What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers
TL;DR
The author says knowledge workers' despair goes deeper than money. AI hands their already abstract work to agents. That exposes "Workism", the habit of treating a career as the source of meaning, as an illusion. Companies that lose this talent may not get it back. His remedy is to accept that most office work doesn't matter and to look for meaning in people and community.
The article
- The author, a director of AI operations, sees peers dreaming of farms, pottery and going off the grid. He says this despair is existential, unlike past recessions or outsourcing. It reaches well-paid senior professionals too.
- He draws on Derek Thompson's "Workism" and Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs". Finance, consulting and tech jobs, he argues, lack the altruistic payoff of nursing or plumbing. Workism works like a religion that keeps people from noticing the gap.
- Using Debord's "Society of the Spectacle", he argues that work only has to look impactful. AI agents now produce the deck, the strategy or the newsletter. Workers then lose even the effort that made the work feel like theirs. Without that effort, they can see through the illusion.
- He says executives want AI so they need less collaboration and fewer people. That cuts out the "messy middle" of the job. Citing Teresa Amabile's research, he argues that creative, high-quality work comes from this middle. Losing it hurts "experience-first" workers and suits "outcome-first" ones.
- He calls the current layoff wave AI-washed, since AI isn't yet efficient enough to justify it. He warns that disillusioned workers may not come back when companies try to rehire. Many of them don't own homes or plan on kids. That makes it easy for them to pivot.
- Like Debord, he doubts anyone can escape, since even quitting gets turned into content. His advice is to keep some work human and to remind each other that the work is not that important. He wants that energy put into real relationships and community.
Why it matters
Read the full essay for the whole chain from Workism to Debord's spectacle. It also has the Klosterman officiating analogy and the outcome-first versus experience-first split. It gives white-collar workers words for the despair but no plan. As commenters pointed out, it says nothing about paying the bills.
The discussion
A huge, mostly gloomy thread of over 1,300 comments. Most commenters accepted that the despair is real but rejected the author's existential framing. They argued over whether the cause is AI, a broken industry and economy, or a steady diet of online doom. The fiercest fight asked whether past automation of printers and weavers shows that people adapt or that they suffer. Another asked whether UBI is the answer. A long side debate asked whether remote work isolated the people who wanted it most.
This time is bigger, and the displaced don't bounce back
The second-largest thread opened with printers, a centuries-old skilled trade that vanished, and with UK weavers and Wapping. Optimists said society always adapts, but others replied that 'society came out fine' is not 'individuals came out fine'. Retraining is mostly lip service, they said, and AI threatens far more workers far faster than printing did. In the long UBI fight that followed, one side saw UBI as the only way through, and the other feared lost work incentives or inflation.
Knitting is not the answer. This is a survival issue. Somehow I suspect the author inherited money.
Also fails to distinguish between “society came out of it fine” (generally true) and “individuals came out of it fine” (much more mixed of a track record)
AI empties out the craft
Many developers said AI takes away the part of the job they loved, and some felt their skills fading under huge AI-generated PRs. Directing an agent feels like ordering rather than making, and 'you'll just be a manager now' sounds like a demotion. Others said LLMs brought the joy back, since the architecture still feels theirs and shelved side projects are finally possible. A few argued that the people suffering came into tech for the money rather than the craft.
Despite having built more in the last year than would have ever been possible before, I feel empty.
The output still feels mine. Maybe not line by line, but definitely architecturally.
The industry soured before AI
A large group said AI gets the blame for a decline that started earlier. The end of zero-interest-rate money in 2022 brought layoffs, more pressure and less autonomy. Before that, the industry had already drifted from tinkering and connecting people toward ad-tech, data extraction and monopoly. In this view AI is the latest insult, and executives' AI push and AI-blamed layoffs are disguised cost-cutting that often lowers quality.
The culture of the tech industry started going to shit in 2022/2023 after rates were hiked and before LLMs were capable of anything much.
For a lot of folks, AI was the final canary in the toxic coalmine.
Doom is partly an online diet
The top thread blamed the despair on an online diet of outrage, astroturfing and doom headlines, and tech workers eat more of it than most. Some added that unhappy people post more, so negativity feeds on itself, HN included. Critics called advice to stop reading the news a privilege for people it doesn't touch, citing ICE raids and real political harm. One person who stayed off the news for about six months said their anxiety returned to the same level within a month, with new triggers.
If you spend any time online, as most tech workers do, you have exceptional resiliency if you're able to stay sane and level headed.
But after a month my baseline pretty much reset with the same levels of anxiety, just with different sources/triggers to attribute those feelings to.
Distrust of the author and his conclusion
Many readers noted that the author directs AI operations and that the Berggruen Institute owns Noema. Some read the piece as quiet AI promotion, and others called that guilt by association. The ending drew more fire than the funding, since telling people their work doesn't matter does nothing for the meaning crisis or the rent. Several also found an off-putting glee in the essay, and noted that tech bros quitting for a farm is a decades-old story.
So the author tells us there is a crisis of meaning in the workplace, and their proposed solution is… to remember none of the work matters?
Sure, it's great when you're able to derive philosophical meaning from your work, but at the end of the day the vast majority of people are here for the paycheck.
Consensus
The despair is real and widespread, and its roots are mostly material. Commenters named layoffs, a frozen job market, no safety net, and an industry that now seems built for extraction. Telling someone the work doesn't matter does nothing about a lost income.
Dissent
A vocal minority said they have never been happier. AI lets them build projects they had shelved for years. In their view the despair sits mostly with people who joined tech for the money or who doomscroll. Job churn from new technology is old news, they said, and people should adapt to it.