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The trap of being a halfway white-collar worker

original Teams & Careers

There was once, I think, a time when people could say without irony that white-collar workers were the winners.

Get an education, wear a suit, type away in an air-conditioned office, earn more than average. Compared to people working in factories or driving trucks, the work was easier on the body and life expectancy was supposedly longer. Postwar developed countries have, in fact, built their entire trajectory around equating “rising from blue-collar to white-collar” with prosperity itself.

Lately, this framing has started to seem shaky to me.

I’ve been on the hiring side many times. During my time in the Bay Area, I watched middle-aged white-collar workers get laid off and never make it back into a job. Since returning to Japan, I’ve heard the same story repeatedly: “once you lose your seat in your fifties, there’s fundamentally no next seat to find.” The difficulty older workers face in changing jobs feels, in my own experience, bluntly cruel.

Meanwhile, people with a trade in their hands — electricians, plumbers — apparently still have more work than they can handle.

An assumption worth doubting

Earn a high white-collar salary when young, and raise your standard of living to match. Take out a mortgage, send your kids to private school, live in the center of the city, all on the assumption that you can keep running at that pace into your fifties.

Then, somewhere along the line, it quietly collapses. You get laid off. There’s no new job you can adapt into. Or young white-collar workers simply get substituted in more cheaply. Before you know it, your standard of living is fixed while your income has vanished.

Research from the Urban Institute in the US finds that among stable workers aged 50+ who had held the same employer for five years or more, 28% experience a major employer-driven layoff before retirement (Urban Institute “How Secure Is Employment at Older Ages?”). Median household income drops sharply after such a job loss, and even those who find new work mostly never return to their previous level. Some reports note there is almost no difference in resilience to this shock between college graduates and non-graduates. A degree doesn’t protect you from a layoff.

So what about blue-collar work? There are unions, the ability to strike, ties to local communities, and a residue of seniority-based trust. Licenses and skilled trades don’t lose their value with age — some jobs actually become more valuable the older you get.

Wait, isn’t blue-collar work actually the happier path? — that hypothesis crosses my mind.

History tells us the opposite

Here I need to be careful. Nobel laureate economist Angus Deaton’s co-authored book, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Anne Case & Angus Deaton), actually demolishes exactly that hypothesis.

Between 1999 and 2015, the group in the US whose deaths from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholic liver disease surged were, of all people, white blue-collar workers without a college degree. Among college graduates, these death rates stayed roughly flat. Over this period, non-college-educated white men alone saw roughly 500,000 excess deaths — comparable in scale to the death toll of the AIDS crisis.

In other words, the “blue-collar worker protected by unions, community, and inherited trades” I had pictured is already a thing of the past. The hollowing-out of manufacturing, the collapse of union membership, the disintegration of local communities — since the 1970s, American blue-collar workers have been under sustained structural fire.

The image of blue-collar work I had in my head was closer to blue-collar work of Japan’s Showa era. It is not blue-collar work as it exists today.

And we may be at an inflection point

Here’s where it gets interesting.

That relationship now seems to be reversing.

Just as “globalization + robotics” once devastated blue-collar workers in the Midwest, “globalization + AI” may now be what shakes up white-collar workers. A reviewer of Case & Deaton at LSE called this globotics, writing that white-collar workers are likely to join the despair that blue-collar workers have long experienced (LSE Review of Books).

Watching people come and go in the field myself, I honestly don’t find this premonition very surprising.

A brief word on AI coding

In this context, let me write a bit about software engineering, an area I understand relatively well myself. This is purely a personal opinion.

The progress of AI coding has, frankly, been dramatic. Around 2022 it was “useful as a completion tool” at best; by 2024–2025 it had reached the stage of “hand it a spec, and it returns the whole implementation in verifiable units.” People seriously mastering Claude Code, Cursor, and other agent-based tools are no longer discussing “an era without programmers” as a hypothetical — they’re discussing it as something within range.

Writing this always draws the objection: “come on, AI code still has plenty of mistakes, you can’t trust it.” A few years ago that objection was fair. Today, saying it out loud invites suspicion the other way — isn’t this person just not putting in the effort to master tool choice and usage? Which model you choose, how you design your prompts, how you build it into your workflow, how you run review and testing — the gap between people who have pushed hard on these questions and people who haven’t is bigger than you’d expect. Even I, who have fortunately kept one foot in the field the whole time, increasingly find myself on the “not in the know” side, scrambling to catch up.

And this is about programmers — a group within white-collar work that leans relatively toward “a trade in hand” and was thought to be relatively AI-resistant. Clerical work, accounting, legal, marketing, middle management, and other forms of “proceduralized knowledge work” should be squeezed far more directly.

The problem of the in-between white-collar worker will likely start collapsing from this layer first.

What’s really dangerous is the “in-between majority”

To organize the argument so far, the picture looks like this.

One group is white-collar workers who have secured their own place. Protected by autonomy, scarcity, and personal brand, they can turn around and use AI as a tool even as it arrives.

Another group is blue-collar workers doing physical, manual labor. They have traditionally been placed in harsh conditions, and as the research on deaths of despair shows, they’ve suffered serious damage. But this is a different structure from the kind of suffering that comes from collapsing out of a self-image of “I made it, I climbed up to white-collar.”

And finally, the white-collar middle layer. A middling salary, generalist skills, replaceable by younger workers, yet fixed living costs.

This middle layer sits in the structurally hardest position of all. You could say it’s the position where the pain of falling hits hardest.

Research by Modrek et al. at Columbia University shows that depression and anxiety among middle managers exceed that of frontline staff (Modrek & Cullen, 2012, “Job Insecurity during Recessions”, and subsequent studies). It’s the classic bind: “no authority above, only responsibility below,” “autonomy that’s only half-given.” The research points out that middle managers do better with either full autonomy or comprehensively defined authority — being caught in between is the worst.

Being caught in between is the worst. I think that’s exactly right.

CDC data reports that suicide rates among white-collar managers aged 35–54 have risen sharply, showing the steepest increase of any occupational group. This shouldn’t be read merely as a matter of individual mental health — it should be seen as a wound inflicted by the structure itself.

Bullshit Jobs and golden handcuffs

This argument can be reinforced from two more directions.

One is the late David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. In a YouGov survey conducted in the UK, 37% of people said their job made “no meaningful contribution.” A 2023 paper by Simon Walo of the University of Zurich, published in Work, Employment and Society, provides the first quantitative empirical support for this theory (Walo (2023) “‘Bullshit’ After All?”). People working in the white-collar occupations Graeber singled out are statistically significantly more likely to feel their own work is socially useless.

Graeber drew a sharp distinction between shit jobs (hard but necessary blue-collar work) and bullshit jobs (well-paid but meaningless white-collar work). The latter is surrounded by honor and prestige, respected as professional, well paid, treated as a mark of high achievement — yet the person doing it secretly feels they’ve accomplished nothing.

The other is golden handcuffs. The phenomenon of finding it impossible to quit a high-paying job is, in clinical terms, framed not as a matter of logic but of the nervous system. The fusion of identity with job and compensation, concentration risk (retirement funds, mortgage, and children’s education all tied to the same company’s stock), and fear of losing social signaling status.

Logically, you may know that quitting for a lower income to do what you actually want would make you happier — but your nervous system won’t allow it.

I feel this acutely myself, from the side of someone who fields career consultations.

So, what do we do

Writing something like this always draws the question: “so what should we do?”

Honestly, there’s no tidy prescription.

One thing I can say: it’s best to assume that a life plan premised on running forever as a white-collar worker is no longer a viable premise.

If you melt your high salary from your younger years straight into your standard of living, the damage becomes exponentially larger when things collapse in your forties or fifties. Once you raise your standard of living, lowering it again is brutally hard, and once you have a family, it’s not even a decision you alone can make.

Your high-earning years should be treated not as a time to raise your standard of living, but as a time to buy future options — assets, skills, connections, health, relationships with family. This isn’t a platitude; it’s structural self-defense.

Another is to seriously weigh a choice between two paths: become a white-collar worker who can carve out their own place, or, if you can’t, build a second axis early. I happen, fortunately, to be on the former side, having managed to carve out some kind of place for myself, but I doubt many people can do this. A career designed on the premise that “staying employed somewhere equals safety” is going to get considerably harder over the coming decades.

As for blue-collar work, it may be due for reassessment. Work done with the hands, work tied to physical space, work where licenses and trust carry weight — these are relatively shielded from AI’s first wave, and demand is growing amid labor shortages. The implicit social assumption of “looking down on blue-collar work” may be about to get revised.

In closing

Looked at positively, I’m fortunate to be someone who has managed to carve out my own place on the edge of white-collar work. I run my own company, I do advisory and consulting work, and I also teach at a university. I recognize this is a lucky position to be in.

But looking around me, there really are a great many people carrying around a feeling of “this isn’t how it was supposed to go” as in-between white-collar workers. They studied, they worked reasonably hard, they didn’t do anything wrong. And yet, before they knew it, there was nowhere left to go.

What these people probably needed was a chance, much earlier on, to question their “faith in white-collar work.”

I’m not going to go so far as to say blue-collar work is happier. But I do think that unless a whole generation starts questioning the premise that “if you run the white-collar race to the end, you win,” the next 10 to 20 years are going to turn out fairly brutal.

This piece was conceived and directed by Kuzuryu, with the writing done by AI.

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2026/04/1570/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.