 | SPECIAL EDITION, June 29, 2026 | |  | Getty Images | | | White-collar America is having a nervous breakdown about AI | For two decades, Kimberly Harrington thrived as a freelance copywriter and creative director, with clients including Apple, Netflix, and Nike. She was the breadwinner for her family, working remotely and raising her children in rural Vermont. Two years ago, as the kids left home for college, she decided to look for the perfect full-time job — only to watch her prospects collapse. She went, as she put it, from carefully vetting only “the best of the best” opportunities to, “I will
take anything.”
“I've given up on any sort of dream scenario. I'm just trying to survive,” Harrington said in an interview. “I know a creative director who is a mailman now.”
Harrington is one of thousands — or, depending on how you count, millions. If you earn more than $60,000 a year, have at least some college education, and do your work on a laptop, this story is about
you, too.
Molly Kinder, a former Brookings Institution researcher who studies what’s happening to knowledge workers in the AI era, compares what’s coming for white-collar America to the collapse of the country’s manufacturing sector that began in the 1980s. That collapse cost roughly eight million blue-collar jobs over three decades and hollowed out entire towns. | | | SPONSORED |  | You're Business Is Stuck In The Health Insurance Dead Zone | Too big for small-group pricing. Too small for enterprise-level benefits. It’s a frustrating place to be. Premiums keep rising, plan options stay limited, and every renewal feels like you’re paying more for
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| | The next crisis is here for
white-collar knowledge workers: credentialed, skilled, and accustomed to being well compensated for their abilities to design corporate websites, hit corporate sales targets, or write corporate marketing copy. Until recently, such skills were a golden ticket to the “best paid and most coveted jobs in the economy,” as Kinder puts it. These skills carried workers through the dot-com era, the smartphone explosion, and the pandemic hiring frenzy — always riding the next wave, often pulling down six figures, solidly within the top 10% of
earners.
Now, suddenly, the old assumptions don’t apply. “For the first time in at least a generation — perhaps two — the future is up for grabs, and there's a chance that they might not end up on top,” Aaron Terrazas, the former chief economist of Glassdoor, said of white-collar workers.
The result is a kind of class shock, hitting millions of people all at once. White-collar
dread is everywhere you look. One social media post declaring that “something big is happening” went viral earlier this year, racking up 90 million views on X alone. A Substack post predicting mass AI-driven unemployment captured so much attention that it briefly tanked the actual stock market. Dark jokes about how you only have two more years to “start a podcast or become part of the permanent underclass” have gone mainstream.
The data suggests many already dread what’s coming. The New York Fed's Survey of Consumer Expectations has found that expectations of broader unemployment are
skyrocketing — most sharply among more educated, higher-income people.
For Harrington, the speed of the change in the job market is part of the shock: “You start to feel the fear that other people have been feeling forever.” | 'A full-blown panic attack' | Others shared their own experiences of dread in interviews with Quartz, speaking on condition of anonymity because they didn’t want to jeopardize their job prospects or current employment.
A graphic designer in her 30s, who works at a marketing firm in the South, said she had already lost one role — with her employer citing AI as a reason to “retire the position” — and hustled to land another at the same company. A
little over a year later, she was pulled into a vague private meeting with her manager and her manager’s boss — the exact setup as before.
“I had a full-blown panic attack for hours beforehand,” she said. “Thankfully, it ended up just being about our team being split in two. But it really showed me how much anxiety and instability so many of us are carrying around right now. Even normal workplace conversations can feel
loaded.”
An engineer at a Fortune 500 company said he’s “100% feeling” the dread, too. “It’s only a matter of time before any of us are worth less than a text prompt,” he said. It feels personal, even as he understands the larger scale of the phenomenon. “I went from growing up being bullied by kids in L.L. Bean to being bullied by tech bros in love with LLMs.”
For a certain
type of frustrated citizen, there may be an extra frisson in all this — an existential thrill in watching the system maybe, finally crack under its own weight, a sense of being a witness to history, or even the end of history. As one fed-up job seeker, who finally quit seeking another role in corporate sales and began working with disabled adults, reading tarot on the side, told Quartz: “At the risk of being the tarot guy, I feel like society is in one big tower moment with capitalism itself trying to sustain, but it’s very much starting to
reap what it sows.” | | | | The mechanics of the squeeze | Experts explain the collapse of morale in several ways. Ron Hetrick, principal economist at the labor market data firm Lightcast and a former Bureau of Labor Statistics economist, sees the post-pandemic, 2021 and 2022 job markets as an outlier, not a new baseline. Companies were overhiring, cash was loose, so some white-collar jobs came with salaries above reasonable market rates. In Hetrick’s read, what we’re now seeing, from reduced salaries to return-to-office mandates, is a return to normal.
It just doesn't feel that way to people who thought their leverage was permanent.
The most recent jobs report bore that out, Hetrick said. Professional occupations added 632,000 workers over the last year. But the unemployment rate in those fields rose anyway as supply continued to outpace demand.
The simultaneous prospect of AI automation is also reducing white-collar workers’ negotiating power. Daniel Keum, a
professor at Columbia Business School who studies AI in the workplace, describes the mechanism plainly: “A junior associate at a law firm before could demand 20% of billable hours,” he said. “Now you bill more, but you take 10% — because if you demand anything more, there's AI.”
Wage cuts may also come as job searchers struggle to find positions on par with the compensation they’re used to. Terrazas, the former Glassdoor economist, suspects new graduates are
competing less against AI than they are against workers with two to four years of experience who have been pushed down the expectations ladder — people who would once have aimed (and likely earned) higher, but are now taking whatever’s available.
“It might not be that AI is taking new grad jobs,” he said, “as much as workers with [more] experience taking new grad jobs.” This would also explain the entry-level crunch, the tough market for those coming out of
school. Hetrick blames elite overproduction, too: too many college graduates competing for too few jobs.
The compensation picture confirms these pressures from a different angle, with wage growth failing to keep pace with inflation, and the prospect of $5 gas top of mind across the country (even as gas prices fall on a preliminary deal to end the Iran war). Companies rarely cut salaries directly, because there’s a real psychological
cost to watching a paycheck shrink, and workers resist. But the squeeze arrives nevertheless through what
Terrazas calls white-collar shrinkflation: benefits reduced, bonuses and stock grants cut, and job scopes expanding without any corresponding increase in pay.
Hanna Horvath, a financial planner behind the popular Your Brain on Money newsletter, wrote in March: “If you earn roughly $50K to $100K, have no generational wealth, maybe some college — you’re experiencing what I’d call material precarity. You’re
watching the things that middle-class life used to include by default — stable housing, healthcare that doesn’t bankrupt you, childcare that doesn’t consume an entire salary, a retirement you can actually plan for — slip out of reach. And you know it. You can feel it at the grocery store, at the pharmacy, in the insurance deductible that’s quietly crept up to $8,000.”
Harrington, the copywriter in Vermont, echoed the sentiment: “I never used to pay attention to
gas prices, ever, in my life. Like, who cares? I’ve very rarely been in a position where I haven't been able to put gas in my car. That alone is a privilege.” Now, she said, “you're dealing with that and getting groceries? They’re the kinds of things that I think a lot of white-collar people haven't necessarily had to pay that much attention to.”
“People say, ‘Money can’t buy happiness,’” she said. “Well, yeah, but it relieves an entire layer of thought and
fear and stress. … How are you going to pay for your health insurance, or maybe you have to wait to go to the market? I just think a lot more people are in touch with what that feels like now.” |  | Kimberly Harrington | The deeper loss | “Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition,” Alain de Botton wrote in his 2005 book Status Anxiety, which traced human fears about their place in
society from ancient times to the modern-day knowledge economy. Every adult life, he wrote, contains two love stories: romantic love and what you might call professional love, the esteem of our peers and the larger world that we gain through accomplishments.
This second love story, he said, isn’t just important in an economic sense, and thus it is “no less intense than the first, it is no less complicated, important or universal, and its setbacks are no less
painful. There is heartbreak here, too.”
Perhaps that’s never been more true than now, at least in terms of scale. The white-collar worker is, historically, a child of industrialization — the same force that first arrived as a destroyer of work, replacing manual laborers by the thousands. Weavers. Croppers. Coopers. Whole trades and professions absorbed by machines. | | | SPONSORED |  | Tackle your credit card debt with 0% interest | Did you know some credit cards could actually help you get out of debt faster? Yes, it sounds crazy. But it’s true.
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| Along with the machines came the “satanic mills,” tenements, cholera, decades of immiseration before anything resembling broad prosperity arrived. But the transformation that wrecked so many trades did, slowly, make something else valuable: As large-scale industrial employment spread, skills, training, and
education became the currency of advancement. The middle class was built first by industrial capitalism, then broadened and stabilized much later by public policy, unions, and reform. It took a Depression, it took organizing that was genuinely dangerous to do. Out of that long, uneven arc came the 21st-century knowledge worker.
Call it the triumph of mind over muscle and machine.
Subsequent waves of labor displacement have mostly run in the same direction. Mechanization, more mechanization, offshoring, more offshoring — each wave moved the floor and left the ceiling intact. The white-collar class watched from above and told itself that the mind is not an asset that can be shipped overseas: Being smart, somehow clawing together the right credentials, you could win an exemption. If
your smarts and talent were highly regarded enough, you could have a voice within organizations, a degree of freedom to speak your mind.
Now, with less leverage, how many white-collar workers feel they can afford to say what they really think? White-collar work always involved palace intrigues and byzantine politics. Now you hold your tongue for different reasons, across a much greater swath of subjects.
Now you find yourself competing against a smart machine whose labor is regarded, day to day, as free — at least if you’re not the one paying the bill for the AI tokens. What is more, if you’re a knowledge worker who’s published books or made any sort of commercial art, your own work was likely already conscripted to develop the technology.
AI technology itself didn’t steal training materials, or revoke the
talent-for-security bargain, of course. Part of why the moment feels so dreadful is the mass experience of management sprinting to cut costs — gleefully, enthusiastically, in many cases before the technology even fully works. This means what white-collar workers are absorbing now goes beyond automation, something more like the blunt discovery that the people running the country’s institutions are indifferent to the people inside them, no matter the people’s rank. That the going bargain is, train your replacement or be branded a naysayer and get
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| | There’s little visible political
will for a new social contract to replace the old, however flawed or partial it may have been.
“The average person is starting to notice that our political and economic systems don’t actually exist to serve or provide for them anymore, they exist to consolidate wealth for people and companies at the top of the chain,” said Rosie Spinks, a journalist and author of the forthcoming book How to Build a Village. “The earth and its resources are treated as a
commodity (we already knew that part) but now it’s becoming clear that we are, too. AI is a really obvious manifestation of that — a half-dozen men are razing entire categories of human effort and meaning in the name of efficiency, productivity, and the creation of more value.”
This is what makes the moment feel larger, feel worse, than a few bad quarters. If “the end of history” named the belief that liberal capitalism and professional meritocracy had settled
into the final stable order, then the hollowing-out of white-collar work is the end of the end of history — the
unraveling of the class that invested more into that settlement than anyone.
As for Kimberly Harrington, the copywriter whose dream job search came to nothing, she has started a podcast. It’s going well. No Country for Old Women, which is partly about what’s happening to white-collar work, recently debuted in the top 10 New Shows in the Apple
Podcast Charts.
But she still misses her old work-life, and she worries about the next generation missing out on the formative experience of coming up through the ranks, perhaps meeting a future spouse or close friend along the way.
“It's not just about learning how to do a job,” she said. “It's about learning how to have a life.” | | Tell Us About It | | | | | | © 2025 Quartz Media Network (US), INC. All Rights Reserved. |
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