Here's a sentence that could only come out of San Francisco in 2025: tech workers are flooding therapists' offices because artificial intelligence is giving them existential dread.

Let's be clear about what's happening. Some of the highest-paid workers on the planet — people pulling six figures to sit in ergonomic chairs in climate-controlled offices with free kombucha on tap — are in crisis because the tools they're building might eventually make their jobs redundant. The irony is so thick you could spread it on avocado toast.

Now, we're not here to mock anyone's mental health struggles. Anxiety is real, career uncertainty is stressful, and therapy is genuinely useful. But let's zoom out for a second and recognize something the rest of the economy has understood for decades: job disruption is not new. Factory workers, retail employees, journalists, truck drivers — millions of Americans have faced automation anxiety without the luxury of $300-an-hour therapists and RSU cushions to soften the landing.

What's actually interesting here isn't that tech workers are anxious. It's what that anxiety reveals about Silicon Valley's culture. For years, the industry sold a narrative that disruption was always good — as long as it was happening to other people's industries. Uber disrupted taxis. Airbnb disrupted hotels. Amazon disrupted everything. Move fast and break things, right?

Well, now the thing being broken is the comfortable assumption that writing code makes you irreplaceable. Welcome to the free market, friends.

The healthy response isn't to spiral — it's to adapt. Learn to work with AI. Develop skills that complement automation rather than compete with it. The workers who treat this moment as an opportunity rather than an apocalypse will be fine.

And for those genuinely struggling: get the help you need. Just maybe skip the part where you expect the rest of us to feel sorry for people earning $200K while the barista serving their oat milk latte has been living with job insecurity since day one.