The AI Culling

Artificial intelligence is not coming for everyone’s job. It is coming for a specific kind of job—the kind that was never as essential as it pretended to be. Over the past thirty years, the American economy produced an enormous class of credentialed professionals whose work consisted largely of mediating, administering, screening, processing, and advising. They sat between the people who build things and the people who need things, and they extracted a living from the friction. They required degrees, certifications, and licenses—not because the work demanded deep expertise, but because the credentials themselves became the product. AI is now exposing what many of us quietly suspected: Much of this work was overhead dressed as contribution. And the consequences of that exposure will reshape not only the economy, but the relations between men and women in ways that almost no one is prepared to discuss.

Consider therapy. For decades, talk therapy has been the default prescription for every form of psychological distress in America—from genuine psychiatric illness to ordinary unhappiness. An enormous industry grew up around it, sustained not by demonstrated outcomes but by insurance reimbursement and cultural momentum. The truth that few therapists will admit is that the model was never well-suited to most men. Men do not, as a rule, benefit from sitting in a room and narrating their feelings to a stranger for fifty minutes a week. They benefit from action, from structure, from solving problems, from being needed. AI-powered mental health platforms are now offering exactly that—direct, structured, on-demand guidance without the performative vulnerability that traditional therapy demands. The digital mental health market is projected to reach nearly fifty billion dollars by 2035. That growth is not coming from nowhere. It is coming from the millions of people—especially men—who tried therapy, found it useless, and are now finding something that actually works.