Congratulations, You've Picked the Worst Time to Become an Adult
Unsolicited advice for the class of 2026, who deserve better than what we have in store for them
AI’s masks are off, and the entry-level jobs your degree was pointing at are the first ones in the crosshairs
The jobs report looks decent until you notice where the jobs actually are — and where they aren’t
The geopolitical situation is best described as “actively unhelpful” to anyone trying to plan a career
Collect your grudges, expand your luck surface, and keep the people close — in that order
It’s the second week of May again, which means that against everyone’s best efforts, and several plausible extinction-level scenarios, the world has refused to end.
For more than a few of my students stalking the stack, this will feel less like a relief and more like a cruel joke delivered by the universe with a straight face.
Last year I dropped a note on how my graduators were stepping into the abyss, given what 2025 was shaping up to look like in its first half.
And boy did the year deliver. So thoroughly, in fact, that the 2026 edition of this letter could simply be a restack of the previous one with “double that” stamped on top.
My thoughts go out to anyone about to be violently thrust into the real world in the coming days. And so should yours.
Here is what we have lined up for them.
The Masks Have Finally Come Off
Last year, AI had picked up it’s pace, going from an early-mover curiosity to a genuine shaker of labor supply. By 2026, the only thing that has meaningfully changed is the candor with which the people at the top are talking about it.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told the company in a memo that they plan to use AI to “reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains” from deploying it across the company.
Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan that by 2025, Meta and its peers would have AI capable of doing the job of a mid-level engineer, and perhaps most memorably, Block CEO Jack Dorsey announced plans to cut 4,000 employees, about 40% of its global workforce, while explicitly tying those losses to AI.
A survey of 1,000 business leaders found that 37% expect to have replaced jobs with AI by the end of 2026, while half have already pulled back on hiring and nearly 40% have conducted layoffs in the past year.
And if you had any doubts about the demographic most at risk, know that it’s the entry-level workers and recent hires, which is to say, the cohort I am writing this letter to.
There is a tinge of irony in all of this that I have watched play out in real time.
Most of the students whose career paths AI now stands squarely in front of have been using it to write their essays for months (my last check on Pangram had a 100% hit rate), and the tool that’s displacing them is the same one they’ve been quietly deploying since at least their second semester.
But the real irony runs deeper, and I’ll own my share of it.
We, the educators, failed this cohort by holding them back from AI at precisely the moment they could have learned the most from it.
We spent the past few years AI-proofing our syllabi, engineering assignments that the models couldn’t easily crack, and congratulating ourselves on preserving academic integrity, only to slowly realize we should have been doing the exact opposite.
We should have all embraced the tools much earlier, and much deeper, teaching our students to think with them and to speak AI the way the next generation will do natively, the way my own kids already are.
That is what employers want from them now, and it is what they are asking from me and my colleagues as we deliver more than a dozen AI leadership programs over the next ten months.
It would have been a wonderful gift for our graduates to be able to lead that charge.
Instead, they arrive at the door fluent in the tool and credentialed in a curriculum that pretended the tool didn’t exist.
Sorry, everyone. My bad.
Welcome to the Real World
The latest jobs data, released this morning, gave my Robinhood portfolio a reason to exhale while simultaneously making my Spidey senses tingle in the uncomfortable way they do when something is technically true but quietly misleading.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the US economy added 115,000 jobs in April, beating a consensus forecast of around 65,000, which sounds encouraging until you look at where those jobs actually landed.
Health care led with 37,000 new positions, transportation and warehousing added 30,000, and retail tacked on roughly 22,000. Federal government employment, meanwhile, continued its decline, shedding another 9,000. The February numbers were revised down by 23,000, to a loss of 156,000, meaning the combined picture for February and March is 16,000 worse than we thought a month ago.
The unemployment rate held at 4.3%, which has now sat above 4% since June 2024. An economist at Indeed described April’s report as “generally positive” but noted that “the progress feels more like a tentative first step than a confident stride forward, which is a polite way of saying that finding a job in this economy is something to be proud of, and doing so right after graduating is something to frame next to a winning lottery ticket.
What genuinely worries me is that this cohort, which already lost years to COVID, graduated into a distorted economy, and entered the workforce during one of the more chaotic periods in recent memory, keeps getting hit before they have had any time to find their footing.
Every time they begin to stabilize, the ground shifts again. One crisis dissolves into the next without the breathing room that previous generations, for all their complaints, mostly got to take for granted.
The compounding weight of that is something no graduation speech adequately accounts for.
But at least the graduation speeches will go on, right?
How Big Is the Blast Zone Again?
It is a rite of passage for a certain type of anxious New Yorker to spend an evening on Nukemap plugging in coordinates and warhead yields to calculate whether they’d survive long enough to be inconvenienced by the fallout.
The city has always had that particular existential undertow to it, and with what can only be called World War Meme now in full development, NYC suddenly feels more precarious than ever.
The animosity the country has accumulated abroad has a way of coming home eventually and if it misses Times Square or, God forbid, Smorgasburg, someone’s targeting algorithm has serious issues.
And even if my graduates manage to sidestep the blast radius entirely, there is always the draft, which I’ve heard now at least comes with a decent headset and asks you to land precision strikes using skills previously developed destroying 12-year-olds in Call of Duty.
See mom, it wasn’t a waste of time, was it?
On the bright side, the gap on your resume suddenly stops mattering.
Apathy Is for Losers, and Losers Aren’t Winners
All things tallied, the class of 2026 deserves something between a D- and a standing ovation for choosing one of the more historically unfortunate moments to enter adulthood.
The standing ovation is because they had no choice, and the D- is for the timing.
The silver lining, and there genuinely is one, is that their landing makes the 2025 abyss look like a puddle. Everyone who graduated last year and is still searching: the company you are keeping has just gotten considerably larger and more distinguished.
If the world is handing you lemons at scale, you had better develop a serious appreciation for limoncello.
Here is a three-part hit list for making the most of a dystopia that didn’t ask for your permission.
I. Start collecting grudges
A few years ago I found myself in a conversation with Ernie Garcia, CEO of Carvana, in the aftermath of the company’s spectacular 99% stock collapse in 2022. '
The company had been worth billions before it collapsed to almost nothing. Then, through a combination of ruthless restructuring and the kind of institutional stubbornness that gets misread as optimism, Carvana clawed back more than 7,000% from its low. What I took from that conversation was how the chip on the shoulder and the need to show everyone who had written them off exactly what they were made of was exactly what made it all happen.
Garcia told me, in so many words, that the trauma of the collapse fired the whole crew up in a way that the good years never could. You can’t manufacture that kind of motivation. But can earn it through genuine adversity.
Class of 2026, you have more than enough adversity to work with.
No one promised that life would be fair, and no one expects you to make it through without a hell of a chip on your shoulders. The rejected applications, the deflating job market, the sense that the deck was stacked before you even sat down at the table, take it all as it were fuel.
For every application that comes back with a no, send two more out of spite, and watch yourself become inevitable.
Embody the heads of the hydra. The world can cut one off, and you can grow two back. This is how you become inevitable.
II. Expand your luck surface
If you haven’t worked this out yet, the world is a glorified casino where the odds are rarely posted honestly. Whatever the boomers in corner offices tell you about meritocracy and ladder-climbing, the truth is more probabilistic than that: you get there because you found something that worked, at a moment that it worked, and you were positioned to take it when it arrived.
The times we’re in call for a shotgun, not a sniper rifle. Your future, like my own, if I’m being honest, will be best served by expanding the surface area on which luck can strike. Explore, range, seek breadth, take both roads at the fork when you can, and resist anyone’s confident narrative about commitment to a career path that may be as cooked as actuarial sciences after Claude’s latest update.
The version of this for a 2026 graduate is simple. Being more matters more than doing more. Range is the only sensible career strategy when the world is too volatile for anyone to confidently point you at a single path and tell you to run.
III. Keep your people close
At best, and accounting generously for sleep and the portion of waking hours that work will consume, you have somewhere around 20 fully autonomous years left in your life, as long as you count the years where the choices are mostly yours, the energy is mostly there, and the window is genuinely open.
I hope you have more sense than I did about filling that time with the people who matter rather than the outputs you produce for institutions that will mostly forget you existed.
Chances are that no one from your first job, or your last, will come to carry your casket. And you wouldn’t want them to.
Keep the garden paths open and clear even when the world is pulling hard in the direction of career quicksand.
Find the people who share your particular brand of madness and hitch your wagons together. The research on human flourishing is almost comically consistent on how community, connection, and the sense of being genuinely known by other people predict wellbeing far better than income, status, or the prestige of the institution on your diploma.
The world will give you plenty of reasons to let those connections atrophy. Resist them the best you can.
One last thing worth noting, for anyone who needs a genuine glimmer of it.
Compute costs are starting to bite hard enough that some companies are quietly discovering that humans, for certain tasks, are actually the more cost-effective option again.
The pendulum doesn’t stay at one extreme. The people who understand both the tools and the irreducibly human parts of the work will be the ones the next version of this economy is built around.
That is you, class of 2026. Arrive accordingly.
A book to read
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, David Epstein
If the research above lands, this is where to go next. Epstein makes the case, across domains, that breadth and late commitment produce more durable excellence than early specialization, and does it in a way that actually sticks.
A thought to have
The world has not ended, and you have not either.
The defining challenge for this generation may not be any single crisis but the accumulation of them, the weight of one thing after another before anything has had time to settle. Resilience built under those conditions is the real kind. It compounds.
A thing to do
Plan accordingly
Write down the three things that would make the next twelve months feel like they mattered, independently of whether anyone offered you a job or a salary or a title. Start there.
A grudge to weaponize
Become whatever the market, the algorithm, or the institution told you that you weren’t.
I am currently conducting a study on range and how it impacts people’s career trajectories. Ten questions and a name will get you on the hall of fame as we pump up the n on the study. Link below - thanks for considering it!
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Curiosity is best when enjoyed in great company.