Labor, Automation & the Post-Work Condition
Damianonyx5 min read·1 hour ago--
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that has no good name. It is not tiredness from physical labor that at least carries with it the decency of honest depletion. It is not the fuzzy fatigue of illness. It is something closer to the feeling of spending eight hours performing the elaborate pantomime of work attending meetings that could have been emails, updating spreadsheets that feed other spreadsheets, writing reports that nobody reads and arriving home emptied of something you cannot quite locate, understanding in your bones that you have produced nothing, moved nothing, changed nothing.
The machine ran. You were one of its parts, yet tomorrow you will do it again.
For most of the twentieth century, that feeling had nowhere to go. You absorbed it. You went to therapy, or to the bar, watched television or even doomscroll socia medias until the self dissolved pleasantly into someone else’s story.
The social contract was clear; you traded your hours for money, and the transaction, however spiritually bankrupt, kept the lights on.
Quitting looked irresponsible. Refusing the terms was pathological. The category did not yet exist for the person who looked at the arrangement clearly and said: "no, thank you".
It exists now. They are called NEETs.
What NEET Actually Means
The acronym "NEET-Not in Education, Employment, or Training" originated in British policy documents in the late 1980s, a bureaucratic label for young people who had slipped between the institutional net’s squares. It was a problem category. A risk indicator. Something to be solved. The European Commission adopted it formally in 2010, and it spread across OECD countries as a shorthand for demographic failure; the young people a society had mislaid.
Somewhere in the intervening years, the label got reclaimed. The way queer got reclaimed, the way punk got reclaimed not by committee or press release but by the subjects of the label themselves, who looked at it and thought: actually, yes. That is precisely what I am. And I am not particularly ashamed of it.
262M
ILO 2025 Global Estimate
Young people aged 15–24 worldwide classified as NEET roughly one in four of the entire global youth cohort.
By 2025, the International Labour Organization estimated that approximately 262 million young people globally that one in four between the ages of 18 and 24 were NEET.
In the United Kingdom alone, nearly a million young people had left the workforce. In the United States, over four million Gen Zers are neither in school nor working. Governments commissioned inquiries. Economists wrote alarmed papers. The prevailing narrative was one of crisis, of failure, of a generation that needed to be fixed.
But here is the question that the alarmed papers tend not to ask: what if the NEETs are right?
"I wasn’t treated like a human being there, more like a tool that could be easily replaced."
➺ Young NEET, interviewed by Vice, on leaving their apprenticeship
That quote, raw and plainly stated, contains more economic analysis than most quarterly reports. The person did not leave because they were lazy. They left because the terms were degrading. They looked at the contract 'your dignity for our productivity' and declined to sign. The system called this failure. The person perhaps called it self respect.
The Hollow Ladder
Here is what makes the automation story particularly vicious, and why it hits the NEET generation with such specific force: the jobs being automated first are not the jobs at the top, they are the jobs at the bottom. The entry level positions.
The junior analyst, the paralegal, the junior copywriter, the customer service associate, roles that generations of young people were told were the first rung on the ladder, the mandatory tunnel through which you had to pass before arriving at the work that actually mattered.
Cornell University research found that companies adopting AI reduced junior hiring by about 13% a significant effect, concentrated precisely at the entry point. Among young software developers aged 22 to 25 in AI-exposed roles, employment fell nearly 20% between late 2022 and mid 2025.
Entry-level job postings overall declined roughly 35% since January 2023. The ladder is not just shaking. Someone is removing its bottom rungs.
Revelio Labs via CNBC September 2025
Decline in entry-level job postings since January 2023. The rungs at the bottom of the professional ladder are disappearing faster than any previous transition. The next generation of senior professionals has fewer and fewer paths to become senior at anything.
The researchers at MindStudio, writing in early 2026, identified the real horror embedded in this dynamic: even if current workers aren’t being fired, the pipeline into professional careers is narrowing.
Historically, entry-level roles weren’t just labor. They were training grounds. You did the grunt work as a junior analyst because doing it taught you how the work actually functioned. You developed judgment. You moved up. If AI absorbs the entry-level task layer, the question becomes: where does the next generation of senior professionals come from?
The answer is; it doesn’t. Or rather it comes from an ever shrinking pool of people who either had the right connections, attended the right institutions, or got in before the door closed.
The meritocracy was always somewhat fictional, this was known, but now the fiction is becoming untenable. The kids who followed all the instructions, got the degrees they were told to get, applied for the jobs they were told to apply for, are finding the architecture of the promise simply gone. The contract was honored right up to the moment they tried to collect.
The Coin That Says the Quiet Part Loud
Into this specific cultural moment, young people locked out of entry level work by machines, demoralized by stagnant wages, increasingly skeptical of the entire apparatus of formal employment comes a Solana meme coin called $NEET, with a tagline that reads; dispatches from the other side of the 9 to 5.
It sounds absurd. It is, in many ways, absurd. And it is also, in the particular way that good jokes are honest, one of the more accurately titled financial instruments of the current moment.
Thanks for reading btwn :)
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