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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.)

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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

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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

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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)

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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, business executives, technicians, bureaucrats and soldiers, lumped together by Burnham, under the name of “managers.” These people will eliminate the old capitalist class, crush the working class, and so organize society that all power and economic privilege remain in their own hands. … The new “managerial” societies will not consist of a patchwork of small, independent states, but of great super-states grouped round the main industrial centers in Europe, Asia and America. These super-states will fight among themselves for possession of the remaining uncaptured portions of the earth, but will probably be unable to conquer one another completely. Internally, each society will be hierarchical, with an aristocracy of talent at the top and a mass of semi-slaves at the bottom.

| George Orwell, Second Thoughts on James Burnham (1946)

…

It’s fitting to pull up this prediction of Orwell today, as the super-state of the US (under the suzerainty of Trump) bombs Iran, one of the ‘uncaptured portions of the earth’. I’ll leave the geopolitical analysis to others, but will point out that we are living in a world controlled by the ‘managerial society’ presaged by Orwell, with the billionaire aristocracy at the top and all the rest of us as ‘semi-slaves’ at the bottom.

I saw that James Talarico, the democrat running for US senate has been arguing that left versus right is a false dichotomy. What matters is up versus down.

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Colin Newlyn on ‘Uncomfortably Numb’

Colin Newlyn is a deeply observant chronicler of the human condition of white-collar work. In Uncomfortably Numb he illustrates how organizations impact the semi-slaves at the bottom of the pyramid:

We enter the workforce with high expectations, optimism and energy. We are keen to learn, to help, to achieve. Then the knock-backs start. We get told off for speaking out of turn. We get told our questions are stupid, that our ideas are naive. We show some initiative and then get into trouble for not having got permission first. We find coworkers are running us down to our bosses, we see people less able than us get promoted, seemingly for sucking up. We see that what gets rewarded is performance theatre, not actually getting the work done.

Day by day, our enthusiasm gets blunted, our hopes get dashed and our optimism evaporates. It’s heartbreaking. So we start to numb ourselves as self-protection.

We lower our expectations and our goals. We trust our coworkers less and expect less of them. We curb our impulse to speak out, we stop asking questions and we definitely stop making suggestions. We hold back from taking the initiative because that only leads to taking the blame for something. We can’t play the performance game and we’re not interested in the politics, so we keep out heads down, play safe and merge into the background.

We detach ourselves from the work because that way we can’t feel any pain when it disappoints us once again. We figure that if we don’t really expect anything, then we can’t be disappointed. And we decide that’s a plus because we really can’t bear being let down all the time.

Gallup has detailed disengagement of the workforce in State of the Global Workforce 2025 report, which is just what Newlyn’s observations would suggest:

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Instability from Rigidity

In Imagining Institutions as Living Systems, Naeema Zarif dissects the structural defects of our institutions, leading to a world where ‘everything is broken’ [emphasis mine]:

Contemporary governance is beset by high-profile failures, from halting crisis responses to eroding public trust, that reveal a deeper institutional malaise. Neither better technology nor managerial tweaks alone can fix what ails our governments. Recent years have seen pandemics mishandled, climate plans falter, and bureaucracies paralyzed in the face of rapid change. Global surveys show that confidence in public institutions is near historic lows (fewer than half of citizens worldwide express trust in their national government). These issues are often framed as technical or leadership failures. But beneath them lies an ontological problem: our very conception of institutions. Many of today’s institutions were designed as if they were machines, static, hierarchical, optimized for control, and thus structurally incapable of governing the complex, adaptive realities of modern society. When a system built for predictability confronts the unpredictable, the result is fragility. Indeed, institutions premised on singular truths and rigid plans tend to break under the plural, emergent pressures of real-world politics. The argument is that governance failures stem not primarily from a lack of expertise or data, but from a misaligned institutional worldview. By treating institutions as living, evolving ecosystems rather than static clockwork machines, governance can center on plurality, feedback, and collective action, building resilience without veering into authoritarian control.

Or not.

I learned of this post by Rachel Happe, who remarked on it in a Substack note:

This is aligned with the conclusions I have come to about organizational structure and governance, with more explanation of how complex systems work.

The key point, is that we over-engineer solutions and when we go, they create rigidity and fragility rather than offering room for adaptability and diversity. As humans, that feels stifling and restrictive. It creates a cage that is limiting instead of a trellis that supports growth.

Control is for amateurs 😏

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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 disrupted daily routine, upon which the patterns that I depend were unmade. And of course, the endless chaos of today’s world — the wars, economic crises, and the turmoil in our streets.

But, as Stafford tells us, we cannot stop time’s unfolding. We must return to our work, our passions, and whatever it is that motivates us to get out of bed each morning and push on.

I wish you all the strength you need, as I hope to hold on to mine.

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Functional Freeze

Maybe what I have recently experienced is a ‘functional freeze’, as described by Christina Caron:

People have equated functional freeze with being “tired and wired” — anxiety mixed with fatigue. Others have said that “freeze mode” is similar to “dissociating, escaping” or feeling like you’re “in a fog,” even though you’re able to get things done when you need to. Others explain that, though they might be participating in social activities, they aren’t enjoying themselves and feel “emotionally numb.”

In that sense, the term “functional freeze” could potentially be referring to many different things, said Janina Fisher, a clinical psychologist and an expert in treating trauma. The symptoms that social media users are describing might overlap with seasonal affective disorder, depersonalization or the long-term effects of past trauma, Dr. Fisher said.

Exactly.

PS: Clay Shirky: ‘In 2022, 41 percent of young adults reported feelings of anxiety most days.’

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Raise The Minimum Wage

If the Washington elite really wanted to address the cost of living in the US, they might consider raising the minimum wage:

For the first time, more Americans will earn a minimum wage of $15 or more than will earn the federal minimum of $7.25, according to the Economic Policy Institute. The federal rate has remained unchanged since 2009, despite broad public support for an increase.

| Audra Burch

It has fallen to states and cities to push for higher minimum wages, while our federal officials don’t seem to be even discussing it. Oh, that’s right, ‘affordability’ is a hoax. I forgot.

PS: Ashley Wu, Annie Karni: ‘The House set a grim record in 2025, casting the fewest votes of the 21st century during the first session of a two-year Congress.’

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You Can Always Take a Sick Day

Many employers require frontline workers to find substitutes to cover their shifts if they call in sick, which is immoral but not generally illegal.

In New York and California it’s illegal for your employer to require you to find a replacement as a condition for taking paid sick leave you’re owed, even as a part-time or seasonal worker. Elsewhere, workplaces may differ. But even in states with less empowering sick-leave laws (or those with none at all), staffing is usually a managerial responsibility for the obvious reason that, when you’re sick, you should be resting and recovering rather than scrambling to find shift coverage — or, worse, working in public with an infectious disease.

| Max Read

And, of course, many people don’t even get paid sick days (via GovDocs):

While there is no federal paid sick leave law for private employers, seventeen states and Washington, D.C., have mandatory paid sick leave laws: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, and Washington, D.C.

In addition, 3 states have mandatory paid leave for any reason laws: Illinois, Maine, and Nevada.

The past several years have seen wave after wave of new and amended paid leave laws at the state level (and local, as well). And, of course, each jurisdiction handles them differently.

In other words, a messy patchwork quilt that a reluctant federal government has imposed by inaction.

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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Hope is a virtue to be practiced, not an aspiration to be managed. [...] To hope is to do good without expectation that we can make it so. It is to resist the darkness daily, whatever may come.

| David DeSteno, For 2026, There’s a Better Way to Be Hopeful

…

The New Year is a good time to reflect on hope.

Hope is a muscle, not a mood.

| Stowe Boyd

Living In The Ultraprocessed World

Angela Duckworth makes accessible her research in Willpower Doesn’t Work. This Does.1 The trick, she says, is to create scaffolding -- situational agency -- so you don’t need willpower. In this ultraprocessed world, where everything fractures our attention and focus, one thing — maybe the only thing — you can choose is your immediate surroundings: what you carry with you, how you prepare, where you place your phone when studying.

You cannot change the conditions of modern life, but you are the sovereign of what enters your personal space. Physical distance creates psychological distance: Draw close what you want more of; push away what you want less.

Should Companies Take Stands?

America Pulls Back From Values That Once Defined It, WSJ-NORC Poll Fi… -- Patriotism, religious faith, having children and other priorities that helped define the national character for generations are receding in importance to Americans, a new Wall Street Journal-NORC poll finds.

| Aaron Zitner (from 2023 so we can't blame Trump 2.0)

It only gets worse:

The share of Americans who say that having children, involvement in their community and hard work are very important values has also fallen. Tolerance for others, deemed very important by 80% of Americans as recently as four years ago, has fallen to 58% since then.

And with regard to businesses taking political (or controversial?) stands publicly?

Overall, 63% of people in the survey said that companies shouldn’t take public stands on social and political issues, while 36% of people said companies should take such stands. Among Republicans, 80% opposed companies doing so, while 56% of Democrats favored the idea.

Money is the only thing Dems and Reps agree about. As Derek Thompson wrote about these results, 'What binds the modern world is our collective reverence for money'.

That explains a lot.

Nothing But Distractions

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.

| Amanda Hoover

How can anyone get anything done? The title of Hoover’s article is a clue: Sundays are the new Mondays2, which is mostly about people working on Sundays to get ahead of Mondays.

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Related Notes

In that 2028 issue of workfutures.io, I presented Carl Erik Fisher citing of modern research, which suggests willpower is a myth [emphasis mine]:

More fundamentally, the common, monolithic definition of willpower distracts us from finer-grained dimensions of self-control and runs the danger of magnifying harmful myths — like the idea that willpower is finite and exhaustible. To borrow a phrase from the philosopher Ned Block, willpower is a mongrel concept, one that connotes a wide and often inconsistent range of cognitive functions. The closer we look, the more it appears to unravel. It’s time to get rid of it altogether.

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25% of Americans believe in reincarnation, or some form of reincarnation.

| Razib Khan, Francis Young: Baltic paganism in modern times

…

Paganism is deep in us.

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The only progress I can see is progress in organization. The ordinary human being does not live long enough to draw any substantial benefit from his own experience. And no one, it seems, can benefit by the experiences of others. Being both a father and teacher, I know we can teach our children nothing. We can transmit t…

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I cannot say whether things will get better if we change; what I can say is they must change if they are to get better.

| Georg C Lichtenberg

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When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas – that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the …

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