We are about to walk into the worst job market of our lifetime. Not a slowdown. Not a cycle. A shift.
I said in December that May would be when things start breaking. It’s already happening. White collar layoffs are accelerating, and for every 100 people that lose their job, there are roughly 1–2 jobs available. Pause on that. 100 people fighting for one seat.
I’ve seen it up close. Startups in Chicago cutting half their team and somehow getting more done. Not less. More. That should scare you, because it points to something deeper.
The world doesn’t distribute outcomes evenly. It never has.
In content: 1% of posts get 90% of all engagement. The other 99% split the remaining 10%.
In music: 1% of songs on Spotify get 90% of all streams. 90,000 songs are uploaded every single day. The median song gets 30 total plays. Ever.
In startups: 0.00006% of startups become unicorns. A single company in a VC portfolio often returns more than all other investments combined.
In wealth: the top 1% owns more than the bottom 50% combined.
This is not a flaw; it's the core framework of how networks, attention, and money operate. If you don't grasp this, you're engaging in the wrong pursuit. Consider your favorite artist. Many of them have hundreds, even thousands, of unreleased tracks, often unpolished.
One thing that I have always thought about is the Stephen King / Quentin Tarantino effect. Stephen King was known for hitting 2,000 words a day.Every. Single. Day. Like clockwork.
Same with Quentin Tarantino. He would isolate himself for months at a time writing in a small windowless room. Writing for 12-16 hours a day crafting dialogue, rewriting scenes, and fine tuning character arcs. Both were obsessing over dialogue like it was oxygen.
They were playing a game they actually wanted to play. Not the game that looked good. Not the game that felt safe. Their game. That’s the difference.
Because most people aren’t doing that. They’re performing. Living lives that look right instead of lives that feel right. Posting what they think will land. Pursuing what they think will impress. Performative action. Like everyone is putting on a show. Optimizing for perception, not truth.
At work, we chase quarterly goals handed to us by someone else, slowly losing sight of what we actually want. Our relationships start to mirror what society calls “perfect,” not what feels real. We follow religious traditions not because they mean something to us, but because they’ve always been there and we never questioned understanding.
No one stops to ask why.
We go to college believing it’s a guaranteed path, even as the ground beneath us is shifting. Entire industries are being rewritten. Technology is accelerating faster than we can adapt. And the truth is uncomfortable:
Most of the jobs people are preparing for today won’t even exist in the near future.
Yet we continue to follow the same script.
Not because it works.
But because it’s familiar.
I released an article in January that was pretty spot on. I said by May we will start to see massive layoffs. Looks like they are already started.
We are entering the era of deployed intelligence. What it means to give 100% is no longer the same, and neither is what it means to understand something. There was a time when obsession and effort alone could separate you—when going all in on a single goal was enough to create something meaningful.
That era is ending.
Now it’s not about how hard you work, but how intelligently you deploy yourself. The standard is shifting from effort to multiplication—if you can’t 100x your output, something else will.
Over the next five years, many dreams will quietly die. Not because people failed, but because cognition itself is being replicated and scaled at a level we’ve never seen before. What once made you valuable is becoming baseline.
And when that happens, you’re forced to face a different question: if your intelligence can be replicated, what actually makes you irreplaceable?
The world is becoming a terrifying engine of innovation.
Like right now we can all agree that one of the biggest differentiators in life that money can’t buy is just looking fit / being fit. Nobody can take that from you. It is the one component that is completely earned. It takes hard work, determination, and a strict regimen to become fit.
I see a world to where more people are fit than ever. To where the rich will always be fit due to modern technology. Such as peptides and a transparent health intelligence layer. I see a future where 10 years from now everyone “can” be fit due to supplementation without the previous scale of effort. Value is quite literally derived from human perception (utility / desire) and scarcity. If everyone can obtain a goal, purchase something, etc. It holds no value. But if it is extremely hard to achieve then it holds value.
So back to the core component of the piece. How do you deliver value in this world if cognition is free for everyone and they can deploy intelligence anywhere. Where is the value?
It's not in what you know. That's free now. It's not in what you can do. That's getting automated by the quarter. It's not even in how hard you work, because a machine that never sleeps will always outwork you.
Go back to King. Go back to Tarantino. The common thread between them isn't talent. Talent is everywhere. It's not discipline either, discipline is just a byproduct. The real thread is that both of them were playing a game they actually wanted to play. Not the game their parents wanted. Not the game that looked impressive at dinner parties. Not the game that LinkedIn told them was "the future of work." Their game. The one that made them look borderline unhinged to everyone on the outside.
King didn't write 2,000 words a day because he was chasing a bestseller list. He wrote because not writing felt like dying. Tarantino didn't lock himself in a windowless room for months because he wanted an Oscar. He did it because dialogue was his oxygen. The obsession wasn't performed. It was involuntary. And that's the part nobody talks about, the obsession chose them before they chose it.
Now zoom out.
Most people have never had that experience. Not because they're incapable of it. But because they've never been still long enough to hear it. They've been too busy running on borrowed goals. The degree someone told them to get. The career path that seemed safe. The relationship that checked the right boxes. The quarterly target their manager set that had nothing to do with their actual life.
This is the unconscious misalignment I'm talking about. And it's everywhere. It's the person who spent eight years climbing a corporate ladder only to realize it was leaning against the wrong building. It's the founder who raised $5M for a company they secretly hate running. It's the creative who stopped creating because they started optimizing for the algorithm instead of the art.
These people aren't lazy. They're lost. And the economy we're walking into will punish "lost" more brutally than any economy in human history.
Here's why.
When cognition becomes a commodity, when anyone can deploy intelligence at scale for near-zero cost, the only remaining differentiator is direction. Not speed. Not effort. Direction.
A misaligned person with AI is just automating the wrong life faster.
They're 100x-ing someone else's dream. They're scaling their own confusion.
But an aligned person with AI? That's a different species entirely. That's someone who knows exactly what they're building, why it matters to them specifically, and what they're willing to sacrifice to see it exist. Intelligence doesn't replace a person. It multiplies them. It becomes the most powerful amplifier ever created, but only if there's a signal worth amplifying.
And that's the brutal truth about what's coming. AI doesn't eliminate the need for humans. It eliminates the ability to hide. You can't coast anymore. Excuses are gone. You can't fake passion for a job you hate and survive on competence alone — because competence is now table stakes.
You can't build a personal brand on aesthetics and borrowed ideas. The feed is about to be flooded with content that looks identical to yours. You can't differentiate on knowledge, skill, credentials, or even execution speed.
The only thing left is you. The specific, weird, obsessive, unreasonable version of you that exists when nobody is watching.
That's where scarcity lives now. Not in information. Not in access. Not in intelligence. In identity. You need to pursue your dreams. Set the goals higher than ever. We are seeing teams of 3,4,5 take down companies that are worth billions. The field is wide open for the taking.
And here's the question that should keep you up tonight:
If an AI could study every email you've sent, every meeting you've attended, every deliverable you've produced, every post you've published, could it replace you?
If the answer is yes, the problem isn't AI.
The problem is there was never a you to replace. Build your “You”. The job market is so bad. Just pursue your dreams.
-Nikhil Mohanty