In the 1980s, an office job symbolized security, ambition, and personal fulfillment. For many graduates entering the workforce in 2026, the outlook feels far more uncertain and discouraging.
This spring, commencement speakers across the U.S. encountered an unfamiliar reaction from the Class of 2026. At the University of Arizona, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt described AI’s inevitable reach into every profession and aspect of life—prompting boos from the audience. Similar pushback greeted speakers at the University of Central Florida and Middle Tennessee State University who framed AI as the “next Industrial Revolution.” Just a year or two earlier, such warnings hadn’t yet carried the same weight of inevitability.
Jodi Kantor’s slim new book *How to Start: Discovering Your Life’s Work* arrives at this uneasy moment. Based on her 2025 Columbia Class Day address, the volume offers career advice drawn from her own path—from Staten Island roots to Pulitzer-winning journalism at *The New York Times*. Kantor acknowledges AI but focuses more on restoring a sense of possibility around work itself. Despite documenting harsh workplace realities, she urges young people: “Do not give up on it.” She celebrates the collaborative achievements made possible through organized effort—new cancer therapies, political campaigns, television shows—and positions herself as a defender of Work with a capital W.
Yet her cheerleading highlights the very anxiety it seeks to soothe. How did white-collar careers, once the expected bright future for college graduates, come to feel so grim?
The Yuppie Dream
Kantor’s optimism echoes the 1980s ethos captured in Mike Nichols’s 1988 film *Working Girl*. Melanie Griffith’s Tess McGill, a sharp Staten Island secretary, dreams of moving from answering phones to making deals on Wall Street. She battles her cutthroat boss Katharine Parker (Sigourney Weaver), borrows the right suit, reclaims her ideas, and ultimately earns her own office—set against Carly Simon’s soaring anthem of dreamers. The film’s closing shot of a skyscraper full of lit windows celebrates aspiration rather than anonymity.
That era birthed the “yuppie”—young urban professionals whose image mixed ambition, consumerism, and cultural backlash. Historian Dylan Gottlieb’s *Yuppies: The Bankers, Lawyers, Joggers, and Gourmands Who Conquered New York* examines the phenomenon seriously. Deregulation under Carter and Reagan transformed finance. Banks and law firms expanded aggressively, recruiting heavily from newly diversified college classes. At Penn, the share of seniors heading to Wall Street jumped from one in thirty in 1979 to one in three by 1987.
Work became a total lifestyle. Long hours, marathon running, competitive dining (dim sum as status signal), and quantified self-improvement defined the culture. New financial instruments and merger waves created demand for armies of analysts and associates. Starting salaries helped pay down debt, and a relatively clear (if brutal) career ladder appealed to outsiders without elite family connections. Meritocratic rhetoric flourished, even as upper ranks remained largely white and male.
The downside was real. Law associates faced seventy-five-hour weeks on fragmented, low-skill tasks with slim odds of making partner. Many experienced anxiety beneath the adrenaline. Barbara Ehrenreich and others noted a “fear of falling”—the sense that two incomes were now needed for the middle-class life their parents had achieved with one. College students often abandon dreams of teaching, writing, or public service for the perceived safety of business or law.
These yuppies helped reshape the economy through mergers, offshoring, and value extraction—contributing to greater inequality and the erosion of stable employment for others.
The Meritocracy’s Broken Promises
For the next generation, the path grew murkier. Noam Scheiber’s *Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class* follows ambitious, heavily indebted graduates who found that degrees no longer reliably delivered professional jobs. Post-Great Recession data showed many to be underemployed for years. Raj Chetty’s research illustrated declining intergenerational mobility: children born in the 1980s had only about a 50% chance of out-earning their parents.
Scheiber profiles educated workers in service roles—Starbucks “partners,” Apple “geniuses” and “creatives”—who channel their skills into union organizing. Figures like Teddy Hoffman, a Watson Fellowship recipient turned barista and union leader, reveal the gap between expectations and reality. Companies co-opt meritocratic language (“more competitive than getting into Harvard”), but advancement remains elusive. Similar organizing waves have hit doctors, engineers, architects, and especially Hollywood writers.
The 2023 Writers Guild strike exemplified shifting realities. Streaming and tech consolidation destabilized once-reliable TV writing careers. AI threats added urgency. Intergenerational solidarity helped secure a stronger contract despite studios’ miscalculations.
The Allure and Illusion of Control
Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild’s 1990s study of “Amerco” employees revealed a paradox: even as people craved more family time, many gravitated toward work. Work offered structure, recognition, friendships, and a clearer sense of agency—elements often missing or chaotic at home. Policies promoting balance existed on paper but were undermined by cultural pressures.
Kantor echoes this: in a healthy environment, hard work, skill, and collegiality yield results. Work remains one of the domains where individuals can exercise the most direct influence over outcomes. Yet that sense of control is increasingly fragile—disrupted by corporate consolidation in the yuppie era and by today’s mix of technological upheaval, economic precarity, and AI uncertainty.
The graduation woes of 2026 signal deeper frustration. Speakers dismissing young people’s fears missed the point. The children of yuppies and their successors inherited an intense drive for meritocratic success that no longer guarantees stability. Solutions will likely require the cross-generational solidarity Hochschild once hoped for—this time among those now old enough to speak up.
White-collar work didn’t become bleak overnight. The promise simply failed to evolve with the pressures that followed its 1980s heyday. Whether today’s graduates can reclaim agency, rewrite the rules, or find new sources of meaning remains the open, anxious question.