RIP my profession (and probably yours, too)

Artificial intelligence is transforming work. No one is talking about the grief that will follow.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Hello, mortals. Is everyone doing OK out there?

I don’t know about you, but it seems like everyone I know is grieving something right now. The cold, brutal winter we’ve had on the East Coast seemed to be mirroring what was going on in so many people’s lives in early 2026: deaths of loved ones, illnesses and health crises, job losses and economic fears, and nervous system overload at the increasingly dystopian state of the world.

And a lot of anxiety around AI and work. Every day seems to bring a new viral essay every day about the “end of work,” the white-collar jobs apocalypse and rising unemployment. As Ezra Klein declared in the New York Times last week, “The future we feared is already here”—and we are not prepared for it. Questions around AI, he notes, have shifted from What if? to What now?

So many of us are staring into a future where our skills and expertise no longer carry the economic or social value they once did. And for some, the losses have already begun: An unsettling jobs report last week showed that U.S. employers cut 92,000 jobs in February, spiking unemployment to 4.4 percent—a troubling sign that the opportunities and roles that so many of us have trained and worked hard for are disappearing.

Something big is indeed happening. If you’re job-hunting right now and sending hundreds of applications into the void; if you’re a consultant, marketer, graphic designer or lawyer whose job is no longer “safe”; if you’re an engineer training AI to replace you; or if you’re a Gen Z who did everything right but can’t seem to break into the job market and start your career; you know this from personal experience. The ground beneath our feet, the foundation of our working lives, is shifting.

While nobody really knows whether AI will actually cause a “white-collar jobs apocalypse,” there’s no question that the nature of work is fundamentally changing. As Michael Steinberger writes in the NYT, “It looks all but certain that A.I. will transform knowledge work; the question is to what extent.”

As a writer, I’ve found it difficult to shake the ambient existential dread surrounding my profession. AI-generated content is everywhere. I’m constantly unsubscribing from newsletters and unfollowing accounts when I realize I’ve been reading something written by ChatGPT. Recently, I’ve had to start including an AI policy in my client contracts so I’m not spending my editing hours trying to reconstruct meaning from book chapters “written” with AI.

Meanwhile, I can’t open LinkedIn without getting a cortisol spike from the stream of desperate posts from out-of-work editors and copywriters. While the work that makes up most of my livelihood (book coaching and editing) has yet to be swallowed up by automation, other streams of work I once relied on, like brand copywriting, have dried up almost entirely. And I’m very aware that the work that remains may soon become scarce.

This feeling isn’t entirely new, but it’s more intense than ever before. Like other journalists, I’ve watched my profession absorb a succession of death blows over the past decade. Now legacy media is in free fall, undermined by a fragmented information ecosystem, the rise of social media and the creator economy, and AI. I can’t help but worry that the recent bloodbath at the Washington Post, which laid off 30% of its staff and left only a skeleton of the institution it once was, is one of the last nails in the coffin.

Most journalists I know have already left the profession to seek other work, and those who have remained are increasingly forced to operate like influencers, working for the algorithm to stay afloat.

It’s sad to watch the industry I’ve worked in for 15 years being dismantled, and to see so many smart, hard-working people out of work and unable to support their families. It’s sad to see people so readily giving their voices (their power) away. And it’s deeply sad to witness the devaluing of human thought and creativity, and its replacement with AI tools that do the job worse—at a massive social and environmental cost. There’s real grief in knowing that thousands more people will lose their careers, livelihood and future prospects as the wealth and opportunities are concentrated in the hands of an ever-smaller pool of companies and individuals.

I don’t mean to sound alarmist, but I think it’s clear that we’re not prepared for the epidemic of grief that’s coming. How do we cope with the loss of not only jobs but the identities and lives we’ve built around them? What happens now? What do we do when the careers we’ve been told would lead to security, success and happiness disappear in front of our eyes?

The End of the Promised Path

I moved to New York City in 2011 chasing a cliché: the dream of becoming a writer.

After graduating from college, I landed an internship at Vanity Fair, where I didn’t actually write anything, but I did spend my days fetching editors Advil from the newsstand downstairs and coffee with a splash of half-and-half (instructions: “the color of a paper bag”). In the evenings, I worked as a hostess at a tapas restaurant in Grand Central to pay the rent on my railroad apartment in east Bushwick. I was tired and broke, but happy.

Coming off the heels of the Great Recession, jobs were scarce but digital media was booming. At 21, I was hired as an assistant editor at the Huffington Post with a starting salary of $20,000 (even 15 years ago, this was offensive). After I turned down the initial offer, reasoning I’d be better off waitressing while I waited for something better, they bumped it up to $30k, and I accepted. For over five years, I churned out stories, managed editorial calendars, obsessed over traffic stats, attended events around the city, and worked with Arianna Huffington on her books and wellness initiatives. Those early years in the newsroom set me up for the rest of my career in digital media, and later, book publishing.

That world no longer exists.

Looking back at my early days in New York, I feel a certain wistfulness for what now seems a bygone era. When I heard about the new Devil Wears Prada sequel, it struck me as not just a nostalgia marketing opportunity but an expression of real longing for a lost dream: the cultural archetype of the “New York City writer” and the promise of the high-powered creative career as the path to a meaningful life.

If you’re an American Millennial, Gen X or older Gen Z, that promise—successful career equals happy life and purposeful existence—was in the air you breathed and the assumptions you were raised by. We were raised to believe that building a successful career was the central project of adulthood. Work was supposed to provide identity, status, and purpose. Americans have long lived by the religion of “workism,” as The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson calls it: the belief that work should sit at the center of our lives, serving as the organizing principle for not just how we spend our time but who we are.

Now, for many of us, that promised path is dissolving. As whole industries shrink and algorithms begin to absorb the work we once trained years to do, we face the loss of the illusion that our jobs would provide the meaning and security they had always promised. After all, work isn’t just about what we do Monday through Friday but how we find our place in the world. Carmen van Kerckhove writes in a viral Substack post, “You are not your job and soon you won’t have one”: “I see millions of people about to lose not just jobs, but the entire scaffolding of how they understand themselves.”

For better and for worse, work is the primary structure through which we’ve been taught to find meaning. Without work as a source of meaning, without a place to go and something useful to do every day, many people will feel existentially adrift.

The only way through is to face it head on, and to grieve what we’re losing.

Grief and adaptation

If we’re going to adapt to these massive changes, and find new ways of working and being, we will have to grieve first. The loss of a job (or an entire career path) is not just one loss. It’s a constellation of many losses, including the loss of identity, belonging, status, purpose, security, and in some cases, even losing our home or health. Many people’s lives will become unrecognizable as a result of the changes that are coming.

We need to give ourselves permission to grieve this. Too often, we dismiss and invalidate the true pain of these experiences because we’re only taught to grieve the death of a person. But as we’ve explored before in this newsletter, this type of grief is known as “disenfranchised grief” or “hidden grief.” What we wrote in a previous essay, “What happens when the person you’re grieving is you,” applies here, too:

During times of career transition, we might lose a professional identity or a more successful version of ourselves. Becoming a parent, we lose our more free and independent self. In times of sickness or injury, our formerly healthy and vibrant self is gone…

There may not be a funeral or even a word of acknowledgment from anyone else about what we’re going through, but the grief is real. And it’s time to name it, and start talking about it, so that we can more smoothly move through the “deaths” of our former selves to fully rebirth into who we’re becoming.

Grieving isn’t optional; it’s necessary. It’s an evolutionary mechanism that leads us from loss to new possibilities. When something important is taken from us—a person, a home, an identity or an imagined future—grief is the process through which we absorb the loss and slowly adapt to our new reality. Mourning our losses prepares us to survive without them.

From a biological perspective, grief serves several adaptive purposes. It leads to a state of hyper-vigilance and heightens our awareness of vulnerability after a loss, helping us navigate dangerous periods when social protection may be weakened. The pain of loss also motivates us to protect what remains, strengthening bonds with surviving community members and encouraging behaviors that prevent future losses. At the same time, grief helps the mind update its map of the world—loosening our attachment to what’s gone so we can begin imagining life again under new conditions and prepare to form new attachments.

Paradoxically, rushing to move on without properly allowing space and time for grieving can keep us stuck in the past. That’s why honoring endings is so essential to our ability to move forward, although certainly not easy when survival fears are kicking in and you need to find a new way to pay the bills. But it’s only in the uncomfortable space between death and new life (aka the “bardo”), in the discomfort and uncertainty, that a new path takes form. And this is where many of us seem to be right now.

The Road Ahead

For me personally and so many other people I know, there’s an “end of an era” feeling to this moment. It’s sad and disorienting, but in moments, strangely energizing. As I’m preparing to leave New York after 15 years and start a new chapter in Maine, I’m allowing myself to imagine the possibility that it may be time for my work to evolve along with my life, and perhaps to become something more offline, embodied and relational.

My hope is that this crisis might offer the possibility of a return to something more meaningful and real. After all, making work the center of our lives and identities was never all that satisfying to begin with. Many corporate jobs were always devoid of meaning and true value. Few people find purpose in increasing shareholder value and optimizing engagement. Working 40 hours a week while trying to care for children and aging parents was never a sane way to live.

I have always stubbornly believed in the Buddhist idea of right livelihood, and the possibility of making a living doing work I care about that aligns with my values and does good in the world. That kind of work still exists. It may just look different than the careers many of us were trained to pursue.

Right livelihood, like many other aspects of Buddhist philosophy, directly challenges the extractive logic of our capitalist system. It’s an ideal to strive for, and one that admittedly is not always possible in today’s world. The very structure of the job market can make it impossible for to avoid “wrong livelihood”: work that either directly or indirectly causes harm. By design, those with fewer resources have far less freedom to choose how they work than those with more.

But as the foundations of that system begin to crack, there is the hope of something new and more life-affirming emerging. To the extent that we’re able to do so, the task may be to orient ourselves toward the kinds of work, and the kinds of lives, we hope this next era might make possible.

Can we work in a way that isn’t soul-crushing? Most people I know who spend their days staring at screens quietly long for the same thing: to get offline, to live more embodied and relational lives, to build communities, to spend time with their children and neighbors, to make things that feel real.

Here’s what I do know: there is so much work that needs to be done. As countless jobs disappear, this strikes me as something important to remember. Work to help each other and build more sustainable systems. Perhaps the loss of corporate, technology-based work will be the rise of more human work: caregiving; feeding and farming; community building and local services.

Maybe it sounds like a pipe dream right now, but if we don’t dream of something better—and embody that in whatever way we can—then we’re accepting the current trajectory as inevitable. It’s not.

As artificial intelligence transforms our economy, we will have to decide—individually, but especially as a society—what kinds of work we actually value.

The coming years may bring a massive revaluation of labor. And if we’re thoughtful about it, we might discover that much of the most important work humans can do was never the work we built our economy around in the first place.

Have you experienced job loss? Has AI impacted your profession, or are you worried about how it might alter your professional trajectory? We want to hear about it. Respond to this email or let us know in the comments. x