We Are Sleepwalking, and the Abyss Has Excellent UX

The strangest part of this moment is how calm it feels if you have a salary.

You open the laptop. The tools are helpful. Your grocery app still works. The news is loud and then it is a recipe. You can spend a whole year inside that feeling and tell yourself you are paying attention because you watched a panel and you have an opinion about regulation.

That is not paying attention. That is being entertained by the idea of paying attention.

We are walking toward a world where a lot of people will have less economic role, less practice at being needed, and more synthetic company. We are doing it in comfortable shoes. The abyss, if you want that word, is not lava. It is a gradual thinning of the reasons a society has to take care of ordinary adults.

People can see the demos. They can see the layoffs in tech, the frozen grad hiring, the call centers shrinking, the cheap content flooding every channel. Seeing is not the same as changing a life.

Changing a life is annoying. It means learning a tool that makes you feel stupid for a month. It means telling your kid that the career script you followed is not a promise. It means asking your industry association a rude question. It means voting like labor and technology are the same subject, because they are.

Most of us would rather have a take. Takes are cheap now. The models will even write them for you.

I am not above this. I have wasted evenings arguing about timelines with people who have never mapped the tasks in their own job. Timeline arguments are catnip. They let you feel rigorous while doing nothing. Whether the cliff is three years or ten does not change whether you should stop outsourcing your judgment this week.

A labor market that still uses 20th century stories (college, then a firm, then a ladder) while firms staff like software.

A public square where it is getting harder to know if a sentence, a photo, or a grievance came from a person who can be held to account.

A generation of students training for roles whose junior versions are the first things the tools ate.

A political class that treats this as a branding exercise: innovation on Tuesdays, workers on Thursdays, no connecting paragraph.

And underneath it, a quieter harm. People get a lot of their dignity from being useful to someone who is not a feed. If usefulness gets scarce, you do not only get an unemployment statistic. You get a meaning statistic, and meaning statistics show up as addiction, rage, and men and women who are technically alive and practically unemployed from the human race.

I do not say that to be cinematic. I say it because we already ran a version of this experiment with towns that lost their industry and were told to learn to code. Some did. A lot got opioids, conspiracy, and a long afternoon.

Now we are pointing the same pattern at the professional class and acting shocked that the professional class is building nicer bunkers instead of a plan.

If the future arrived as a siren, people would grab each other. It is arriving as autocomplete. Autocomplete feels like a gift. You did not have to think of the next sentence. You did not have to sit in the awkward silence of your own mind.

That gift has a price that does not show up on the invoice. Skills you do not practice decay. Judgment you do not exercise gets clumsy. If you let the model drive the first draft of everything, you will wake up one Monday unable to tell whether you still have a first draft of yourself.

I am not telling you to live like a monk. I am telling you to keep a private standard. Write some of the hard things without a net. Check the facts that could hurt someone. Talk to the person you are about to email, at least sometimes. Stay in contact with the physical world, where objects do not autocomplete and a bad joint leaks.

The abyss is not that machines will hate us. The abyss is that we will accept a thinner life because it is convenient, and we will call the thinning progress because the demo was smooth.

Open your eyes while the salary still lands. After that, waking up is a different kind of work.