AI Is Breaking the Spell of 'Workism' — and Tech Workers Are Reeling

Aaron Horwath argues that a distinct kind of despair is spreading through the ranks of knowledge workers — engineers, consultants, financiers — who are increasingly fantasizing about escape: farms, surf schools, analog hobbies like knitting and pottery. What separates this moment from past disruptions (recessions, outsourcing, earlier waves of automation) isn’t economic anxiety but an existential one. Even senior, well-paid professionals who should be insulated from AI’s near-term impact are questioning whether their work ever had a point.

The piece frames this through Derek Thompson’s concept of ‘Workism’ and David Graeber’s ‘Bullshit Jobs’: the idea that highly educated Americans have substituted career for religion, deriving identity, community, and meaning from jobs that often deliver little social value. Unlike genuine vocations — nursing, teaching, trades — much modern knowledge work is optimized slide decks, promotion-driven code, and money shuffled between wealthy parties. Workism, Horwath contends, functions as an opiate that keeps talented people treating rebrandings and strategy documents as if they were life-or-death work.

The significance is that Workism, like faith, depends on belief winning out over logic — and AI threatens to break that belief precisely as it removes the financial rationale that held it together. If AI can do the work, the manufactured sense of purpose collapses, and an entire professional class may lose faith in its careers at once. Horwath poses the open question of what happens to a society and its industries when that disillusionment goes mainstream overnight.