WE WERE ALL taught that caring about your work was a good investment. Excelling in school, building relationships with coworkers, and receiving glowing reviews all served to build wealth, increase stability, and contribute to achieving goals. The widespread adoption of AI across industries, despite being billed as a tool to increase productivity, has a way of increasing how much work we have to do, not reducing it.
I see the repercussions in my office day after day. It shows up as indifference—a collective “meh.” Guys who initially get excited about new jobs and new opportunities say their days quickly don’t feel like a win—especially if they’re filled with telling an AI agent how to do the tasks they used to do. Guys who have been in their jobs for a while reflect on how much they invested: They honed their skills, and they believed that developing into their careers mattered for their futures. I keep hearing different versions of the same thing: “I just don’t care anymore, and that scares me more than getting fired.”
When going above and beyond stops protecting your job, caring becomes an expense with no return, and people quietly stop paying it. This is not burnout. Burnout is depletion. This is divestment. Your ability to care is intact, but what’s changed is that the return on it is no longer there.
I’ve dubbed it the Care Crash. It’s the combination of feeling that one’s competence no longer matters, that meaning has drained from one’s career, and that a person is helpless to improve the future.
Vacation doesn’t solve it. You come back rested, but still don’t care because rest cannot fix a career path that has eroded.
One key thing about it: the numbness is not a malfunction. It’s self-protection. If the career you’ve built can disappear no matter what you do, you don’t let yourself love it.
That’s why advice to “just reengage” doesn’t work. You can’t talk someone out of a defense that’s working. But you can restore a sense of agency and meaning in your life and take the “meh” out with these strategies:
- Start by naming what you’re feeling. Demoralization is a response to a situation, not a character trait. Calling it what it is creates some separation between feeling like your career is unstable and feeling like a failure.
- Invest in meaning outside of work. This is critical. Your self-worth shouldn’t run through your employer. Men are taught to believe that their worth is their output, and to process feelings through function: providing, producing, fixing. For many, these functions are central to their identities, but you can find meaning and fulfillment in other places, like friendships, community, and family. When work stops telling you that you matter, you need other spaces that do.
- Find where your effort still pays off at work. Even as jobs have evolved, some parts of them still require forms of craft, judgment, or creativity. There are some things that LLMs just cannot do as well as a person, such as creating connection, and having complex ethical judgment, creativity, and discernment. Mentorship and workplace relationships also matter as much as ever. Find an area where effort still matters and invest in it.
- Begin to grieve for the old playbook. The things you worked so hard for aren’t trivial, and the loss of the life you’d hoped for deserves compassion and care.
One important reminder: Be mindful of when it goes beyond just indifference. The line between the Care Crash and depression can be fuzzy, so be attentive to whether the feelings follow you home each night, you see shifts in your sleep patterns or appetite, or you feel disconnected from other parts of your life, even the activities and relationships that typically give you meaning and happiness. A good way to figure this out is with a licensed therapist who will support you without judgment.
You can’t outwork the Care Crash. But you get to decide where your care goes next. Invest in community, find small ways to build meaning into your work, and grieve the loss of things you’ve expected in your life. These don’t make the effects of AI go away. But they’re part of strengthening the resilience you have in the face of them.
Matthew Willner is a licensed clinical social worker and Certified IFS Therapist practicing in New York, New Jersey, and Colorado, where he specializes in working with men.
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