If you asked me what my favorite hobby is, I'd say putting on noise canceling headphones with some music, laying in my LoveSac, bundled in a blanket, and my head on a pillow as I read articles and watch videos for the sake of learning. This is done best with one of my children or my wife cuddled next to me on the LoveSac.

But, I was alone last night when I read, "US employers cut 108,000 jobs in January—worst start to a year since the Great Recession."

I read it twice. Put the phone down. Picked it up again. Read it a third time.

And then I noticed what I was feeling, which was: not much.

Not panic. Not fear. Not even the performative concern I'd need if someone asked me about it at work. Just a low, quiet hum of something I couldn't name yet. The night continued and my brain couldn't stop racing.

It took me until this evening to realize what the hum was.

It was guilt. Not the useless kind—not "I feel bad for having a job." Something more structural. The recognition that 108,000 people just got cut loose, and my first honest reaction was to check whether my own position was safe. It was. And the relief I felt about that was the most damning thing I've experienced in months.

Here's what I know about myself that I don't love admitting: I am protected.

Not rich. Not powerful. But insulated in the specific way that matters right now—I work in AI, at a company that's growing, in a role that touches revenue. I speak the dialect. I know which Slack channels matter and which are theater. I can write the email that signals competence before anyone checks my numbers.

I wrote an essay a while back about the job market not being fair. About how the gates are guarded by language, not credentials. About the quiet class of people who decide what "culture fit" means and then pretend it's objective.

I meant every word. I still do.

But reading that headline in my kitchen, I felt the distance between writing about unfairness and living inside it. I'm not on the wrong side of that number. I'm on the side that reads about it over breakfast and goes to work.

108,000 people. Three times the December number. The worst January since 2009. Amazon announced that they are going to cut 16,000. UPS plans to cut 30,000. AI was cited for not most, but many of the losses—which means the technology I sell for a living showed up in somebody's termination rationale last month.

That one sat with me.

My best friend owns a plumbing company.

He's one of the smartest people I know—not in the credentialed way, not in the "went to the right school" way. Smart in the way that actually matters: he sees how systems work, he solves problems that have consequences if you get them wrong, and he builds something real with his hands every day.

When I read that headline, I thought about him before I thought about myself. Not because I was worried about him—he's going to be fine. Plumbing doesn't get disrupted by tariffs or restructuring or the AI bubble. People will always need water to flow and shit to leave. His security is literal. It's made of copper and PVC and the fact that no chatbot is going to crawl under your house at 2 AM when a pipe bursts.

My security is different. Mine is made of language. Of fluency in a dialect that happens to be valuable right now—the cadence of "async" and "alignment" and "enterprise AI." Of being in the right room at the right time, speaking the right way about the right things. Of building a career on top of abstractions that are worth whatever we collectively decide they're worth tomorrow.

His value is physical. Mine is linguistic. His is constant. Mine is contingent.

And here's the thing that keeps circling in my head: we're both doing fine. But only one of us is doing fine for reasons that don't depend on the current mood of the economy.

This is the part where the essay is supposed to become about economics. About tariffs and Fed rates and whether we're heading into a recession. About the macro forces that produced 108,000 cuts in a single month.

I don't have that essay in me. Not because I don't care—I do. But because the thing I actually felt, laying in this LoveSac I am writing in right now, wasn't about the macro. It was about the distance between the headline and my body.

The economy is an abstraction. A job is a person.

Somewhere in that 108,000 is someone who did everything right. Who showed up on time and hit their numbers and wrote the right kind of emails and still got a calendar invite from HR on a Tuesday morning that said "Quick Sync" with no agenda. We all know what "Quick Sync" with no agenda means.

Somewhere in that number is someone who just bought a house. Someone who just had a kid. Someone who's been sending applications into the void for months, finally landed something, and now they're back in the void again.

And somewhere in that number is someone who works in AI—my industry, my world, the thing I sell—who got replaced by the tools they helped build. That's not dystopian fiction. That's a line item in the Challenger report. AI was cited for 7,624 job cuts in January alone.

I sell AI for a living. I think about this more than I used to.

There's a question underneath all of this that I've been circling for weeks, and I think the headline finally forced it to the surface.

What is value?

Not in the economics textbook sense. In the "what am I actually worth and why" sense. The personal, uncomfortable, keeps-you-up-at-night sense.

My best friend's value is obvious. Pipes carry water. Water sustains life. The chain from his hands to human need is short and visible. You can point at it.

My value is less obvious. I help companies figure out how to use AI audio technology. That's real—it generates revenue, it solves problems, it creates things that didn't exist before. But the chain from my work to human need is longer, more abstract, more dependent on a set of assumptions about what the economy values and why.

And those assumptions are shifting. That's what the headline actually means, underneath the numbers.

We spent twenty years building an economy on the premise that the knowledge worker was the apex of the labor market. That the person who could manipulate information and navigate complexity and speak the right dialect was worth more than the person who could fix your toilet. The entire compensation structure of the American economy is built on this premise. Tech salaries. The college wage premium. The cultural hierarchy that puts the guy with the MacBook above the guy with the wrench.

108,000 cuts in a month is the economy starting to ask whether that premise still holds.

I'm not saying knowledge work is worthless. I'm saying its value was never as stable as we pretended. It was always contingent—on growth, on investment, on the collective belief that the abstractions were worth what we were paying for them. When that belief wobbles, knowledge workers are the first to feel it. Because you can't eat an AI strategy deck. You can't live inside a quarterly business review.

My friend with the plumbing company doesn't think about this. He doesn't have to. His value renews itself every time someone turns on a faucet.

I keep thinking about something my father-in-law would have said if he'd read that headline.

He isn't in tech. He's actually also a plumber. He is the kind of guy who worked with his hands by default. Never made a lot of money. Never had what I'd call stability—not the financial kind, not the emotional kind, not any kind.

But he likely looks at 108,000 layoffs and is thinking something like: "The people who survive aren't the ones who picked the right industry. They're the ones who are useful to the people standing next to them."

He certainly isn't a philosopher. He is just paying attention.

And I think he is right, in the way that people who don't overthink things are sometimes more right than people who do. Value isn't an abstraction. It isn't a market cap or a salary band or the number of LinkedIn followers who think your takes are insightful. Value is what happens between you and the people in your life when things get hard.

My best friend the plumber is valuable because he can fix your pipes. But he's also valuable because he'll show up at your house at midnight when you're panicking about water damage and he'll tell you it's going to be fine and you'll believe him because he's the kind of person you believe.

I'm valuable—if I am—not because I sell AI, but because the people I work with trust me to show up and think clearly and tell them the truth even when the truth is uncomfortable. That's the part of my value that doesn't depend on the economy. That's the part 108,000 job cuts can't touch.

Everything else is contingent. And I think we should be more honest about that.

I don't know what happens next.

Not with the economy. Not with AI. Not with the labor market that keeps sending signals I don't fully know how to read. (No one knows how to read them.) Goldman Sachs is revising growth forecasts downward. Job openings are at their lowest since 2020. The "low-hire, low-fire" market people kept talking about is starting to look more like "low-hire, actually-fire."

I'm not an economist. I'm a dude who read a headline cuddled in a glorified beanbag making money in an economy that just so happens to favor me and not others at the moment.

But here's where I've landed:

I'm going to keep building. Not because I think my position is safe—nothing is safe, and pretending otherwise is the kind of lie that makes the fall worse. But because the alternative to building is waiting, and waiting is just slow-motion panic dressed up as caution.

I'm going to keep selling AI. Not because the technology is innocent—it isn't, and I've written about that before—but because the tools exist whether I sell them or not, and I'd rather be the person in the room asking hard questions about deployment than the person who walked away so they could feel clean about it.

I'm going to call my best friend the plumber. Not because I have a leak. Because he's the kind of person who reminds me what value looks like when you strip away the abstractions.

And I'm going to stop pretending that reading a headline about 108,000 lost jobs is the same as understanding what it means to be one of those people. I don't understand it. I'm not living it. The most honest thing I can do is say that, and then figure out what I'm going to do with the protection I have.

I started this month thinking about money. About what it is, what it means, why we trust it. Gold, fiat currency, crypto, stock prices—all of it just collective belief wearing different costumes. We agree that this piece of paper is worth something, and it is, until we don't, and then it isn't.

I'm ending the month thinking about something smaller and less abstract.

What are you worth to the person standing next to you?

Not your title. Not your salary. Not your position in the hierarchy of industries that the economy has decided to reward this quarter.

What are you worth when the "Quick Sync" shows up on someone else's calendar and they call you, shaking, from their car?

What are you worth when your neighbor's pipes burst at midnight?

What are you worth when the headline hits and the first thing you do is check whether you're safe—and you are—and now you have to decide what to do with that safety?

108,000 people lost their jobs last month. I read about it, I didn't live it. I kept working. Spent time with my kids. I'm writing this now, in the bean bag where I first read the number, trying to figure out what it means that the number didn't scare me.

I think it means I'm protected. I think it also means I'm not paying close enough attention.

Both of those things are probably true. I'm working on the second one.