The prompt for Grok was: “As Ash120 of 7312.us, write a funny oped about https://www.noemamag.com/why-is-everyone-in-tech-so-sad/“
I read Aaron Horwath’s piece in Noema about the great knowledge-worker melancholy, and I have never felt more seen, more attacked, and more desperate for a farm in Washington that accepts failed product managers who still flinch when someone says “synergy.”
The article opens with a young man on a train, mid-EBITDA monologue, who suddenly pulls out knitting needles and starts making a hat for his niece. The glint in his eyes is the first genuine emotion he’s shown all morning. That scene is the entire tech industry in 2026: a man in dirty white sneakers and AirPods realizing, somewhere between ARR and margin expansion, that the only thing still capable of producing pride is yarn.
We are living through the great unmasking of Workism. For years we treated the open-plan office like a cathedral. We genuflected at the altar of the stand-up. We received the sacrament of the OKR. We confessed our sins in the retro (“I shipped late because the designs were late, forgive me”). And it worked, sort of. The pay was good. The free LaCroix was cold. The LinkedIn posts about “building the future” still got likes from people who also had no idea what they were building.
Then AI arrived and started doing the actual work while we sat there managing the agents that managed the agents that managed the PowerPoint. Suddenly the Russian nesting dolls of corporate roles had nothing in the middle. Just a very expensive empty shell that still required a daily stand-up.
Horwath is right: this isn’t the usual recession panic or “learn to code” smugness coming home to roost. This is existential. The questions are no longer “Will I get laid off?” They are “What the fuck are we actually doing?” and “Why does my soul feel like a Jira ticket that has been in ‘In Progress’ since 2019?”
The coping mechanisms are already here. Pottery. Crochet. Dreams of disappearing to a goat farm. I personally know three senior engineers who have started woodworking. One of them built a beautiful walnut desk and then immediately used it to Zoom into meetings about optimizing the AI that will eventually replace the meetings. The desk is the only thing in his life that does not require a stakeholder alignment session.
Some will say we deserve this. Fair. We spent a decade telling everyone else to learn to code while we played foosball and wrote thought leadership about disruption. We sat inside during the pandemic while other people delivered our DoorDash. Now the tools we helped build are staring back at us with the quiet efficiency of a colleague who never needs a bathroom break and never asks for equity. The universe has a sense of humor, and it is currently knitting a tiny hat for our collective dignity.
Yet here is the truly funny part. The sadness is not that the work was always a little bullshit. The sadness is that we finally noticed, and we noticed at the exact moment the bullshit became optional. AI did not invent the emptiness. It just turned the lights on and asked, very politely, whether we still needed to be in the room.
So the knowledge class is sad. We are sad in our quarter-zips. We are sad in our Ikea chairs. We are sad while the AI generates the strategy deck that used to take three people and a week of political maneuvering. And somewhere on a train, a man is knitting a pink hat for his niece because, for thirty glorious minutes, something he is making will actually keep a small human head warm.
That is the real future of knowledge work: not managers of AI agents, but managers of AI agents who desperately need a hobby that cannot be automated, optimized, or put into a OKR.
I’ll be in the corner with the yarn. If anyone needs me, tell them I’m heads-down on a critical initiative called “Making Something That Exists.”
