Let’s play a game. Imagine the zombie apocalypse just happened and everything’s down - banks, Wi-Fi, Stripe, Slack, your JIRA board of OKRs. There’s no Uber Eats, there’s no “digital transformation” to oversee. Just the smell of rot, the sound of breaking glass, and the soft rustle of your neighbor becoming compost.

Now ask yourself: will any of the survivors want you, Head of Customer Experience Optimization at a VC-backed fintech startup that gamified lending for Gen Z, on their team?

Spoiler: no. The answer is no.

Fragile Careers in a Fragile Economy

The society we’ve built has long job titles, good salaries, but the survival rate in any real-world scenario is near zero. We’re one minor economic hiccup away from having former executives walking dogs and SaaS support engineers delivering pad thai because, well, “we ran out of savings.” (Real story, that’s Denis, he just popped into my feed. He used to solve tech problems, now he’s dodging pigeons to meet a delivery SLA.)

Upskilling? Pointless. Networking? Useless. Interviewed sixteen times just to hear “we went with someone else.” This is what happens when the market’s flooded with people holding the same comfy job titles that only exist in highly optimized corporate simulations.

Now don’t get me wrong - I work in this market too. I know the value we bring. Streamlining operations, keeping customers happy, aligning teams around purpose - all good things in a functioning economy. But let’s be honest: none of it helps reboot civilization after a power grid collapse. When the trucks stop rolling and Wi-Fi’s gone, nobody’s gonna ask you to make the landing page content “snappier”. They’re asking for bread, clean water, and someone who knows how to syphon gasoline out of abandoned cars so they can scram.

The world, and the company that fired you, are doing just fine

Maybe - just maybe - as a species, we should start developing some complementary skills. Like being able to cook something edible with what you’ve got lying around, without poisoning your dinner guests or setting yourself on fire or slicing through an artery. I get it, that’s hard – you have a housekeeper and a private chef because you’re busy doing brain tumor resections with Dr. Dumitru Bagdasar.

Like picking up your kid from kindergarten.

Like flipping the breaker back on when it trips.

Like being able to find north in broad daylight, in the city, with the sun high in the sky. Nothing fancy. Just stuff way outside your usual Netflix-and-financial-literacy bubble.

And if you think you’re important and irreplaceable, remember this: Microsoft laid off 6,000 people in 2025, intel “only” 10 tousand and the market reaction was… a raging boner. The planet didn’t grind to a halt. Shares went up 0.5% on the same day hundreds of workers were doing mental math on whether they’d land a new job in time or get deported for violating their H1B visa terms. That’s the impact your departure has. That’s how much the world cares that you walked out the door with your little cardboard box full of business cards and team-building diplomas.

The Bullshit Job Generator™

We invented roles because companies reached a level of development stupidity where everything is dictated by politics. Gender quotas. Race quotas. Ethnicity. Engineers vs. accountants. Android fans vs. Microsoft Phone loyalists. So they spun up jobs and titles to accommodate every new directive. Then HR came in with its frameworks. And suddenly, you’re part of a division with five sub-departments analyzing how productivity drops when IT removes a custom emoji from Slack.

We now have jobs that only exist when everything is running smoothly, when the supply chain is solid, and nobody sneezes in Wuhan. Roles that depend on PowerPoint decks, Slack threads, and quarterly roadmaps – not running water or food.

Back in the day, if your work didn’t put food on the table or protect someone, you didn’t have a job. You were called “unemployed.” Now you’re called “Head of Strategic People Enablement.”

What AI Will Really Take

AI won’t take your plumbing. It won’t fix your toilet. It won’t weld your car frame. It won’t plant carrots or pour concrete. It’ll take everything that looks like work but isn’t. Everything that needs 40 hours but produces 4 to 5 minutes of glory in a business review meeting. And it’ll do it faster, cheaper, and without crying on LinkedIn when it gets laid off.

It won’t take your job because it’s smarter. It’ll take your job because your job was dumb.

Pride Doesn’t Pay Rent

What’s worse is the shame. The pride. The “I used to be…” posts. But pride doesn’t pay rent. There’s no LinkedIn badge for humility, just likes from people who are two reorgs away from joining you in the delivery bike lane.

So if you’re reading this and your job can be summarized in three vague nouns and a hyphen, maybe ask yourself: what would I be doing if the internet went out tomorrow? If the robots take this job, what am I left with?

Because after the zombie apocalypse, you’ll still need plumbers, cooks, medics and tengineers. You won’t need a Director of Culture Change Enablement.