We learn to think of history as something that has already happened, to other people. Our own moment, filled as it is with minutiae destined to be forgotten, always looks smaller in comparison.

| M Gessen, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Unimaginable Reality of American Concentration Camps

…

Gessen uses the lens of history to shrink our experience to inconsequence. But others have shared a different take on history making us feel small, like Gary Greenberg:

History’s wheel is indifferent, not unlike cancer or a cheating spouse, and can crush us willy-nilly. Which means, I hear myself saying to my own surprise and dismay, that it falls upon us to cultivate helplessness. That’s not to say we should cultivate inaction or nihilism. It’s to say that we really have no choice but to recognize just how tiny we are, and how much we therefore need one another, and in uncertain times even more. Our minds, as glorious as they are, cannot tell us the future, nor save us from it. The uncertainty we live in right now is only a reminder that this is our lot.

Realizing we are tiny can bring us together.

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Excel and Accountants

Courtesy of Mike Zaccardi, this chart tracks the increase in accountants following the release of Excel 5.0:

Zaccardi mentions this as an example of Jevons paradox — where efficiency gains paradoxically lead to an increase in resource use1 —, saying:

In 1993, Microsoft released Excel 5.0 for Windows, opening up near-unlimited possibilities for automating repetitive tasks, crunching numbers, and presenting data. The result has been more accountants, not fewer.

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What Are We Doing To Kids?

We are making them nearsighted and short-attention spanned.

Unlimited smartphone use among children is leading to an epidemic of myopia.

| Emma Tucker

…

A systematic review of 71 studies with 98,000 participants published in 2025 reached an alarming finding. Across the dozens of studies, heavy short-form video users showed moderate deficits in attention, inhibitory control, and memory. In the chart below, you can see a consistently negative, if also heterogeneous, relationship between heavy short-form video use and problems with attention, memory, and control.

Source: Nguyen, et al

Several studies in the meta-analysis reported structural and functional differences in the prefrontal cortex and reward circuits among high-frequency users, while others found cognitive flexibility reductions and altered dopaminergic reward responses. None of this proves causation. But taken together, they suggest a plausible mechanism: a daily diet of hyper-rewarding, rapid-fire stimuli may gradually reshape attention and regulatory systems in ways that weaken our attentional control. It is, of course, possibly that people with weaker cognitive control are simply more drawn to slot-machine media in the first place.

| Derek Thompson

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Data Center Building Overtakes Office Construction

Via Paul Kedrosky [emphasis mine]:

• Data center construction spending passed office spending for the first time in December 2025, crossing at roughly $3.5B monthly.

• Office construction has fallen ~35% from its 2020 peak.

• Data center spend is up 5x since 2020, with the curve steepening sharply in late 2024.
  

Data center spending in the U.S. just crossed over office construction spending. Granted, office construction spending has been declining for years — down roughly 35% from its 2020 peak — but data center construction is up 5x over the same period.

The Census data excludes racks and servers, so this is purely structural construction: concrete, steel, power infrastructure, cooling systems, etc. That makes the numbers more meaningful, not less. The physical footprint of AI compute is now larger than the physical footprint of white-collar office work, at least as measured by monthly construction spending.

The acceleration in the back half of 2024 and into 2025 is impressive. The curve isn’t linear: it steepened sharply as hyperscaler capex commitments made in 2023 and early 2024 translated into actual ground-breaking.

The office line, meanwhile, has no obvious bottom. Remote and hybrid work permanently destroyed a layer of demand that is not coming back. And AI is changing the shape and scope of future white-collar work. Capital is really and truly replacing labor, in multiple ways.

| Paul Kedrosky, Chart of the Day: Data Centers vs Office Construction

A strange inflection point: more places to park hardware, fewer places to park people.

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One of the truisms of human life is that the older you are, the more you live in the past.

| Walter Mosley, The Art of Fiction No. 234

…

A bunch of what I write about, below, is from the beforetimes. But I am not sharing a nostalgic view: I want us to learn from the past, which we don’t seem to be doing.

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I’d really like readers to sign up for a paid annual subscription, so for the present time, I have dropped the annual subscription to $30. Note that I’ve also raised the monthly subscription to $10 per month from $6 per month. Give annual a try. The biggest value is years of posts behind the paywall, and of course, seeing new posts in their entirety.

It’s Going To Get Worse

Around 10% of lower-income households are now spending over 10% of their income on gas.

| Benzinga

I can recall the gas rationing established during the gas crisis of 1973 (odd-even days at gas stations1), Among other outcomes, the national 55 mile-an-hour speed limit was imposed2, and the strategic petroleum reserve was established. Fuel rationing led to violence, as truckers protested high prices.

This time around, though, despite the fact that Iran is blocking the Strait of Hormuz, the US (and Israel) — not OPEC — has to be considered the cause of the rise in the price of oil, and subsequently, the price at the pump.

Remember, the OPEC countries cut production of oil and embargoed the US in 1973 because of Nixon’s request of $2.2 billion to support Israel’s Yom Kippur war against Egypt and Syria, which the Arab allies started in October 19733. And, now, in 2026, we are suffering another oil embargo.

And, as usual, the poorest Americans will be the ones most severely harmed by soaring gas prices.

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Weaselspeak

Clive Thompson turned me onto this hilarious tool:

I don’t know who did this, but someone made a little Kagi translator that takes a normal English sentence and translates it into the clotted weaselspeak one finds in the average LinkedIn post.

It’s unsettlingly good …

Clotted weaselspeak = LinkedIn. LOL.

I wonder if it works in reverse?

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Factoids

It is the time of the clearing of the benches.

Reid J. Epstein, Ben Casselman report on March employment numbers:

Even in an era of surprising economic news, the numbers on Friday [March 6] were striking: Forecasters had anticipated a gain of around 50,000 jobs. Instead, employers cut tens of thousands of jobs, and what had looked like solid job growth in December was revised to show a loss. The unemployment rate continued a slow but steady rise.

…

Goodbye, middle management.

There are now nearly six individual contributors per manager at the 8,500 small businesses analyzed in a report by Gusto, which handles payroll for small and medium-sized employers. That’s up from a little over three in 2019.

| Emily Peck, Managers were already disappearing. Enter AI.

…

What?

Multiple studies show that young people aren’t dating, having sex4 or forming partnerships. A recent survey of young adults from the Institute for Family Studies and Brigham Young University’s Wheatley Institute found that only 30 percent of its respondents were actively dating, despite about half of them indicating that they were interested in finding a relationship. They cited a lack of confidence in what the researchers termed “dating efficacy”: Fewer than 40 percent believed themselves to be attractive to potential partners or felt comfortable discussing their feelings with them. Only around a quarter felt confident in approaching a potential partner or in their ability to stay positive after a dating setback — a rejection, a bad date or a breakup. If trends continue, one in three adults currently in their 20s will never marry, contributing to an epidemic of loneliness that is already generationally acute.

| Christine Emba, The Reason Gen Z Isn’t Dating [emphasis mine]

An epidemic of childlessness, too.

…

The great pile-on.

Restructuring and layoffs have led to a “great pile-on” within organizations. Some 31% of workers say they have recently taken on extra work responsibilities, according to a survey from Wiley Workplace Intelligence, a workplace research firm. A majority of workers with new responsibilities say their workload increased following a restructuring or layoff.

| Kevin J. Delaney, How higher education must change to train tomorrow’s workers

See Goodbye middle management, above.

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…

We cannot predict the full consequences of what we do, and so we should choose carefully and deliberately as we navigate the world. We should be modest in our ambitions, aware of our own fallibility and mindful of the way things can go wrong.

| Jamelle Bouie

…

It’s clear to me that many of our so-called leaders — political and economic —do not operate by Bouie’s admonition.

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I’d really like readers to sign up for a paid annual subscription, so for the present time, I have dropped the annual subscription to $30. Note that I’ve also raised the monthly subscription to $10 per month from $6 per month. Give annual a try. The biggest value is years of posts behind the paywall, and of course, seeing new posts in their entirety.

So Much Money Building AI Infrastructure

Karen Weise adds up the hyperspending of the hyperscalers in A.I. Spending Sets a Record, With No End in Sight

In the first three months of the year, the four companies [Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta] reported in their financial results, they plowed a total of $130.65 billion into capital expenditures, largely spending on data centers that power A.I. That figure — which was another record — was more than three times what the Manhattan Project cost to develop nuclear bombs and 71 percent higher than what the tech giants spent in the same quarter a year earlier.

All of the companies said they would be spending even more, totaling roughly $700 billion this year. Meta, for one, raised its spending forecast for 2026 to between $125 billion and $145 billion, up from its previous prediction of $115 billion to $135 billion. Google also boosted its projection, to at least $180 billion, and said its spending would be “significantly” higher next year.

Om Malik adds his observations about how much more is off the balance sheets:

What is also true is that funding is increasingly off the balance sheet, that supplier relationships are being prepaid, that lease commitments are being deferred for as long as accounting rules allow, and that a meaningful portion of the AI revenue and AI investment gains are flowing in a circle through the same small set of AI labs.

The platform shift is real. AI engineering is real. So is the financial engineering.

Let the good times roll.

Our economy is structured — by policy, not just market forces — so that these companies have this much money to bet on the AI lottery. Meanwhile, the federal debt just surpassed 2025 GDP, in part because these companies (and their billionaire owners) don’t pay very much in taxes.

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Ticketing Driverless Cars

It had to happen, I guess. Orlando Mayorquín reports:

Police officers in California will soon be able to issue traffic tickets to driverless cars like Waymo robotaxis and require their manufacturers to move them out of the way during emergencies.

The state’s Department of Motor Vehicles adopted the new rules for autonomous vehicles this week, in accordance with a 2024 law that imposed more regulation on the technology.

The rules, which go into effect July 1, are designed to address some of the challenges that have vexed local governments and residents in places where driverless carmakers, like Waymo, have expanded their fleets.

What about driverless police cars issuing tickets?

AI Layoffs Starting To Hit India, Too

Steven Lee Myers, Paul Mozur, and Saumya Khandelwal looked at AI impacts in India:

For a quarter century, India has made itself the world’s back office, providing an educated, English-speaking work force to do tasks more cheaply than in the United States or Europe. The industry today employs more than six million people and is worth nearly $300 billion, more than 7 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.

Now, A.I. threatens to do to India what its outsourcing model did to the rest of the world: replace hundreds of thousands of office workers.

India grew a massive workforce as a low-cost alternative to office workers in the West. Now, we are seeing the impact on new grads, with the same calls to ‘upskill’ as we are seeing here:

The tremors are already being felt. Tata Consultancy Services, one of India’s largest employers, has shrunk its work force to 580,000, a decline of more than 20,000 from a peak in 2022, when it hired 100,000 new workers in one year alone.

Its main rival, Infosys, has also slowed hiring, while dozens of smaller start-ups laid off workers across the country in 2025, according to Inc42, a digital economy news outlet in India.

Graduates of the country’s universities and technical colleges are finding fewer openings, forcing them to scramble to “upskill,” an increasingly popular term in the context of learning the A.I. technology that is reshaping the industry.

Maybe these giant service companies will start building their own data centers to lowball the cost of running AI models? At some point, it comes down to the cost of the chips and electricity, and with the growing concerns about data centers in the US, it might be more politically attractive to locate them on the other side of the planet.

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The pathology of decision-making in wars like this is that leaders often fall into sunk cost fallacies. Wars tend to go on well beyond the point when either side can attain a decisive advantage. At a certain point, leaders often want to believe that something will break their way simply if they persist, even though there’s no evidence of that happening.

| Michael Kofman, ‘Time Is Not on Russia’s Side’: A Q & A With Michael Kofman

…

Watching three wars at once — in Iran, Ukraine, and Lebanon — brings Kofman’s observation into high relief. His ‘wars like this’ was referring to Russia’s war in Ukraine, but Israel has been invading, occupying, and retreating in and out of Lebanon since 1978. And now, the US has gone to war with Iran. And the protagonists have fallen into the trap: desire is not a strategy.

These lessons are directly applicable to business, too. For example, look at the history of media mergers and acquisitions in the past few decades. Remember the $99 billion write off at AOL Time Warner? And the drunk-falling-down-the-stairs history of Time Warner since?

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I’d really like readers to sign up for a paid annual subscription, so for the rest of April, I have dropped the annual subscription to $30. Note that I’ve also raised the monthly subscription to $10 per month from $6 per month. Give annual a try. The biggest value is years of posts behind the paywall, and of course, seeing new posts in their entirety.

Grift, Plain and Simple

Financial shenanigans — especially those that increase debt for nebulous economies — are overwhelmingly bad, strategically, and only line the pockets of financiers.

Perhaps the most remarkable fact about modern finance is that it fails on its own terms. Mergers and acquisitions tend to destroy value even as they sate the appetites of empire-building chief executives. In 2016, the Harvard Business Review highlighted “the rule confirmed by nearly all studies: M&A is a mug’s game, in which typically 70 percent to 90 percent of acquisitions are abysmal failures.”

| Oren Cass, The Finance Industry Is a Grift. Let’s Start Treating It That Way.

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Tech Layoffs Go Viral

Oracle lays off 18% of its workforce, around 30,000 people. Block laid off 40%, Snap 16%, Meta plans another 10% cut in May. Brian Elliott writes in Contagion:

Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Block’s Jack Dorsey and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg are among the notable tech founders now racing to see who can make the most of the AI opportunity to transform work. They may also be in a contest to see who can be the most badass when it comes to cutting people.

Predictably, the contagion is spreading. The WSJ reports this week that Block’s CFO is fielding calls asking for their playbook. I’ve heard the same from a number of people in San Francisco: the tech bros are out to see who can get aggressive the fastest in transforming their business, damn the side effects.

More cuts in tech are coming. The narrative is taking hold: AI is a human replacement technology.

So guess what? All those economists and senior leadership who countered claims about AI as a job-killing tsunami by saying it would augment, not replace workers, workers who would be freed from drudgery and allowed to develop new skills, new sorts of work… well, it’s turning out to be bullshit, at least in large tech companies.

Brian Elliott argues that these large companies may be using AI as a smokescreen to reduce bureaucratic bloat. But he also cites BCG research that shows serious levels of projected disruption:

71 million jobs impacted by ‘high levels of task automation’: that’s half of the 150 million people working in the US, today.

And the BCG researchers attempt to square the circle saying that most jobs would be reshaped, not replaced, but that with this year’s AI tools. What about AI of 2027, or 2030?

…

As I have argued for over decades, just as soon as it is possible, businesses will cram AI into every nook and cranny, and displace workers without a second thought.

Unless we, the people — presumably through our elected representatives — stop them.

It is time for the Human Spring, when we collectively demand a moratorium on job displacement by AI, or else we may be standing in the ruins of a once-thriving (or at least muddling by) civilization.

Even though our governments seem to flubbing the fight against climate change, we must rise to the challenge of unfettered AI. And soon. Or else.

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The Fall of HR

Ashly Goodall zooms in on how HR is seemingly out of the loop while this is going on [emphasis mine]:

Today, the HR profession finds itself at a crossroads. Its traditional focus has been the supply of talent. It has concerned itself with hiring, compensation, promotion, and learning, all in service of ensuring that an organization has the right people in the right roles for as much of the time as possible. Where it has moved beyond this remit, it has tended to retain the perspective of the C-suite. So its work on culture has typically focused more on describing what a culture should be than on figuring out how one is made, or changed. And its work on performance has typically focused more on how to judge it than on how to generate it.

But much of this work is being automated. For better or worse, AI is now screening applicants, recommending salaries, suggesting e-learning, and writing performance reviews—and even where humans remain in the loop, much of the traditional work of HR is being hollowed out.

Meanwhile, many organizations appear increasingly indifferent to the idea that they owe anything to their employees. Layoffs abound once again. My former employer, Deloitte, is cutting PTO and parental leave for some part of its workforce. Workers are being summoned back to the office in ever sterner terms.

So the technical elements of HR are being done more and more by the machines, even as the human elements are devalued. I heard recently about an HR leader who asked his CEO if he could invest in a leadership development program. The CEO told him his job was to keep HR issues off the CEO’s desk—and that if he succeeded at this, he could invest in whatever programs he wished.

HR was always more like a police force than faculty, but increasingly, they are being marginalized as even the incredibly precarious 21st-century work detente between management and managees is fraying.

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I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, and you are not in this world to live up to mine.

| Fritz Perls

…

I am reading a fascinating book, The Art of Logic in an Illogical World, by Eugenia Cheng, and she reintroduced me to some common logical fallacies, such as one possible misinterpretation of Fritz Perls statement above. Reread it. It may seem implicit that someone — maybe everyone — is in the world to live up to their own expectations, even if not having to live up to others’. But you can’t surmise that from Perls’ line.

To reach that conclusion, you need an additional, independent statement: we are in the world to live up to our own expectations, and not those of others. But that is an emotional response to Perls’ aphorism, not a logical one, Chang shows us. Her example is the statement ‘when you tell students they have to work hard in order to do well, and then they think that if they work hard they should automatically do well. Working hard is a necessary but not sufficient to doing well. It is not sufficient because you also have to work hard in the right sort of way, and if you think otherwise, you are making a converse error.’

But Perls may not have been implying anything about living up to our own expectations: it may just be us inferring that, driven by emotion rather than logic.

I’d really like readers to sign up for a paid annual subscription, so for the rest of April, I have dropped the annual subscription to $30. Note that I’ve also raised the monthly subscription to $10 per month from $6 per month. Give annual a try. The biggest value is years of posts behind the paywall, and of course, seeing new posts in their entirety.

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A Managee’s 1:1 Guide

I am always a bit dubious when senior managers give advice to managees, especially when couched as ‘what top performers do differently’, so I confess I read Polina Russell’s The Employee’s Ultimate Guide to 1:1s - What Top Performers Do Differently with trepidation. But after a quick scan, I returned to the top, very intrigued by her practicality, and I gave it a deep read.

I agree that managees (or ICs — individual contributors — in her dialect) should prepare for 1:1s, considering the purpose and problems inherent to close interaction with managers. (The subtext is the relational and political matrix in which everyone at work is embedded, which Russell mostly leaves unstated. She spent 14 years at Amazon, which is a jungle.)

One of the most helpful parts is the section What not to do in a 1:1. For example:

2 Do not use 1:1 as therapy

4 Don’t write an essay

5 Don’t give your manager action items

Her conspiratorial tone in the final paragraphs is a bit arch, but work relations are not tiddlywinks. Remember, there is a low-scale war underneath it all, between managees and their bosses, and between managees, upwardly striving:

If you apply this guide to your 1:1s consistently, you will stand out. Most people don’t do this. Which is good news for you.

ICs (individual contributors): keep this as your edge. Don’t share with anyone.

Managers: remove that edge and send it to your team.

Everybody keeping everybody off balance, at every turn.

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Think Small

Talya Minsberg reports on a study of athletes that shows focusing on ‘process goals’ — ‘small objectives that were more in my control’ — than ‘outcome goals’, such as her efforts to run her fastest time ever in a marathon.

The rationale is that while big goals can be motivating, the reality is that a great deal of what makes big outcomes big — like winning a race — are out of our control:

Many people naturally gravitate toward ambitious goals that are the traditional markers of success, like landing a dream job or winning an award.

These kinds of targets can be highly motivating, said Ayelet Fishbach, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. But, she cautioned, whether you actually achieve them is usually at least partially out of your control.

That’s not all bad. Outcome goals can get you off the blocks, she said. But if you miss your target, she said, falling short can be profoundly disappointing. Had I been singularly focused on running a certain time in Boston, for example, “Well, that may be your last marathon,” she said.

Experts recommend instead focusing on your own performance, building a plan to improve, without ‘normative comparison’, which is measuring yourself against others. She cites the advice of Charles Duhigg, the author of Supercommunicators and The Power of Habit:

“A goal is only useful inasmuch as it helps develop a plan for you,” said Charles Duhigg, the author of “Supercommunicators” and “The Power of Habit.”

If done correctly, he said, once you have a plan in place, you won’t think too much about the goal.

Duhigg used the example of writing a book, which, as he knows well, can be daunting if you try to take in the whole picture at once. But the smaller goals — writing the opening of one chapter, and then the middle of another chapter — are what get you there. “If you just spend enough time sitting there doing these little bits and pieces, you end up with a book,” he said. “The book is the natural byproduct of the plan.”

So, frame your goal as a plan, not as an outcome.

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Never Invented

A 2024 Harris Poll survey of about 1,000 Gen Z adults in the US found that almost half of respondents said they wished social media platforms like TikTok, Snapchat, and X (formerly Twitter) were “never invented.” And 21% said they wished the smartphone had never been invented.

| Sydney Bradley

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…

In capitalism, the future is an asset and it’s already been sold.

| Total Refusal, Hardly Working (around 14 minutes in.)

…

A great video by the artist collective Total Refusal.

I’d really like readers to sign up for a paid annual subscription, so for the rest of April, I have dropped the annual subscription to $30. Note that I’ve also raised the monthly subscription to $10 per month from $6 per month. Give annual a try. The biggest value is years of posts behind the paywall, and of course, seeing new posts in their entirety.

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The Fall of Pax Americana

The numbers are clear: war is on the rise, globally, and not just this month.

From 1989 to 2014, battle-related deaths from cross-border conflicts averaged fewer than 15,000 a year. Beginning in 2014, the average has risen to over 100,000 a year. As states increasingly disregard limits on the lawful use of force, this may be just the beginning of a deadly new era of conflict.

| Oona A. Hathaway, The Great Unraveling Has Begun

What will it add up to by the end of 2026?

According to the projections, an estimated 28,300 people will be killed in Ukraine in 2026, while 7,700 deaths are forecast in Israel and the Palestinian territories, and 4,300 in Sudan.

| Study warns thousands likely to die in global conflicts in 2026

Ukraine, Sudan, Venezuela, Iran, Lebanon, Gaza, Myanmar, and whatever is coming next. The world contains at least 31 million refugees, and we are creating more all the time.

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The Rise of China

China has managed to stay out of military conflicts, while Russia and the US are up to their armpits in them. What has China been doing, instead?

Already, China’s economy is roughly 30 percent larger than the United States’ by purchasing power, its industrial base twice as large, its power generation twice as high, and its navy is on track to become 50 percent larger by the end of this decade. It leads in new technologies like electric vehicles and next-generation nuclear reactors while the United States increasingly depends on it [China] for everything from antibiotics to rare-earth minerals.

| Rush Joshi

China announced on Wednesday the world’s largest trade surplus ever, even adjusting for inflation, as a tsunami of exports flooded markets around the world last year.

China’s surplus, the value of goods and services it sold abroad versus its imports, reached $1.19 trillion, an increase of 20 percent from 2024, according to data released by the country’s General Administration of Customs. The number had already exceeded $1 trillion through November.

The country’s surplus is still widening: For December alone, China’s surplus reached $114.14 billion, propelled by surging exports to the European Union, Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia. It was the third-highest monthly surplus on record, trailing only January and June last year.

The enormous trade surplus for the full year came despite efforts by President Trump to use tariffs to contain China’s factories. The tariffs reduced China’s trade surplus with the United States by 22 percent last year. But Chinese factories increased sales to other regions, in many cases bypassing American tariffs by shipping goods to the United States through Southeast Asia and elsewhere.

| Keith Bradsher, China Announces Record Trade Surplus as Its Exports Flood World Markets

Of course, it’s not all sunshine and flowers. China has persistent problems, like the massively overbuilt housing sector which had harmed individual investors, banks, and regional governments that financed the glut. Older workers find themselves pushed out jobs because of institutionalized agism. Young workers are growing disillusioned by a stagnating economy, as reported by Joy Dong, Max Kim:

In past decades, China’s rapid economic growth lifted 800 million people out of poverty and gave rise to a flourishing middle class. But, analysts say, growth and wages have since stagnated, and prospects for social mobility have dimmed. For many young people, the once-idealized life of striving now evokes drudgery, exhaustion and disappointment.

Those sentiments are reflected in the backlash to “996” culture — the expectation of working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week, promoted by prominent figures in the country’s tech sector. They can also be seen in online descriptions of modern life as “garbage time,” an American sports term for the final minutes of a game, when the outcome is already decided but players must still go through the motions.

This perspective explains the rise of an oddball meme, the Sad Toy Horse.

The plushie first appeared last year in a shop in eastern China. It has stumpy legs, a golden bell around its neck and lettering on its side that reads, “wishing you instant wealth.” It also bears a conspicuous manufacturing error: Its mouth is sewn upside down, turning what should have been a content smile into a picture of melancholy.

Known as the “crying horse,” the glum toy has become an online sensation in China ahead of the Lunar New Year, the country’s biggest holiday, which begins on Feb. 17. The “crying horse” hashtag has appeared more than 190 million times on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, and inspired a winking joke: Take the crying version to work, leave the smiling one at home.

The toy’s sudden popularity has resonated beyond novelty. Many young Chinese workers have embraced it as a symbol of their exhaustion and disillusion.

“Its expression perfectly reflects the helplessness of an office worker,” Ms. Hao said. She bought four, two sad and two smiling.

China is no garden of Eden, but even with the sad toy horses — this is the year of the horse, there — and all the social ills of Chinese society, I have to confess that it’s apparent stability relative to what the US is up in geopolitics has its attractions. But I will have to add the caveat that China might use this time of invasions to occupy Taiwan, and that would figure given the strange calculus of 2026.

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More Independents in the US

Gallup reports on a political realignment in the US: more independent voters.

A record-high 45% of U.S. adults identified as political independents in 2025, surpassing the 43% measured in 2014, 2023 and 2024. Meanwhile, equal shares of U.S. adults — 27% each — identified as either Democrats or Republicans. … In most years since Gallup began regularly conducting its polls by telephone in 1988, independents have been the largest political group. However, the independent percentage has increased markedly in the past 15 years, typically registering 40% or higher, a level not reached prior to 2011.

The higher rate of political independence also results from younger adults today being more likely than young adults in the past to identify as independents. The 56% of Gen Z adults identifying as independents today compares with 47% of millennials in 2012 and 40% of Gen X adults in 1992.1

Taking into account Americans’ party identification and political leanings, an average of 47% identified as Democrats or said they were independents who lean toward the Democratic Party, while 42% identified as Republicans or leaned Republican. This breaks a three-year stretch in which Republicans held an edge in party affiliation.

US voters are growing increasingly dissatisfied with both major political parties.

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The fish is in the water, but the water’s also in the fish.

| Arthur Miller

…

There’s a famous line mistakenly attributed to Marshall McLuhan — ‘We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us’ — actually penned by a friend of his, Father John Culkin. It seems that AI is having such an effect on those that use it, and the greatest impact on those that use it the most. And of course, the systems of work are tools (or a tool) as well.

Are we the fish or the water?

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Work Is Not Neutral

I have often said that work in interconnected to everything in our society, and cannot be understood as a thing in isolation, but I have not expressed as clearly as Corinne Murray does, here [emphasis mine]:

The way modern work functions—and what it demands of us—is a byproduct of our cultural and moral frameworks. Underneath all of what we see playing out in our daily lives lies deep-seated religious and secular ideologies that define productivity as a virtue, suffering as a necessity, and worth as something that can only be earned through effort and performance.

If a better future were possible without confronting the depths and power of these systems, we would have arrived in it already. Instead, we’ve only redesigned and rebranded the surface features while leaving the underlying beliefs untouched and unexamined–guaranteeing that the same old outcomes will play out under a different name.

Even if we could isolate modern work in the United States from…everything else…the conditions of modern work are far from ideal. Burnout rates climb to new heights annually. Gen Z still can’t find entry-level work. Parents—primarily women—are leaving the workforce because of childcare shortages and return-to-office mandates. The elderly are working retail to supplement fixed incomes. All while the wealth disparity between billionaires and the rest of us exceeds that of the Gilded Age, and the last vestiges of America’s social safety net get swept away for more tax breaks for them. These are not isolated crises. These are features of our reality, not flaws.

| Corinne Murray, Work Has Never Been Neutral

And they point out we are implicated in the workings of these systems:

Most of us participate in these systems because choosing not to comes at great personal cost, and one we’re rarely allowed to acknowledge. Regardless of our belief and endorsement of what is happening, our participation makes us complicit—willingly or not—in exchange for some semblance of stability and comfort.

As Abraham Joshua Heschel tells us,

In a free society, all are involved in what some are doing. Some are guilty; all are responsible.

One of our tasks is to name those who are guilty, but to accept we are implicated as well. Murray ends with this:

Awareness doesn’t change the fact that we still must participate to survive, but it removes the illusion that unquestioned participation is neutral. Continuing to look away from these systems and their implications is an active choice of disengagement and the grave consequences for all of us.

Breaking through these illusions requires confrontation, and I ask that you stay with me as I do that.

I strongly encourage others to follow Murray. Here’s some background.

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A Burnout Machine

Connie Loizos reports on recent research published in HBR1 that was based on on-the-job observation at a 200-person tech company. Loizos puts the thesis of AI as

The tools work for you, you work less hard, everybody wins.

But a new study published in Harvard Business Review follows that premise to its actual conclusion, and what it finds there isn’t a productivity revolution. It finds companies are at risk of becoming burnout machines.

The UC Berkeley researchers detailed the time sink that AI become:

In our in-progress research, we discovered that AI tools didn’t reduce work, they consistently intensified it. In an eight-month study of how generative AI changed work habits at a U.S.-based technology company with about 200 employees, we found that employees worked at a faster pace, took on a broader scope of tasks, and extended work into more hours of the day, often without being asked to do so. Importantly, the company did not mandate AI use (though it did offer enterprise subscriptions to commercially available AI tools). On their own initiative workers did more because AI made “doing more” feel possible, accessible, and in many cases intrinsically rewarding.

While this may sound like a dream come true for leaders, the changes brought about by enthusiastic AI adoption can be unsustainable, causing problems down the line. Once the excitement of experimenting fades, workers can find that their workload has quietly grown and feel stretched from juggling everything that’s suddenly on their plate. That workload creep can in turn lead to cognitive fatigue, burnout, and weakened decision-making. The productivity surge enjoyed at the beginning can give way to lower quality work, turnover, and other problems.

The researchers detailed the slippery slope of work intensification. Because AI tools can cover for a person’s knowledge gaps, workers began taking on responsibilities that formerly others would have done, like product managers starting to write code. This led to those others having to review that AI-augment output, like engineers reviewing code written by product managers. And because it’s easy to start up an AI project, time that might have been used to rest and reflect was swallowed up by AI-centered or -supported work.

As the researchers — Aruna Ranganathan, Xingqi Maggie Ye — stated the momentum of AI as a ‘partner’ becomes a rollercoaster ride

While this sense of having a “partner” enabled a feeling of momentum, the reality was a continual switching of attention, frequent checking of AI outputs, and a growing number of open tasks. This created cognitive load and a sense of always juggling, even as the work felt productive.

Over time, this rhythm raised expectations for speed—not necessarily through explicit demands, but through what became visible and normalized in everyday work. Many workers noted that they were doing more at once—and feeling more pressure—than before they used AI, even though the time savings from automation had ostensibly been meant to reduce such pressure.

All of this produced a self-reinforcing cycle. AI accelerated certain tasks, which raised expectations for speed; higher speed made workers more reliant on AI. Increased reliance widened the scope of what workers attempted, and a wider scope further expanded the quantity and density of work. Several participants noted that although they felt more productive, they did not feel less busy, and in some cases felt busier than before. As one engineer summarized, “You had thought that maybe, oh, because you could be more productive with AI, then you save some time, you can work less. But then really, you don’t work less. You just work the same amount or even more.”

The researchers suggest band-aids for management to minimize AI burnout, but the most important takeaway is from Loizos. While AI can augment what workers can do on their own

[The research] confirms it, then shows where all that augmentation actually leads, which is “fatigue, burnout, and a growing sense that work is harder to step away from, especially as organizational expectations for speed and responsiveness rise,” according to the researchers.

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Research is formalised curiosity. It’s poking and prying with purpose.

| Zora Neale Hurston

…

That’s what I’m up to. Poking and prying with purpose.

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Fed Employees Traumatized

Guess what? US federal agency heads characterizing federal employees as ‘the enemy’, trying to inflict ‘trauma’ on them, goading them to quit, and actively criticizing the goals of the federal agencies, results in a highly disengaged workforce. And that, in turn, leads to poor service delivery. So says the Partnership for Public Service in a new report -- the Public Service Viewpoint Survey -- and it reveals a ‘staggering collapse in employee engagement’ at the federal government, as Don Moynihan1 lays it out:

The headline figure is a government-wide Employee Engagement and Satisfaction Index Score of 32 out of 100. To put that in context: prior Best Places to Work scores, even at poorly rated agencies, rarely dropped below 50.

This is not a dip. It is a collapse.

The numbers are awful:

Here are the comparisons between 2024 and 2025 for larger agencies. The Department of the Army registered the highest score among large agencies — at just 48% out of 100 — with only 9% saying Secretary Pete Hegseth’s political team generates high levels of motivation. Every other large agency scored lower, some dramatically so. The average score by agency in 2024 is about 70% and 29.5% in 2025 — just over a 39 percentage point decline.

The picture at mid-size agencies is even worse. In 2024, the average score is 73% and in 2025 it is just over 25% — an astonishing 48 percentage point decline.

Of course, as in the private sector, poor engagement leads to lower productivity, higher churn rates, and worse service to clients. And for those in those jobs, it’s like living in a psychic prison. It may take a decade for the federal government to recover from this crisis.

Elizabeth Linos of the Harvard Kennedy School, comments on the survey results:

By any historical measure, the new data released yesterday by the Partnership for Public Service is documenting the worst employee engagement and workforce sentiment I’ve ever seen for the federal government. To put this into perspective: in a typical year, agencies work hard to get their engagement scores from the high 60s to the mid-70s or even into the 80s (if you’re NASA). This year, the average is 32. No federal agency is a “best place to work” at this point.

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Unsafe For Women

In the United States, women are 73 percent more likely to be severely injured in vehicle crashes than men, and 17 percent more likely to die.

| Eve Van Dyke

Apparently, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has resisted requiring crash test dummies that proxy for actual women. So, terrible stats, and we can’t expect them to get better soon.

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Shift Sulking

When hourly workers begin their day already drained, exhausted, and stressed by increasing pressures to work with understaffed teams and subject to unpredictable schedules, it’s being called ‘shift sulking‘. This goes beyond the disengagement typified by the Gen Z stare, deeper into the way the hourly jobs of today are sapping the reserves of hourly workers, especially when coupled with poly-employment: when workers have to juggle multiple jobs to make ends meet.

Jennifer Mattson reports:

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Instead of a winner-takes-all approach to power, it’s time to consider working toward a system where there is much less power for the winner to take.

| Katherine Mangu-Ward, Libertarians: We Told You So

…

Mangu-Ward’s statement resonates loudly amid the war in Iran and the diminishing congressional oversight of war-making and public policy more generally.

My focus at workfutures.io is on work, not war, but the way corporations are capitulating to the Trump administration's encroachment on how businesses operate must remain high on the agenda here.

I’ve been writing and speaking about the future of work for over 30 years. Along the way, I’ve consulted with and written for Microsoft, IBM, Google, Dell, Cisco, and dozens more. In 2007, I coined the term ‘hashtag’ (yes, hashtag), and many other terms that have shaped the way we think about work, like ‘work management’, ‘social tools’, ‘work media’, and others. If you want to help me continue my work, consider a paid subscription.

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Post-Liberal Conservatism

Vice President JD Vance has embraced the worldview many are calling ‘post-liberal conservatism’, as Thomas Edsall described it1:

Vance described his current way of thinking relatively early on in his transition to MAGA loyalist, at a 2023 event honoring the post-liberal political theorist Patrick Deneen. “We on the right, on the sort of the post-liberal right, the new right,” Vance said, “we are really, really kidding ourselves about the weight of the challenge, and when we talk about changing the regime.”

The corrupting power of liberalism, Vance argued, has infected both the public and private sectors:

The way that lobbyists interact with bureaucrats, interact with corporations — there is no meaningful distinction between the public and the private sector in the American regime; it is all fused together. It is all melded together. It is all, in my view, very much aligned against the people who I represent in the state of Ohio

In fact, Vance continued, “the regime is the public and private sector. It’s the corporate C.E.O.s, it’s the HR professionals at Budweiser, and they are working together, not against one another, in a way that destroys the American common good.”

Vance and his ilk are committed to changing not just public policies or legislating new laws, but changing the culture of the American regime, including what business leaders are working toward, and who they work with to get there.

Edsall quotes Stephanie Slade of the libertarian magazine Reason as saying she

would sum up Vance’s view as follows: The left is willing to use all the power at its disposal — cultural as well as governmental — to impose its way of life on the American people, whether they like it or not, and so if conservatives are to have any hope of saving the country from left-wing tyranny, they must be willing to respond in kind.

This includes putting pressure on business leaders to support the post-liberal right’s agenda. So, out with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Out with secular liberalism. Out with corporate social responsibility.

That may involve dislodging a managerial elite characterized by post-liberal political theorist Patrick Deneen as ‘a new aristocracy that has enjoyed inherited privileges, prescribed economic roles and fixed social positions’.

Deneen expanded on that in Why Liberalism Failed:

A political philosophy that was launched to foster greater equity, defend a pluralist tapestry of different cultures and beliefs, protect human dignity and, of course, expand liberty, in practice generates titanic inequality, enforces uniformity and homogeneity, fosters material and spiritual degradation and undermines freedom.

So, Vance and his cadre would like a new post-liberal managerial elite to take over American business, and to expunge any vestiges of liberal idealism and humanism.

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Following Japan Into Late-Stage Capitalism

Ellie (at Oceandrops) makes that argument that Japan has fallen into late-stage capitalism, and the US is following. She describes Japan’s ‘lost decade’ — the decades following the 1991 financial crisis there:

In 1991, the Bank of Japan tightened monetary policy, cooling speculation which triggered an enormous crash. Asset values plunged by over 80%, and the banks were left with bad loans. This event marked the beginning of the Lost Decade, a period of incredible stagnation that could be better called the Lost Decades — as it plagues the country to this day. Wages peaked in ‘97, the Yen depreciated, and household purchases have flatlined.

We have our own story to tell:

America’s “Lost Decade” started with the housing crisis of 2008, where subprime mortgages and the predatory financialization of consumer debt liquified the entire financial system.

Where the Japanese response to the financial crisis was slow and fragmented, the Americans aggressively flooded the economy with liquidity. TARP bailouts, quantitative easing, zero interest rates, and forced bank recapitalization helped Wall Street recover but not the ordinary American. Asset inflation benefited the rich, and everyone else was handed incredible wealth inequality.

And the social consequences in Japan have been many, and are echoing in America:

Japan has a term for “evil jobs” — ブラック企業 (Black Kigyo or Black Labor). These jobs enforce extreme overtime, unpaid labor disguised as “service overtime”, surveillance, and quotas. Workers internalize this obedience and labor abuse because the alternative is unemployment and social stigma.

(Translation) How to spot a Black Company: Understaffing, low pay, long hours, harassment.

Black kigyo companies comprise a significant portion of entry-level work, drastically altering working norms for young adults.

American analogues are now visible too. This November, the private sector lost 32,000 jobs.2 The pandemic-era white collar work bubble popped, and popped hard. Hiring is flat for the Class of 20263 as layoffs rise and AI takes over menial white collar labor. The American worker is being pushed into gig-worker exploitation, and human dignity violating work conditions. Even industries that were typically seen as relatively stable — healthcare and education — are experiencing major worker burnout.

Overwork is normalized. Karoshi (”death by overwork”) became a recognized cause of death in the 1980s. This includes heart attacks, strokes, and suicides linked to workplace abuses and poor life quality. If you visit Japan you may see signs of this normalized absurdity: salarymen collapsed in random public locations, Konbini selling shower-in-a-can, and people getting most of their calories at vending machines and subway station kissaten.

Asia Minute: Helping and Shaming Japan’s Drunk Salarymen | Hawai’i Public Radio

The average American, unfamiliar with Japanese social norms or cultural history, likely thinks this is some reflection of premodern Japanese values or ritual suicide traditions. It’s not.

Karoshi directly parallels emerging American trends in burnout-related deaths and mental-health collapse. Amazon, for example, had to make a public apology for denying their drivers the right to go to the bathroom.45

Sounds a lot like what is playing out in America circa 2026.

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…

To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.

| George Orwell

…

I feel that Orwell’s line reads better to my contemporary ears with a ‘just’ at the front and some paraphrasing: ‘Just to see what’s in front of your nose is a constant struggle’.

Struggle on!

Sundays Are The New Mondays

996 culture (9am to 9pm, 6 days a week), a trend transplanted from China, has taken hold in Silicon Valley, according to Amanda Hoover:

As of last year, 5% of white-collar workers in the US logged on during the weekends, a 9% increase from 2023, according to an analysis of the habits of more than 200,000 employees and 777 companies conducted by ActivTrak, a workforce-analytics and productivity-software company. They clocked an average of about 5 hours and 30 minutes on Saturdays and Sundays, and those at mid-size companies of about 1,000 to 5,000 employees were the most likely to work weekends. In 2024, people with bachelor’s degrees worked an average of four hours on a weekend, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and about 29% of all employed people worked on weekends.

Hoover argues that people are doing this as an act of ‘liberation’, finding time that is ‘distraction-free’:

Others say the weekends are their distraction-free days. A 2025 report from Microsoft found that workers experience some 275 distractions each day, or an interruption about every two minutes during the 9 to 5 workday. The average desk worker sits in meetings for nearly 15 hours a week in 2024, according to a survey from AI-powered calendar app Reclaim.ai.

Heading toward Josef Pieper’s ‘total work’, which I wrote about in the past:

Pieper poses an existential question, which I fear we have sidestepped, these days, as we’ve accepted the tyranny of work:

What is normal is work, and the normal day is the working day. But the question is this: can the world of man be exhausted in being “the working world”? Can the human being be satisfied with being a functionary, a “worker”? Can human existence be fulfilled in being exclusively a work-a-day existence?

To me, the answer is an unequivocal no. But your mileage may vary. But I believe we are confronted by a constant struggle to resist the tyranny of work culture, management, and the clock, and carve out time for leisure, play, and rest.

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Ungovernable Change

In Why Keeping Up with Change Feels Harder Than Ever, Kayla Velnoskey, Ingrid Laman, and Carolina Valencia introduce the concept of ‘ungovernable change’1, an outgrowth of the frantic levels of change initiative corporations are undertaking today:

A March 2025 Gartner survey of more than 980 global leaders found that only 32% of mid- to senior-level leaders were able to implement their last change initiative on time while maintaining employee engagement and performance.

Leaders are managing ungovernable change at a time when their employees are increasingly skeptical of their efforts: 79% of the 2,900 global employees surveyed by Gartner in April 2025 don’t trust their organization’s ability to change effectively. The majority believe that their organization has made poor change decisions in the past and are unlikely to be successful in the future.

The authors summarize the problem:

Leading through change is more difficult than ever because of the convergence of four factors: 1) not only is there a large volume of change, but changes are stacked, one on top of the other; 2) not only are changes happening faster, they’re continuous, without a start or end date; 3) not only are changes larger in scale; they’re interdependent; and 4) not only is change unpredictable, they’re externally driven by technology, geopolitical trends, and more.

The answer in not to slow down, according to the authors, because the world is moving at ungovernable rates.

The companies that are most successful turn the situation inside out. Instead of slowing down, they inculcate routinizing change. They ‘routinizing change—treating it as an everyday business process’.

Note that in their own survey data, ‘79% of employees don’t trust their organization’s ability to change effectively’. This means ‘adopting three strategies’:

1. Communicate that change is a journey, not a destination.

2. Enable change-ready employees, not change enthusiasm.

3. Foresee multiple possible scenarios, not just the current change.

The examples they offer sound rational, but the paper reads more like a PowerPoint than something that can overturn the disruptions of ‘ungovernable change’. And the subtext, again, is Pieper’s ‘total work’ seeping into everything. Not only do you have to complete the work of the day, but have to become a willing confederate in blowing up any sense of stability, and embrace total change — in all dimensions — as the norm.

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I’ve been writing and speaking about the future of work for over 30 years. Along the way, I’ve consulted with and written for Microsoft, IBM, Google, Dell, Cisco, and dozens more. In 2007, I coined the term ‘hashtag’ (yes, hashtag), and many other terms that have shaped the way we think about work, like ‘work management’, ‘social tools’, ‘work media’, and others. If you want to help me continue my work, consider a paid subscription.

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…

The hour of the barbarian is at hand. The modern barbarian. The American hour. Violence, excess, waste, mercantilism, bluff, conformism, stupidity, vulgarity, disorder.

| Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1950)

…

Events of recent weeks confirm Césaire’s anticipation of the neoliberal world order in the 20th century, and today’s 21st century post-neoliberalism, which looks a great deal like the original form of imperialism: piracy1.

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AI, AI, AI

The title above can be pronounced in two ways: the first is ‘eh-eye, eh-eye, eh-eye’, alluding to artificial intelligence, which is everywhere in the news (but not really in the stats?). The second pronunciation is ‘aye-ee, aye-ee, aye-ee’, like someone screaming because their hair is on fire.

Also, I confess that I am not researching these stories as they flitter by across my radar screen. I am merely repeating anecdotal evidence: mere anecdittos.

…

A whopping 3 percent.

“I can’t really remember a boom with such active hostility to it,” William Quinn, co-author of the 2020 history tome “Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles,” told the NYT. “People usually find new technology exciting. It happened with electricity, bicycles, motorcars. There were fears but also hopes. AI is notable, perhaps unique, for the lack of enthusiasm.”

As consumer sentiment goes from sour to moldy, the CEOs behind the bubble only seem to be doubling down.

“It’s extremely hurtful, frankly,” said Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang in a January interview about the “battle of [AI] narratives.”

Huang insisted that AI is suffering a “lot of damage” from “very well-respected people who have painted a doomer narrative, end-of-the-world narrative, science fiction narrative.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has concurred, lamenting pushback against the “diffusion, the absorption” of AI in broader society. “Looking at what’s possible, it does feel sort of surprisingly slow,” he said at the recent Cisco AI Summit.

While AI boosters could argue we’re simply living under the tyranny of a vocal, AI-hating minority, evidence suggests the public’s aversion runs deep — and not just against the tech itself. As one Pew Research survey from 2025 found, about 60 percent of respondents said they’d like “more control” over how AI is used in their lives, while only 17 percent are “comfortable” with AI remaining in the hands of a few tech billionaires.

Consumer data paints an even more dramatic story. In mid-2025, when mainstream analyst firms were still parroting uncritical AI hype before investor sentiment turned cold in December, the number of US AI users who regularly paid for the privilege stood at a whopping 3 percent.

| Joe Wilkins, Tech CEOs Confused by Why Everybody Hates AI So Much

I know why people hate AI so much: the billionaires who are steering the economy into a dystopian future, or the ditch.

…

42%

The approximate share of tech-industry workers who said their direct manager expects AI use in day-to-day work as of last October, up from 32% just eight months before, according to a survey from AI consulting firm Section.

| The Future of Everything

…

But what incentives?

Fifty-five percent of companies surveyed say they are offering no premiums, no bonuses, no equity, for employees who have built out their AI skillset. Only 14% offer higher base pay, 10% offer bonuses, and 9% offer long‑term incentives.

| Payscale, Payscale’s 2026 Compensation Best Practices Report Reveals Shifting Pay Strategies Amid AI and Labor Market Volatility

AI adoption in exchange for equity might be a sensible model, come to think of it.

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…

Blunt-force trauma.

Thirty-six percent of chief marketing officers expect to reduce head count over the next 12 to 24 months “by utilizing AI or eliminating redundancies,” according to a new survey from executive search firm Spencer Stuart based on November interviews with approximately 90 CMOs and other marketing leaders.

At larger companies, the outlook was grimmer. Forty-seven percent of respondents at companies with $20 billion or more in revenue said they expect to cut staff over the next 12 to 24 months, and 32% already did so this year, the survey found.

The key factor is growing pressure to show returns on companies’ significant investments in AI, said Richard Sanderson, who leads Spencer Stuart’s marketing, sales and communications officer practice.

“We’re hearing, particularly from the largest … companies, that they have to deliver, and it may have to be through blunt-force of head-count reduction,” Sanderson said.

| Patrick Coffee

So, AI isn't generating enough work taken on by bots to justify the spend, so, of course, companies will cut jobs instead of cutting back on AI. Totally reasonable. Uh huh. Sure. Got it.

…

Job applicants want to know why they are rejected by AI.

Applicants for AI-screened jobs are suing a recruitment tool company, Eightfold AI, for failing to share the scores and results for their job applications. The novel twist is comparing this to credit ratings and the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Seems reasonable that they should know why the system is rejecting them, in some case for thousands of applications.

| Stacy Cowley2

Seems fair to me. But the companies behind this software, like Eightfold AI, don’t want to share how they do what they do. Or maybe they don’t know how the AI is doing it.

…

And job hunters are using AI, too.

It’s easy to spot when candidates over-rely on AI, some employers said. Oftentimes, executive summaries will look eerily similar to each other, odd phrases that people wouldn’t normally use in conversation creep into descriptions, fancy vocabulary appears, and someone with entry-level experience uses language that indicates they are much more senior, they added.

It’s worse when they use auto-apply AI tools, which will find jobs, fill out applications and submit résumés on the candidate’s behalf, some employers said. Those tend to misinterpret some of the application questions and fill in the wrong information in inappropriate spots. If these applications were evaluated alone, employers say they’d have a harder time identifying AI usage. But when hundreds of applications all have the same issue, they said, AI’s role in it becomes obvious.

Joseph Eitner, chief human resources officer for New York-based investment firm Eaton Capital Management, said he has no issue with candidates turning to AI to add some keywords, clean up their grammar, or even help them think through a question on the application. But ultimately, he said, candidates should do the writing themselves, express their own ideas and personalities, and take the time to manually submit their applications.

“If that’s how you apply and how you work, I don’t want to hire you,” he said. AI auto-apply services are “snake oil. It’s a disservice to yourself and to the people you’re applying to.”

| Danielle Abril, Employers to job seekers: Your AI résumé isn’t fooling anyone3

I’ve been writing and speaking about the future of work for over 30 years. Along the way, I’ve consulted with and written for Microsoft, IBM, Google, Dell, Cisco, and dozens more. In 2007, I coined the term ‘hashtag’ (yes, hashtag), and many other terms that have shaped the way we think about work, like ‘work management’, ‘social tools’, ‘work media’, and others. If you want to help me continue my work, consider a paid subscription.

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Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralized society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic. The rulers of this new society will be the people who effectively control the means of production: that is,…

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Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.

| Willian Stafford, The Way It Is

…

Apologies for my absence from these pages in the past week or so. The recent snowpocalypse — we had 31 inches of snow and an arctic deep freeze lasting more than a week — hit me like a small-scale pandemic lockdown. Trapped inside, grappling with a …

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Under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. We have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief.

| Robert Anton Wilson

…

In his final column at the NY Times, David Brooks offered this:

Only 13 percent of …

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You cannot overwork your way into being valued. You cannot explain or fight your way into being valued.

| Sara Wachter-Boettcher, Hey designers, they’re gaslighting you

…

Not only is work inherently oppositional, today the stresses of the modern workplace — both white collar work in the office and frontline work in the field, hospital, or factory — are becoming so intense that working people are emotionally withdrawing from their jobs, because, as Wachter-Boettcher points out, you cannot make your bosses value you when they consider workers nothing more than expendable liabilities.

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Shift Sulking

When hourly workers begin their day already drained, exhausted, and stressed by the increasing pressures on understaffed teams and by unpredictable schedules, it’s called ‘shift sulking'1. This goes beyond the disengagement typified by the Gen Z stare, deeper into the way the hourly jobs of today are sapping the reserves of hourly workers, especially when coupled with poly-employment2: when workers have to juggle multiple jobs to make ends meet.

As Jennifer Mattson reports:

“[At a time when] 31% of U.S. workers report feeling detached, ‘shift sulking’ is a clear reminder that the strength of our economy is inseparable from the stability of the shift worker,” says [Silvija] Martincevic [CEO of Deputy, a workforce management platform for hourly workers]. “That’s not simply a retention challenge. It’s a productivity challenge that limits our collective potential.”

According to data from Deputy, in states where stable scheduling is the norm, frontline worker happiness reaches 98%, compared to just 60% where it’s unpredictable.

[…]

“We don’t see shift sulking as a temporary issue; it’s the human cost of deeper structural friction in today’s labor market—and all indicators point to it intensifying in 2026,” Martincevic says. “Businesses are operating leaner, asking teams to deliver the same output despite tighter staffing and volatile demand. That pressure falls squarely on the frontline.”

According to Deputy’s Better Together report, while AI can automate tasks and improve visibility, technology alone won’t solve the problem—that demands structural change that gives workers what they want: predictable schedules, balanced workloads, and transparent communication.

And without outside forces pushing for change, we can expect more shift sulking in 2026.

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Hybrid in 2026

Robert Half’s Demand for Skilled Talent report shows that despite corporate calls for return to the office, hybrid still seems to be with us going forward into 2026, varying by field, seniority, and geography

In general, the more experience, the greater autonomy:

Newly created hybrid and remote jobs—by experience level:

• Senior-level (5 or more years of experience): 30% hybrid, 13% remote

• Mid-level (3-5 years of experience): 25% hybrid, 12% remote

• Entry-level (0-2 years of experience): 18% hybrid, 9% remote

Roughly a third of new jobs are hybrid or fully remote:

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China and US Converging?

China and the US have been decoupling politically and economically (although we’ll see how long that lasts, post-Trump), but we’re seeing a convergence in population projections. The US population is projected to slowly grow to 400 million by 2100, while China’s population peaks right now, at 1.4 billion and falls precipitously to just about 600 million (like Europe) in the same timeframe (via Our World in Data):

China is going to undergo serious economic and societal changes if this holds.

Note that India’s population has surpassed China’s, but is projected to begin declining around 2060.

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There is no satisfaction in being right about terrible things. That’s what many miss about the people who investigate conspiracies: in the end, we would rather be wrong. We would happily be mocked as hysterics and alarmists if it meant everyone could avoid the fate we foresee. When our theories involve the theft of the future, there is no benefit, not even financial, in scaring everyone senseless. This applies to my fellow realists labeled scaremongers: the climate scientists, the epidemiologists, the scholars of authoritarian states.

| Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent

…

And we have to keep our eyes on the politicians, CEOs, and leaders of institutions, who are explicitly or implicitly supporting the theft of our future.

US Unemployment

In the US, it now averages more than 11 weeks to find a new job.

This might motivate the Fed to lower rates, although it seems unlikely that they will do so this week.1

Unemployed Americans are taking longer to find new jobs than at any point in the past four years as muted hiring deepens concerns about the labour market.

It now takes an average of more than 11 weeks for an unemployed person in the US to find a new job, the longest since 2021. Some 26 per cent of the 7.5mn unemployed actively searching for work have been looking for more than six months.

via ‪Mohamed A. El-Erian‬, who writes:

This matters, especially at this economic/political/social juncture. Moreover, the longer the unemployment period, the higher the risk of [the unemployed] becoming a lot less employable.

A negative feedback loop.

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US Construction Deaths

Construction workers have the highest rate of suicide in the US.

The construction industry has one of the highest suicide rates of any major industry in the country, second only to mining, according the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Add in drug overdoses, where construction workers die at a greater rate than workers in any other industry, and a bleak picture emerges of a population in crisis.

Construction is already among the most dangerous jobs in the country, with about 1,000 people dying each year from work-related injuries, more than any other industry. But five times as many workers, 5,100, died by suicide, and 15,900 died from drug overdoses, in 2023, according to an analysis of the most recent federal data by the Center for Construction Research and Training, an occupational safety organization. While the number of overdoses declined from 2022, from 17,000, the number of suicides remained virtually unchanged.

[…]

No occupation has a higher rate of substance abuse than construction and extraction. A substance abuse disorder, even for someone in recovery, increases suicide risk.

| Ronda Kaysen and Sophie Park

A very difficult mess to unsnarl.

Tech Spending Matches 2001 Peak

Paul Kedrosky:

Tech spending, as a percent of GDP, and largely driven by AI, is back to its 2001 all-time high. Remarkable.

It’s looking awfully bubblicious.

Note how wonderful Trump’s tariffs have been for manufacturing.

Hating On LLM Users

Antisocial behavior towards large language model users: experimental evidence | Paweł Niszczota, submitted on 14 Jan 2026 [emphasis mine]:

Abstract: The rapid spread of large language models (LLMs) has raised concerns about the social reactions they provoke. Prior research documents negative attitudes toward AI users, but it remains unclear whether such disapproval translates into costly action. We address this question in a two-phase online experiment (N = 491 Phase II participants; Phase I provided targets) where participants could spend part of their own endowment to reduce the earnings of peers who had previously completed a real-effort task with or without LLM support. On average, participants destroyed 36% of the earnings of those who relied exclusively on the model, with punishment increasing monotonically with actual LLM use. Disclosure about LLM use created a credibility gap: self-reported null use was punished more harshly than actual null use, suggesting that declarations of “no use” are treated with suspicion. Conversely, at high levels of use, actual reliance on the model was punished more strongly than self-reported reliance. Taken together, these findings provide the first behavioral evidence that the efficiency gains of LLMs come at the cost of social sanctions.

The taint of LLM use leads — in experimental conditions — to participants ‘punishing’ those who use LLMs, or are suspected for lying about such use.

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Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and ugliness; accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. A man of the Classical Age who had to live in medieval times would suffocate miserably just as a savage does in the midst of our civilisation. Now there are times when a whole generation is caught in this way between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standard, no security, no simple acquiescence.

| Hermann Hesse

…

This such a time. And all living generations are caught in it, without security, without guide posts, without a standard. How to make sense of it?

I believe that in times of great insecurity, we each — as individuals, organizations, and societies — need to recommit to principles, to not just map a way out of the labyrinth, or simply hide amid the fog of confusion.

Principles for Times of Great Insecurity

Simone Stolzoff appeals1 to leaders (as is usual in Harvard Business Review: it’s always about leaders, not ordinary people) to develop ‘uncertainty tolerance’ as a ‘core skill’. He cites Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky responding to the uncertainties of the pandemic clarifying principles for the company’s way forward when travel came to an abrupt halt, and Airbnb lost 80% of its revenue:

Chesky knew this would be a period of unprecedented uncertainty for the company. So, one of the first things he did was create a list of four guiding principles for himself: Act fast, preserve cash, act with all stakeholders in mind, and play to win the next travel season.

In a crisis, “you make principle decisions, not business decisions,” he said, reflecting on what he learned. A business decision is “a decision predicting the best possible outcome. A principle decision is irrespective of the outcome.” These became Chesky’s anchors as he steered the company through 2020 to position it for success when the travel industry recovered. In December 2020, Airbnb went public, with a market capitalization of $86.5 billion after the first day of trading.

I especially like Chesky’s framing of principle decisions2, which is a term I have not heard before.

PS How uncertain are these times?

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Uncertain Federal Science Funding

How deep have Trump’s cuts been?

In total, federal science agencies lost about 20% of their staff in 2025 relative to the previous year, after modest increases over the past few years.

| Nature

Could take a generation to recover, if ever.

Uncertain of Their Future, New Zealanders Are Out-Migrating

Yan Zhuang and Tatsiana Chypsanava report on New Zelanders’ moving to Australia:

More than 71,000 New Zealand citizens left the country over the 12 months ending in October, far more than the roughly 26,000 who returned, according to official estimates. The outbound number — equivalent to more than 1 percent of the population of 5.1 million — is now the highest it has been since the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis.

More than half of New Zealanders who leave end up in neighboring Australia, a shortish flight away, where they can live and work indefinitely under a reciprocal visa arrangement.

By one HSBC estimate, New Zealand’s economy had the largest contraction in gross domestic product of any developed country in 2024.

The current unemployment rate of 5.3 percent is the highest in nearly a decade. Even those who have work are contending with reduced hours, wages that are growing more slowly than inflation and soaring costs of staples like bread and milk. Consumer confidence has not returned to prepandemic levels.

That’s more than 1% of the 5.1 million population moving away, mostly to Australia, who inherit well-educated workers, at basically no cost.

Meanwhile, many non-New Zealanders are moving to New Zealand — nearly 110,000 in the 12 months through October 2025 — more than the number of citizens leaving.

PS Bulgarians are doing the same thing, only more so:

Since it joined the EU in 2007, Bulgaria has suffered one of the biggest drops in population in the world, losing about 16% of its people as more than 1 million departed.

Bloomberg (via Adam Tooze)

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National Manufacturing Uncertainty Made Local

Wonder why Marie Gluesenkamp Perez3, a Congresswoman from Washington state flipped Washington’s 3rd District in 2022 after a decade of Republican rule?

Washington State has lost roughly 19,000 manufacturing jobs between 2019 and 2023, the steepest drop in the country. Glusenkamp Perez’s politics are a quiet but forceful repudiation of the policies inflicted on districts like hers: factories offshored, wages flattened, families shoved into a gig economy that worships scale over craft. It is not the kind of “moderate” politics one finds in prosperous suburbs.

| Evelyn Quartz

Co-owner of an auto repair shop (with her husband), she’s one to watch.

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The Number: 27 Million

27 Million Fewer Car Trips: Life After a Year of Congestion Pricing | Emily Badger, Stefanos Chen, Winnie Hu, Asmaa Elkeurti, Larry Buchanan

Since congestion pricing began one year ago, about 11 percent of the vehicles that once entered Manhattan’s central business district daily have disappeared.

Fewer cars, faster traffic, higher speeds, more transit riders, better quality of life for residents.

And many people were uncertain there’d be any benefits.

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When you’re setting out to understand a culture, it’s best to seek diverse sources of information that demonstrate a variety of biases.

| James O’Toole, Warren Bennis, A Culture of Candor

…

A friend asked me to explain why I write about — or collate — all sorts of information, stats, and events in these Short Takes that are not i…

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It’s easier to destroy a social order than to build one.

| David Brooks, The Sins of the Moderates

…

Brooks was discussing Rumpletrumpskin and his aggressive undermining of America’s moral compass. However, I think there is a congruent undoing of the social covenants in business.

Consider the push to get office workers back in the office five days per week: the pre-pandemic model. The arguments presented by senior executives are generally unsubstantiated — like the mythical ‘serendipity’ of great ideas from physical proximity1,2.

Those executives are seeking to destroy the pandemic rapprochement between workers and workplace, and reimpose the prior arrangement. They want to Make The Office Great Again, for the managerial elite, but not for everybody.

Manufacturing Down For 10th Month

Dan Burns, and Lucia Mutikani report on what may be one of the motivations for Trump’s wagging the dog in Venezuela [emphasis mine]:

US factory sector contracts for 10th straight month in December -- - Institute for Supply Management manufacturing PMI drops to 47.9, lowest since October 2024.

Trump’s tariffs impact manufacturing, raising average tariff to nearly 17%.

Factory employment declines for 11th month.

U.S. manufacturing activity slumped to a 14-month low in December, with new orders contracting further and input costs grinding higher as the sector continued to bear the imprint of President Donald Trump’s import tariffs.

The Institute for Supply Management survey on Monday suggested a recovery was unlikely in the near-term, but economists were hopeful of a turnaround this year as Trump’s tax cuts took effect.

Funny, I didn’t hear this on the news.

They Say One Thing, But…

Buried in an interesting article about becoming an ‘Octopus Organization’, Jana Werner and Phil Le-Brun reveal a basic truth:

While 73% of executives recognized curiosity and imagination as critical, only 9% of employees felt their leaders supported those traits, such as by encouraging them to be curious and to explore new ideas.

Surprise, surprise, surprise.

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A New Car? Prepare To Pay.

$50,080: The average price of a new car (via WSJ) in September 2025—a new record—up from less than $38,000 in early 2020, according to Kelley Blue Book. As sticker prices marched higher, so did monthly payments. Fast forward to November of this year and the average monthly payment for a new car was estimated to be $760, according to J.D. Power. The struggle to keep monthly payments in check is so tough that the typical 48- to 60-month car-loan term has given way to 72-month terms, and longer.

If only we could buy Chinese cars, which are half the price and twice as good. But somehow the price of cars, like housing, childcare, health insurance, and food, continues to spike.

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Faced with the choice between changing one’s views and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everybody gets busy on the proof.

| John Kenneth Galbraith

…

But a counter to the binary, black-and-white viewpoint of either not changing, or embracing change grudgingly, is allostasis [emphasis mine]:

No doubt, change can, and often does, hurt; but with the right mind-set, it can also be a force for growth. It’s not as if we have any choice in the matter. Like it or not, life is change. We’d be wise to shift our default position from futile resistance to being in conversation with change instead.

A concept called allostasis can help. Developed in the late 1980s by a neuroscientist, Peter Sterling, and a biologist, Joseph Eyer, allostasis is based on the idea that rather than being rigid, our healthy baseline is a moving target. I see it as parallel to the concept conceived by Richard Rohr of order, disorder and reorder. Allostasis runs counter to a more widespread but older and outdated model for change, homeostasis. Essentially, homeostasis says healthy systems return to the same starting point following a change: X to Y to X. By contrast, in allostasis, healthy systems also crave stability after a change, but the baseline of that stability can be somewhere new: X to Y to Z.

Allostasis is defined as “stability through change,” elegantly capturing the concept’s double meaning: The way to stay stable through the process of change is by changing, at least to some extent. If you want to hold your footing, you’ve got to keep moving.

From neuroscience to pain science to psychology, allostasis has become the predominant model for understanding change in the scientific community. The brain is at its best when it is constantly rewiring itself and making new connections — what we experience as a thriving and stable consciousness is actually a process of ongoing change. Overcoming pain, be it physical or psychological, is not about resistance (which often worsens the experience) or trying to get back to where you were before a distressing event or situation. It’s about balancing acceptance with problem-solving and moving forward to a new normal. A healthy response to change and disorder, whether it’s within ourselves or our environments, is one based on the allostatis process. And yet this concept is still little known to laypeople. This is unfortunate.

Adopting an allostatic outlook acknowledges that the goal of mature adulthood is not to avoid, fight or try to control change, but rather to skillfully engage with it. It recognizes that after disorder, there is often no going back to the way things were — no one form of order, but many forms of reorder. Via this shift, you come to view change and disorder not as something that happens to you but as something that you are working with, an ongoing dance between you and your environment. You stop fearing change, which is to say you stop fearing life.

| Brad Stulberg, Stop Resisting Change

401(k) Participation

Automatic enrollment is having a big impact:

85 percent of workers with access to a 401(k) participate, according to Vanguard — up steadily over the past decade.

The average participant savings rate in plans administered by Vanguard reached a high of 7.7 percent of wages in 2024, boosted by automatic enrollment and escalation of contribution rates.

These changes have made the 401(k) system more resilient, with retirement savers staying the course despite upheaval from the pandemic, market gyrations and inflation over the past five years, notes David Stinnett, head of Vanguard’s Strategic Retirement Consulting group.

“Due to these default features, people just keep going,” he said.

Combined participant and employer contribution rates have climbed steadily over time to an average of 12 percent of wages, up from 10.8 percent as recently as 2015. And there’s been strong adoption of target date funds, which automatically rebalance portfolios to age-appropriate asset allocations. At Vanguard, 84 percent of participants used target date funds in 2024, up from 69 percent in 2015 — and 59 percent were invested solely in those funds, Vanguard reports.

Here’s the rub: only half of private-sector workers are covered by a workplace retirement plan at any given time, mainly because small employers are less likely to offer plans.

The coverage gap helps explain why median retirement account holdings for workers 55 to 64 years old was just $185,000 in 2022, according to the Federal Reserve, and the amounts saved by low-income workers have fallen in recent years. There are also persistent disparities in savings by race and ethnicity, with median Black households holding only 14 percent as much as white households, and Hispanic households just 20 percent compared with white households.

| Mark Miller

Confirmation, again, that defaulting to opt-in pays big dividends because monkey brain.

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The ‘No-Shoes’ Office

A Silicon Valley trend may have hit — and passed — its peak: shoeless offices:

Nick Bloom, a Stanford economist who studies work culture, said the shoes-off trend was partly “the pajama economy in action.” That is, now that people who worked from home during the pandemic are back in the office, they are bringing their home habits with them.

The phenomenon, he added, is consistent with Silicon Valley’s 996 culture (in which people have been working 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week). If you’re at work for 12 hours, he noted, “you might as well wear your slippers in the office as you’re not getting to wear them at home.”

| Lora Kelley1

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Taking A Lesson From The Nordics

There’s no magic in how the Nordic countries have managed prosperity and social equality: it’s just smart economic and sociall policies:

The Nordic countries appear to have developed a social and economic model that combines prosperity with equality. This column identifies four key pillars of the Nordic model:

(1) substantial public investment in essential services,

(2) influential labour unions,

(3) high public expenditure on social insurance, and

(4) high and progressive taxation.

Equality in hourly pay, linked to high union density and strong coordination in wage bargaining, is the main reason for lower earnings inequality in the Nordics. Further research is needed to determine the implications of this for productivity and growth and whether the model is replicable.

| Mogstad, Salvanes, Torsvik

Now, let’s get the Democrats out of low gear, the GOP out of the White House, and push ahead. We’ll have to fight hard for a better future.2

There ought to be a future we can choose. It’s up to us to find it.

| Katsuhiro Otomo, Akira

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