout Christians attend church on Sundays: It’s where they feel most themselves.” People have long held careers from which they’ve derived a deep sense of meaning. Traditionally, we’ve referred to those careers as vocations: a calling, a way of life. More than a job: a purpose. A vocation emphasizes skills, values and the desire to contribute something beneficial. Vocations have traditionally referred to careers that are challenging, socially impactful, often rewarding in ways other than financial. These are your teachers, nurses, firefighters, social workers, paramedics or even service providers with direct connections to the communities and customers they serve, like mechanics, plumbers or electricians. Even on bad days, deep down, most of these folks find their work rewarding in important and intangible ways. But those aren’t the careers young people have dedicated their lives to. Instead, graduates are overwhelmingly taking jobs in finance, consulting or technology. There’s no doubt that getting these jobs is competitive, and that they are demanding, complex and require navigating layers of politics and bureaucracy, a ton of ass-kissing, long work hours, heavy cognitive workloads, advanced skillsets and the emotional burden of a near-constant threat of layoffs. But so much of the work lacks any altruistic upside. “Perhaps you too have felt such a feeling, a rising tide of overwhelming, indescribable melancholy, slowly threatening to envelop you in your Ikea office chair.” In “Bullshit Jobs,” David Graeber cataloged people who admitted their jobs serve no meaningful function. Slide decks built for projects that will never launch. Heated debates over the minute details of software features nobody asked for. Agonizing over administrative processes to help money move from one rich person to another. Optimizing every word of an ad no one will notice for a service no one needs. Resting and vesting — when engineers and other highly paid workers get to sit around and wait for their stock to vest — and promotion-driven development, where developers ignore what’s good in favor of what appears to be good when they’re up for a promotion. The altruism in these careers, then, is hard to find. So how does anyone do it without losing their mind? That’s the true beauty of Workism: It is manufactured to distract people from the hole in their souls that a vocation would otherwise fill. It is the opiate of commuters in quarter zips. And it works. It keeps talented people showing up at the office to argue over reports and strategy documents and rebrandings with the seriousness of pediatric heart surgery. But Workism has a weakness. Like religion, it relies on faith’s triumph over logic. What would happen, then, if something threatened that faith? A paradigm shift that broke the spell of Workism? A sort of enlightenment that caused Knowledge Workers to start asking tough questions of their organizations and themselves. And what would happen if Knowledge Workers awoke from the spell of Workism with no financially viable alternative? Well, it seems AI might offer us the pleasure of finding out. Popping The Workism Bubble Knowledge work has always been inherently abstract. Plenty of these jobs, particularly at larger organizations, are structured like Russian nesting dolls: roles designed to support other roles, which support still other roles, layer after layer, until it’s no longer clear where there’s a solid center to be found. It’s easy to see how, to a plumber, a carpenter or a line cook, work of this nature can appear like exactly what David Graeber called it: bullshit. Knowledge work’s one saving grace, until recently, was that it was still executed by humans. We were needed. It was flesh-and-blood humans who sat down to work through a challenge, built the slide deck, wrote the customer response and developed the strategy. Even if it was existentially meaningless, there was human thought, collaborative work and creativity poured into that work, giving it life.