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The Trap of Being a Halfway White-Collar Worker

original Teams & Careers

There was once a time, I think, when people could innocently say white-collar workers were the winners.

Get an education, wear a suit, type on a keyboard in an air-conditioned office, and take home a salary above average. Compared to people working in factories or driving trucks, the work was supposedly easier on the body, and life expectancy longer. Postwar developed nations ran for decades on the assumption that “rising from blue-collar to white-collar” was itself synonymous with prosperity.

Lately, I find myself suspecting this framework.

I’ve been on the hiring side many times myself. When I was in the Bay Area, I watched middle-aged white-collar workers who had been laid off never make it back into the workforce. Since returning to Japan, I keep hearing the same story: 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 gut, bluntly cruel.

Meanwhile, people with a trade in their hands — electricians, plumbers — are, I hear, still in such demand that the work never runs out.

A premise worth doubting

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

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

Research from the Urban Institute in the US found that among the stable segment of workers over age 50 who had been with the same employer for five or more years, 28% experience a major employer-driven layoff before retirement (Urban Institute “How Secure Is Employment at Older Ages?”). Median household income drops sharply after job loss, and even those who find new work mostly never return to their previous level. Some reports even find that college graduates and non-graduates recover from this shock at nearly the same rate. A degree does not protect you from a layoff.

So what about blue-collar work, then? There are unions, the ability to strike, ties to local community, and a residue of seniority-based trust. Qualifications and skilled expertise don’t disappear with age — for some jobs, value actually rises 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 co-authored a book that, in fact, demolishes the hypothesis I just raised: Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Anne Case & Angus Deaton, Misuzu Shobo).

From 1999 to 2015, the group whose deaths from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholic liver disease surged in the US was none other than white blue-collar workers without a college degree. Among college graduates, these death rates stayed roughly flat over the same period. During this span, non-college-educated white men alone accounted for roughly 500,000 excess deaths — on the same scale as the death toll of the AIDS crisis.

In other words, the “blue-collar worker protected by union, community, and generational succession of work” that I had pictured in my head is already a thing of the past. The hollowing-out of manufacturing, the collapse of union membership rates, the disintegration of local communities: since the 1970s, blue-collar America has been under continuous, structural fire.

The blue-collar image I had in my head is closer to the blue-collar worker of Japan’s Showa era. It is not the blue-collar worker of today.

And now, we may be at an inflection point

This is where it gets interesting.

It seems that relationship may now be reversing.

Just as “globalization plus robotics” once devastated blue-collar workers in the Midwest, it may now be white-collar workers’ turn to be shaken by “globalization plus AI.” 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 the comings and goings of people on the ground, I have to admit, honestly, that this premonition doesn’t feel out of place to me at all.

A brief word on AI coding

In this context, I want to briefly touch on software engineering, a field I understand relatively well myself. Purely as a personal opinion.

The progress of AI coding has, frankly, been dramatic. Around 2022, it was “handy as a completion tool” at best. By 2024–2025, it had reached the stage of “hand it a spec, and it hands back an implementation in verifiable units.” People who are seriously mastering tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and other agentic tools no longer discuss “an era without programmers” as a hypothetical — they discuss it as something within range.

Whenever I write this, someone always pushes back: “No, no, AI code still has plenty of mistakes, you can’t trust it.” A few years ago, that pushback would have been reasonable. Say it today, though, and the air in the room shifts to suspecting the speaker — as in, maybe this person hasn’t put in the effort to really refine their 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 those who haven’t is bigger than you’d expect. Even I, though I’ve been lucky enough to keep one foot on the ground the whole time, increasingly find myself on the “not in the know” side, scrambling to catch up.

And this is the story for programmers — a white-collar role thought relatively “trade-like” and relatively AI-resistant. Clerical work, accounting, legal, marketing, middle management, and other forms of “proceduralized knowledge labor” should be squeezed far more directly.

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

What’s truly dangerous is the “mediocre majority”

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

First, there are 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 rather than be replaced by it.

Second, there is the blue-collar layer doing physical, manual work. They have traditionally been placed in harsh conditions the whole time, and as the deaths-of-despair research shows, they’ve taken serious damage. But at least this is a different kind of suffering from collapsing out of the self-perception of “I made it to white-collar, I won.”

And finally, there is the white-collar middle layer: a middling salary, generalist skills, replaceable by younger workers, yet with fixed living costs.

It is precisely this middle layer that sits in the structurally hardest position. This is the position where the suffering of the fall hits hardest.

Research by Modrek and colleagues at Columbia University shows that depression and anxiety among middle managers are higher than among frontline staff (Modrek & Cullen, 2012, “Job Insecurity during Recessions”, and subsequent studies). This is the classic bind: authority above but none of your own, responsibility below, autonomy that’s only half granted. Middle managers, the research points out, fare better when given either full autonomy or none at all — being caught halfway is the worst.

Halfway is the worst. I think that’s exactly right.

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

Bullshit Jobs and Golden Handcuffs

This argument can be reinforced from two more directions.

First, the late David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (Iwanami Shoten). In a YouGov survey conducted in the UK, 37% of respondents said their job “does not make a meaningful contribution.” In 2023, Simon Walo of the University of Zurich published a paper in Work, Employment and Society that gave this theory its first quantitative empirical support (Walo (2023) “‘Bullshit’ After All?”). People in the white-collar occupations Graeber specifically named are statistically significantly more likely to feel their own work is socially useless.

Graeber drew a sharp distinction between shit jobs (blue-collar work that is hard but necessary) and bullshit jobs (white-collar work that is well paid but meaningless). The latter comes wrapped in honor and prestige, treated with professional respect, well paid, regarded as a high achiever. Yet the person themselves secretly feels: I haven’t actually accomplished anything.

Second, Golden Handcuffs. The phenomenon of finding it impossible to quit a high-paying job is formulated in clinical circles as a problem not of logic but of the nervous system: identity fused with occupation and compensation, concentrated risk (retirement savings, mortgage, and children’s education all tied to the stock of the very same company), and the fear of losing social signaling.

Logically, you might know that quitting and doing what you want on a lower income would make you happier. Your nervous system won’t allow it.

I feel this too, painfully, from the side that receives career consultations.

So, what do we do

Whenever I write something like this, I always get asked: so what should we do?

Honestly, there’s no clean prescription.

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

If you dissolve your high salary from your younger years straight into your standard of living, the damage becomes exponentially larger when things collapse in your 40s or 50s. Once you raise your standard of living, lowering it again is brutally hard, and if you have a family, it’s not even something you can lower by your will alone.

The 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 idealism; it’s a structural defense.

Another point worth seriously considering is the choice between becoming a white-collar worker who can build your own place, or, if you can’t, picking up a different axis early. I happen to be, luckily, on the side that has managed to build a place for myself in the former sense, 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 harsher over the coming decades.

And blue-collar work may, from here, get reevaluated. Work that uses your hands, work tied to physical space, work where credentials and trust matter: these are relatively shielded from the first wave of AI, and demand is growing amid labor shortages. The implicit social premise of looking down on blue-collar work may be on the verge of being updated.

In closing

Looking at it positively, I’m someone who has, luckily, managed to carve out a place for myself at the edge of the white-collar world. I run my own company, do advisory and consulting work, and also teach at a university. I’m well aware this is a lucky position to be in.

But looking around me, I see a genuinely large number of people stuck as mediocre white-collar workers, carrying the feeling that this isn’t how it was supposed to go. They studied, they worked reasonably hard, they didn’t do anything wrong. And yet, somehow, there’s 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 feel that unless we start questioning, generation by generation, the premise that running the white-collar race to the end means winning, the next 10 to 20 years are going to turn out fairly brutal.

This piece was conceived and directed by Kuzuryu, and drafted using AI.

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