The 9-to-5 office job had a good run.

It survived the fax machine. It survived email. It survived the cloud, the pandemic, the open office floor plan, and seventeen different project management tools that were supposed to fix everything.

It did not survive what came next.

For the first time in history, the thing sitting across from you at the virtual desk is smarter than the task, faster than the deadline, and cheaper than the benefits package. It doesn't need a standing desk. It doesn't need a mental health day. It doesn't need to find meaning in the work — it just does the work.

The white collar job isn't being phased out gradually. It's being rendered obsolete at a speed that no career counselor prepared anyone for, and no government policy will slow down.

Let's be honest about what white collar work actually was.

Most of it was processing.

Processing emails. Processing invoices. Processing reports that summarized other reports. Sitting in meetings to discuss the meeting from last week. Reformatting someone else's slides. Chasing approvals. Writing the same quarterly update in slightly different words.

We built entire careers around tasks that, if we're being ruthless about it, no one actually wanted to do. We called it work. We measured it in hours. We built office towers to house it and hired managers to watch it happen.

And the whole time, somewhere in the back of everyone's mind, was the quiet suspicion:

This shouldn't require a human.

It didn't.

Yes, millions of jobs will disappear.

Here's the part no one wants to say: a lot of those jobs were already making people miserable.

The burnout epidemic wasn't from working too hard. It was from working on the wrong things — the soul-grinding, repetitive, invisible labor that kept the lights on but lit nothing inside the person doing it. Intelligence, curiosity, creativity — poured into formatting spreadsheets. Potential — spent reconciling bank statements at 11 PM because the month-end close didn't care that you had a life.

The tragedy was never that those jobs existed.

The tragedy was that we spent human lives on them.

If a machine can take that from us, let it.