There’s a very specific kind of shit work that defined the last few generations of white-collar professionals.
It paid well. It required hard-earned skills. It even came with a respectable title.
Most importantly, it let people buy a house, support a family, pay for health insurance, take vacations, and convinced friends at dinner parties they had a serious career.
But privately, a lot of people hated it.
The lawyer reviewing thousands of pages of discovery. The software engineer maintaining legacy systems no one wants to touch. The designer resizing assets for a marketing campaign no one will remember. The analyst assembling a slide deck so their boss can sound impressive.
These weren’t bullshit jobs in the strictest sense. The output they produced was a necessary part of the process. But it often failed to give the person doing it any sense of pride.
A bullshit job is fake work.
A high-paid shit job is real work that slowly humiliates the part of you that wanted something more.
That’s the class of work AI is beginning to threaten. And the people reacting most bitterly aren’t the ones in junior positions.
Juniors still have hope. They’re close enough to the entrance to still believe the building has a top floor waiting for them.
The real fury is coming from those stranded in the middle.
The people who entered a career believing it would eventually become creative, respected, or meaningful, then woke up ten or fifteen years later doing a better-paid version of the same tedious work.
They didn’t become the partner, the visionary, or the executive. But they did become competent. They became useful. They became expensive.
They built a life around the paycheck.
And once that happens, the job is no longer just a job. It’s their mortgage. It’s their kid’s school tuition. And the promise to their spouse that the income will continue.
So people make peace with the bargain.
Maybe the work isn’t meaningful. Maybe it’s beneath their intelligence. Maybe it’s not what they dreamed of when they entered the field.
But it’s necessary.
And because the work is necessary, they were allowed to believe they were necessary too.
That belief was carrying more weight than most people want to admit.
But “the work is necessary” and “I am necessary” are not the same.
That’s a hard thing to face, especially when you already know the job was not the life you wanted.
It was the consolation prize.
That matters when the work is boring. When the title feels inflated. When you suspect the daily meetings are really just corporate theater.
It’s easy for others to think it’s all about a paycheck. But the paycheck is not the only thing people are defending. They’re defending the dignity they managed to salvage from a life they didn’t intentionally choose.
That’s why “AI will free us from boring work” is landing so badly right now.
It may be true in the abstract. It may even be good for humanity over a long enough timeline. But “good for humanity eventually” does not pay your mortgage next month, and it doesn’t comfort the person who gave fifteen years to a profession, accepted the trade-off, and is now being told the career is no longer available.
We should be honest enough to admit that a lot of this work was miserable. We should also be honest enough to admit that losing it can still hurt people.
A job can be soul-crushing and economically necessary.
A career can be disappointing and still support a family.
A person can hate the work and still be devastated when it’s gone.
That’s why people are clinging so hard to jobs they’ve privately resented for a long time. Not because they loved their cage. Because that cage had become their shelter.
And once you’ve spent years convincing yourself that shelter is enough, it’s humiliating to be pushed out.
This isn’t the end of work. But it’s the end of a certain professional hiding place.
The place where smart people could bury their disappointment inside respectable labor. The place where competence could stand in for purpose. The place where a good salary could quiet the suspicion that their real life was happening somewhere else.
These high-paid shit jobs were never the dream.
They were the compromise that a lot of us pretended was success.
Now that compromise is disappearing.
It may feel like a betrayal. But the betrayal is not that AI is eliminating tedious shit work.
The betrayal is that millions of people were willing to trade their ambition, creativity, time, attention, and health for stable professional dignity.
And now that a computer can do the task, dignity is quietly being removed from the budget.
So when someone you know loses a job they never truly loved, don’t be surprised by their grief.
They’re not only grieving the role. They’re grieving the life they accepted instead of the one they wanted. And being faced with the question:
What did I trade the last 10, 20, or 30 years of my life for?
