Mourning a Job You Still Have

Three people wrote about the same thing in ten days. Not one of them had a word for it, so each of them went and borrowed a word from somewhere else.

On 4 September, in a Hacker News thread about burnout, a man wrote this: "In my case, my work is being devalued by AI. The same effort nets smaller and smaller returns every month, even though the work is still necessary." He's got a job. The work still needs doing. He isn't buried in it, which is the thing burnout was named for. What he's describing is a price change: the same effort buys him less than it bought him last year. And watch how he reaches for a word. "I'm starting to feel something a lot like how people describe burnout." Not I'm burnt out. Something a lot like how other people describe it. He's holding the word away from himself, because he feels it doesn't quite fit.

On 11 September, a developer who taught himself to code and got an apprenticeship at sixteen wrote about where to take his career next. "Programming felt like my calling," he said. Companies now want "dime a dozen agent supervisors to pump out features." Then the line that hit me hardest: "Supervising agents takes away pretty much everything I enjoyed about my job. I am somewhat mourning this loss."

Mourning. A word we keep for the dead, used by a man who still has his job.

He also wrote that he needs to work out what comes next in order to protect "both my income and my sanity."

On 13 September, in a subreddit for computer science careers, someone who graduated as the market turned wrote: "The job market and AI has demoralized me a bit but I want to find that passion again." Not a salary. Passion. He's asking where to start again, and the thing he lost isn't employment.

Burnout, which belongs to overwork. Mourning, which belongs to death. Passion, which belongs on a poster. Three people, in ten days, reaching past the words they had, for the same thing.

There's no word for what happened to them and that's why nobody around them knows what to say.

Think of a word as the handle on a heavy box. With or without a handle, the box weighs the same. But with a handle, somebody else can lift the other side. Without one you can still carry it, but only alone, and badly.

We've got handles for most losses. Redundancy is a handle, and hanging off it are notice periods, severance, outplacement, a legal framework, and a set of conversations that everybody in an office already knows how to have. Bereavement is a handle, and hanging off it are funerals, leave, food arriving at the door, and permission to be useless for a while. Burnout is a handle we fitted late and argued about for twenty years, and it carries sick notes and a way of telling your manager without ending your career.

The word is never the point. The word is what lets everything else attach.

Now take the handle off and watch what stops working.

The man mourning his calling has nothing to apply for. There's no leave for this. There's no conversation with his manager that doesn't sound like he's asking to be managed out, because the only words available to him make him sound either burnt out or difficult. His friends can't help him because they have no script. When someone is made redundant we know what to do within about four seconds. When someone says that the thing they were good at is being quietly repriced while they're still doing it, everybody reaches for a platitude, and the platitude is always about reskilling, because reskilling is the only public story we've built so far.

An essay by Jack Maguire in May puts the mechanism plainly. For people whose work is thinking, he writes, "expertise is a large part of the self rather than merely an activity," so when automation comes for the work "it reaches past the income and touches the identity." He then borrows a term from the grief literature for a loss that the people around you don't recognise as a loss. That's the shape of this one exactly.

This is where I stop thinking of it as a private problem, and it's the part I can't get out of my mind. Those three men are sitting with this separately, in different places, each of them fairly sure it says something about his own resilience. It doesn't. The same thing is being done to a whole class of work at the same time, and the only reason it looks like thousands of private difficulties is that we haven't built the shared thing that would make it one event. That's what a missing word does. It takes something that's happening to everybody and hands it back to each person as a personal failing.

Now, I want to be careful about the size of the claim here. Three posts, three people, two websites, ten days. That's not a measurement of anything, of course. But three people independently reaching past the words they have is worth noticing, because that's usually what happens just before a word arrives.

Language does catch up in the end. Somebody will name this, and the naming will do what naming always does. It makes the private thing legible, and once it's legible people can ask for something, and institutions can be embarrassed into building it. Every loss we now take seriously was a personal failing first and a recognised condition second.

We're in the gap before the word.

So what do you actually say to a man who's mourning a calling he still technically holds? I've been thinking about it for a week and the honest answer is that I don't have a good sentence for him either. Which might be the whole point. He borrowed a word because nobody has made him one, and until somebody does he'll carry the box on his own and assume that's normal.

It isn't normal. It's just early.