A tweet recently crossed my feed that raised an uncomfortable question most futurists have been avoiding. The argument went something like this. Artificial intelligence is going to disproportionately destroy male-dominated white-collar professions. High-status and high-earning men in professional careers will find their positions completely annihilated. Meanwhile, female-dominated professions like teaching, nursing, and caregiving will persist through the initial waves of AI disruption. The political and social divide between the sexes is already enormous, and this technological shift is going to pour gasoline on an already raging fire.
The author predicted that when previously successful men lose their jobs, their status, and any pathway to recovery, they will snap. The culture wars we see today are mild compared to what is coming.
I want to take this argument seriously because the historical record gives it real credibility. And yet I think the author is fundamentally wrong about the long-term implications. Understanding why requires us to go much deeper than economics or employment statistics. It requires us to examine what masculinity actually is and what it is for.
The Historical Record and Why This Fear Is Grounded in Reality
The term mancession emerged around 2009 during the recovery from the Great Recession. Economists noticed that women were recovering from economic devastation faster than men. The jobs that disappeared during the recession and never came back were disproportionately jobs held by men. Manufacturing, construction, and other traditionally male industries contracted while healthcare and education expanded.
What followed was more than an economic phenomenon. Men who lost their jobs showed significantly higher rates of depression and self-destructive behavior compared to women facing similar circumstances. Divorce rates spiked. Deaths of despair rose among working-class men and have continued climbing ever since. The data is unambiguous. When men lose their economic role, many of them experience a psychological crisis that women in similar circumstances do not experience to the same degree.
This pattern reflects something deep about how masculine identity has been constructed and what happens when that identity loses its anchor.
So when someone argues that AI-driven job losses will hit men harder psychologically, they are standing on solid empirical ground. The short-term pain is going to be real. Over the next five, ten, or even twenty years, as post-labor economics rolls out and AI and robotics reshape every industry, some men will be broken by this transition and will never recover.
But I do not believe this is the whole story. Many men will pivot. And understanding why requires us to examine masculine psychology at a level most people never explore.
Why the Internet Has an Immune Reaction to Discussing Masculinity
Before diving into this analysis, I need to address the elephant in the room. The internet has developed a kind of immune system around discussions of masculinity. The moment you acknowledge that men face unique challenges or that masculinity itself has value, you risk being branded as far-right regardless of your actual political positions.
I identify as a moderate progressive or radical centrist. I am the furthest thing from far-right. But acknowledging that men have issues, that masculine identity is real, and that the systematic denial of these issues makes them worse should not be a politically controversial position. The more we deny that a problem exists, the more that problem festers. If we want a soft landing for the economic transformation ahead, we need to be able to have this conversation without ideological gatekeeping.
The Archetypes and Carl Jung’s Map of Masculine Psychology
The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung spent decades exploring the deep structures of the human psyche through clinical practice, introspection, and analysis of mythology and religion across cultures. Through this work, he identified what he called archetypes. These are fundamental patterns that shape human experience across all societies and throughout history.
Among these are four masculine archetypes. The Warrior. The King. The Magician. The Lover. These are more than roles that men play. They are energies or orientations that exist in every man to varying degrees. They represent something like the platonic form of mature masculinity.
Some critics from neuroscience and psychology object that you cannot point to a specific region of the brain that encodes these archetypes. This criticism misunderstands what archetypes are. You also cannot point to a specific brain region that encodes love or justice or meaning, yet no one denies that these phenomena are real and powerful. The archetypes are patterns that emerge from the complex interaction of our evolved psychology, our social environment, and our individual development.
I want to ground these archetypes in evolutionary theory because doing so reveals something crucial about their purpose. To understand masculine energy, we first need to understand the fundamental context in which it evolved.
The Arena and the Sacred Nest
Before we can understand what masculine archetypes are for, we need to understand the environment that shaped them. I use two conceptual frameworks to describe this environment. The Arena and the Sacred Nest.
The Arena is the zone of competition, struggle, and survival. For any system to be characterized by struggle, three conditions must be present. Volition. Plurality. Scarcity. When beings with will compete for limited resources, struggle is inevitable. This describes almost all of the natural world. The Darwinian observation that nature is red in tooth and claw is a literal description of the environment in which our ancestors evolved over millions of years.
The Arena is contrasted with the Wasteland, which represents the void where no life exists at all. The lifeless surface of the moon. The frozen Antarctic plains. The airless reaches of space. These are places outside the domain of biological competition because nothing can survive there to compete.
But within the Arena, life discovered something remarkable. Certain creatures began to carve out protected spaces within the competitive landscape. Birds build nests. Mammals create dens. Bats find caves and hollows in trees. These protected spaces I call the Sacred Nest. The Sacred Nest is the zone of nurturing, safety, and regeneration. It is where offspring can develop, where the vulnerable can be protected, and where the relentless pressure of the Arena can be temporarily held at bay.
The fundamental purpose of masculine energy in our species is to serve the Sacred Nest. Every masculine archetype exists to protect, provide for, understand threats to, or bring joy into the protected space where life can flourish. Once you understand this, everything else falls into place.
The Warrior as Protector of the Boundary
The Warrior archetype is the oldest and most primal of the masculine energies. The Warrior exists to create and maintain the boundary between the Sacred Nest and the Arena. When predators approach the den, when rival tribes threaten the village, when danger of any kind emerges, the Warrior responds.
In our evolutionary past, this was literal survival. Men who could not or would not fight to protect their families did not pass on their genes. But the Warrior energy extends beyond physical violence. It is about creating a zone of safety through presence, competence, confidence, and the willingness to put oneself at risk for what matters.
Consider what women experience moving through the world. Most women constantly calculate their physical safety in ways that men rarely need to consider. The smaller a woman is, the more conscious she is of potential threats at all times. This is a reasonable response to biological reality. Women have always lived in a world where physical vulnerability to larger and stronger individuals is a constant background concern.
The ability to make a woman feel safe is perhaps the most attractive quality a man can possess. Everything that makes this possible flows from the Warrior energy. Physical fitness. Psychological stability. Confidence. Alertness. The willingness to respond decisively to threats. These qualities signal a man who can help the next generation survive.
Here is the crucial point for our discussion of AI and job loss. Nothing about losing a job affects a man’s ability to embody Warrior energy. Jobs exist outside the home in the economic sphere. The Warrior protects the boundary of the nest itself. A man who loses his career but maintains his physical health, his psychological groundedness, his protective presence, and his willingness to respond to genuine threats remains fully capable of providing what the Warrior provides.
Modern culture has pathologized Warrior energy. We have told men that aggression is always toxic, that protective instincts are patriarchal oppression, and that the masculine desire to defend and fight for what matters is something shameful that must be suppressed. This pathologization has driven the Warrior archetype underground and caused it to emerge in distorted forms.
The rise of figures like Andrew Tate can be understood as a predictable reaction to this suppression. When mainstream culture tells men that their protective instincts are inherently bad, some men will gravitate toward voices that validate those instincts even in immature or harmful ways. The Andrew Tate phenomenon represents an inevitable consequence of suppressing Warrior energy for too long. The solution involves more mature models of what it means to be a protector.
The King as Provider of Order and Prosperity
The King archetype concerns itself with provision, structure, and the flourishing of the collective. Jung described the King as offering consecration and fertility, but the underlying concept is more primal than these abstract terms suggest.
In any social species, coordination problems must be solved. Who makes decisions? How are resources distributed? What rules govern behavior? The King energy addresses these questions. The King creates order out of chaos, makes decisions for the group, sends warriors to defend the realm, and ensures that everyone has enough to eat.
At the household level, the King provides law and structure. The father says this is the rule and the household operates accordingly. The King energy takes responsibility for outcomes and accepts the burden of final decisions when decisions must be made.
This is the archetype most directly threatened by AI-driven job loss. For the past one to two centuries, the primary way most men have expressed King energy is through wage labor. You get a job, earn money, and provide economically for your family. When that path disappears, it can feel like the entire archetype has been rendered obsolete.
But wage labor as the primary expression of King energy is actually a historical anomaly. For most of human history, men provided for their families through farming, hunting, craftsmanship, or trade. The idea that you need an employer to give you a wage in exchange for your labor is a relatively recent invention tied to industrialization. We have only been living this way for about a hundred years at the broadest scale.
I believe we are transitioning back toward more primal expressions of King energy. As AI and robotics reshape the economy, the role of the family provider will shift from wage slave to something more like a hedge fund manager or venture capitalist for the family. Multiple income streams from investments, universal basic income programs, sovereign wealth dividends, and other mechanisms will replace the single paycheck. The man who understands how to navigate these complex systems and optimize outcomes for his family will still be expressing King energy. The content will change but the underlying archetype remains.
There will always be ways to generate additional resources for your family even if traditional employment disappears. The men who adapt will find them. The men who believed their entire worth was tied to a specific job title or industry will struggle. But that struggle is about rigidity of identity rather than the obsolescence of masculine value itself.
The Magician as Seeker of Understanding
The Magician is the archetype of curiosity, understanding, and wisdom. In more primitive settings, this energy manifested as the shaman or medicine man, the one who understood the mysteries of existence and could interpret the forces that shaped the tribe’s fate.
Consider the world as our ancestors experienced it. The stars moved across the sky according to patterns no one understood. Tides rose and fell in rhythm with the moon through mechanisms that would not be explained for thousands of years. Disease struck seemingly at random. Weather determined whether your people would eat or starve. The world was enormous, dangerous, and fundamentally mysterious.
The Magician’s response to this mystery is relentless curiosity. The drive to understand how things work. The desire to see behind the curtain of reality. The compulsion to reduce the domain of surprise and expand the domain of knowledge. This energy can express itself through religious and spiritual understanding, through philosophical inquiry, through practical wisdom accumulated across a lifetime. It is the masculine urge to comprehend the world.
This connects to what scientists call the free energy principle, the idea that one core function of intelligence is to reduce surprise. Evolutionary pressures selected for organisms that could build accurate models of their environment and act on predictions rather than merely reacting to stimuli. The Magician archetype is the cultural and psychological elaboration of this evolutionary tendency.
The Magician serves the Sacred Nest by understanding threats before they arrive, by knowing what the seasons will bring, by reading the signs that indicate danger or opportunity. Consider the archetypal image of the man reading the newspaper in the morning. He is scanning the horizon for anything that might affect his family, monitoring distant events that could eventually arrive at his doorstep, building and updating his model of how the world works. This is Magician energy enacted as daily practice.
Men feel a deep instinctual pull to monitor the situation. Geopolitical events in distant countries. Weather systems developing far away. Political developments that may eventually affect policy. All of these fall within the masculine information horizon. We want to know because knowing is how we protect what we love.
The Magician energy is particularly relevant to the AI transition because understanding what is coming is itself a valuable contribution. The man who can interpret technological trends, anticipate economic shifts, and guide his family through turbulent transitions is providing immense value. This value exists independent of traditional employment.
The Lover as Pursuer of Joy and Connection
The final masculine archetype is the Lover, which represents the pursuit of pleasure, beauty, and deep connection. This includes physical and romantic love but extends to all experiences of richness and enjoyment. Good food. Meaningful conversation. Aesthetic appreciation. Sensual pleasure. Emotional intimacy. All of these fall within the Lover’s domain.
The Lover balances the serious responsibilities of the other archetypes with the recognition that life must also be enjoyed. A man who is all Warrior, all King, and all Magician but no Lover becomes grim and joyless. The Sacred Nest needs protection, provision, and understanding, but it also needs celebration and warmth.
Here again, job loss does nothing to prevent a man from embodying Lover energy. The ability to bring joy, pleasure, and deep connection to a relationship does not require a salary. A man who has developed all four archetypes in mature forms will maintain strong relationships regardless of his employment status because he is providing things that matter far more than a paycheck.
The Integrated Man and Why Employment Is Not Identity
When you understand these four archetypes and how they serve the Sacred Nest, the panic about AI-driven job loss begins to look different. Yes, one channel through which King energy has flowed for the past century or two is being disrupted. But the King archetype itself is not being eliminated. Neither are the Warrior, Magician, or Lover.
A man who has developed these energies provides safety, structure, understanding, and joy to his partner and family. These things are valuable in any economic system. The men who will struggle are those who never developed the archetypes themselves but instead relied entirely on external markers of status like job titles, income levels, and professional prestige. When those external markers disappear, they discover they never built the internal substance those markers were supposed to represent.
This is the opportunity hidden within the crisis. The economic disruption ahead will force men to examine what actually makes them valuable as partners, fathers, and members of communities. Many will discover that they had confused the symbol with the substance, that they had been performing masculinity through their careers rather than developing it within themselves.
The men who pivot successfully will be those who recognize that their worth never depended on their employer. They will find new ways to express King energy through financial strategy and resource acquisition. They will maintain their Warrior energy through physical fitness, psychological stability, and protective presence. They will develop their Magician energy by understanding the changing landscape and guiding their families through it. They will nurture their Lover energy by bringing joy and connection to their relationships.
Feminism, Democracy, and the Disintegration of Patriarchy
To fully understand the context of this transition, we need to examine how we arrived at the current moment. The tweet that sparked this discussion complained about toxic feminists, but this framing misunderstands the forces at work.
Feminism emerged as an effect rather than a cause. It is the natural and inevitable result of two principles that modern civilization has embraced. Democracy and capitalism.
Democracy’s foundational promise is equality before the law. When the American founders declared that all men are created equal, they planted a seed that would take centuries to germinate. The logic of this principle has slowly extended to include populations initially excluded from its promise. Slaves were not equal before the law, so abolition eventually came. Women could not vote, own property, or control their own economic lives, so suffrage and legal reforms eventually came.
Capitalism contributed its own pressure. The economic inefficiency of excluding half the population from education and the workforce became increasingly apparent, especially during competition with the Soviet Union. The Soviets loudly proclaimed that their women were equal, educated, and economically productive. This ideological pressure, combined with the genuine economic advantages of full female participation, pushed Western democracies toward extending equal rights to women.
The result is what we are living through now. The disintegration of patriarchy. This is an epochal transition that has been unfolding for over a century and will continue for decades or centuries more.
The old patriarchal paradigm lasted at least five thousand years, possibly much longer, essentially since the dawn of agriculture. When a social structure that ancient begins to crumble, the process cannot be smooth or quick. Divorce rates spike. Birth rates fall. Gender relations become confused and contentious. All of these are predictable consequences of dismantling a social arrangement that had been in place for millennia.
This disintegration was driven by the fundamental logic of the principles we have committed ourselves to. If you believe in equality before the law and you believe in efficient markets, you will eventually arrive at gender equality whether you intended to or not. Feminism is the working out of these principles.
Understanding this history reframes the anger that some men feel. That anger is valid because real losses have occurred and real confusion is widespread. But directing that anger at feminism or at women is directing it at a symptom rather than at the tectonic forces that actually drove change. Reacting from that place of misdirected anger is what the original tweet predicted would happen. And for many men who lack the framework to understand what is occurring, that prediction will prove accurate.
The Problem of Choice and the Rise of Epistemic Tribes
The transition we are undergoing is complicated by what I call the problem of choice. In a low-dimensional problem space, decisions are simple. You are hungry, so you find food. You are thirsty, so you find water. The problem has one clear dimension and one clear solution.
Modern life presents high-dimensional problem spaces where you must orient yourself toward capitalism, democracy, gender, religion, science, technology, family structure, and dozens of other complex domains all at once. Each of these is itself a high-dimensional space with no single correct answer. The question of how to orient toward all of them simultaneously becomes paralyzing in its complexity.
Epistemic tribes emerge as a solution to this paralysis. An epistemic tribe is a community that provides a ready-made template for how to understand the world. Here is what is true. Here is what is false. Here is who the good people are. Here is who the bad people are. Join this tribe and you do not have to solve the impossible coordination problem of orienting yourself across dozens of complex dimensions. The tribe has already done the work for you.
This is why we see such stark polarization around issues of gender and economy. Red pill. Blue pill. Black pill. White pill. Purple pill. Each represents a different total-package answer to questions that have no simple resolution. People adopt these packages because the packages offer relief from the cognitive burden of navigating impossible complexity.
The AI disruption will intensify this dynamic. As economic uncertainty increases and traditional sources of status and identity crumble, more people will retreat into epistemic tribes that offer clear answers and clear enemies. The man who loses his job and joins a community telling him that feminism destroyed his life has adopted a wrong answer, but he has adopted it because he desperately needed some answer and the correct one is far more complicated and less emotionally satisfying.
Technology as Forcing Function Throughout History
Throughout history, technological change has been the forcing function that drives social disintegration and reformation. The agricultural revolution transformed nomadic bands into settled societies with hierarchy, property, and patriarchy. The industrial revolution transformed agrarian societies into urban industrial ones with wage labor, factory work, and new class structures. Each transformation brought genuine losses alongside its gains.
There is evidence that hunter-gatherer lifestyles were in many ways healthier than what followed. Nomadic peoples showed fewer signs of the chronic diseases that emerged after agriculture. Their diets were more varied and nutritious. Their social lives were richer and more egalitarian. But hunter-gatherer bands could not compete with agricultural societies that could support larger populations and more complex coordination. The healthier lifestyle was outcompeted by the more powerful one.
The same pattern repeated with industrialization. Farm life may have been closer to human-scale community than factory life, but agrarian societies could not compete economically or militarily with industrial ones. The lifestyle that was more natural and perhaps more fulfilling was outcompeted by the one that generated more power.
We are no more evolved than our ancestors. We have not transcended our nature through moral progress. When social structures break down, humans revert to behavioral patterns that would be familiar to our paleolithic forebears. The veneer of civilization is thin, maintained by stability and abundance. Remove those conditions and the Arena reasserts itself.
AI and robotics represent the next great forcing function. The social structures that emerged from industrialization, including the organization of masculine identity around wage labor, are being disrupted by technologies that can perform cognitive work at a scale and speed humans cannot match. This disruption will be at least as profound as the ones that came before.
Some men will be broken by this. Their identity was entirely constructed around their position in an industrial-era economy, and when that position disappears, they will have nothing to fall back on.
Other men will pivot. They will recognize that masculine identity was never really about the job. The job was just one expression of deeper energies that can find other outlets. They will develop their Warrior energy through fitness, presence, and protective capability. They will adapt their King energy to new economic structures. They will sharpen their Magician energy to understand and navigate the transformation. They will deepen their Lover energy to maintain connection and joy through turbulent times.
A Conversation the Overton Window May Never Allow
I do not know how this essay will be received. Discussions of masculinity almost always devolve into accusations that the author is far-right, regardless of their actual views. Most people cannot think about these issues beyond simple binaries. Feminism versus Andrew Tate. Progress versus tradition. Any attempt to examine the deeper structures gets lost in tribal warfare.
The Overton window, meaning the range of ideas considered acceptable in mainstream discourse, may never expand to include the kind of analysis I have attempted here. This might always be a niche conversation, available only to those who seek it out. Perhaps that is okay. Some truths do not need to be popular. Some truths only need to reach the people capable of hearing them.
What I know is this. The economic disruption ahead is real. The pain will be real. Some men will be destroyed by it, and their destruction will have political and social consequences that affect everyone.
But the disruption does not have to be the end of meaningful masculinity. The archetypes that defined masculine value for millions of years existed long before industrial capitalism and will exist long after AI has transformed the economy into something we cannot yet imagine.
The men who survive and thrive will be those who understand that they were never defined by their jobs. They were defined by their ability to protect, provide, understand, and love. Those abilities exist in them right now, waiting to be developed and expressed.
The Sacred Nest still needs its guardians. The form that guardianship takes will change. The substance never will.
