Mariaelena Caputi for BISilicon Valley is having an existential freakout.Tech workers have long complained to their therapists about soul-crushing hours, cutthroat competition, and the absence of that woolly concept known as work-life balance. Lately, with the collision of mass layoffs, artificial intelligence, and gazillion-dollar IPOs, the woes cut deeper."Three years ago, people would walk in saying, 'I'm exhausted, burned out beyond belief,'" says Annie Wright, a Bay Area psychotherapist and executive coach whose practice is dominated by tech workers. "Now they walk in saying, 'I'm exhausted. I'm burned out beyond belief. I don't know who I am if my work gets automated. I don't know if I'm next, right? And what is this even going to look like for the next 20 years of my career?'"Globally, more than 120,000 tech jobs have been cut in 2026, the tracker Layoffs.fyi reports, with Silicon Valley giants like Meta, Google, Oracle, Salesforce, and Amazon laying off hundreds or thousands at a time. The tech-focused Substack Lenny's Newsletter surveyed 8,200 workers and found the industry's state of mind deteriorated in one year. Reports of burnout shot up from 44.4% to 55.7% of those surveyed between 2025 and 2026, and career optimism fell from 54.8% to 48.7%.While the AI juggernaut has fueled upheaval and anxiety across many sectors, in tech, it's rattling the lives of the people who engineered it — a phenomenon Wright calls "complicity grief.""The engineer who trained the model that's now displacing her peers — she built the machine," she says. "The PM who shipped the AI feature that just made three of her colleagues redundant — she shipped it, right? The founder who raised a round to build the agent that's about to commoditize an entire profession — she raised it, and then she has to go home and sit with what she did."For those who don't survive, a different calculus awaits. Nick Sanchez, who founded Silicon Valley Therapy and specializes in high-performing professionals, says that of the 25 clients on his roster, six have been laid off in the last two years, and most have been unemployed for six months or longer. While some are getting by with contract work, others are pivoting — to smaller companies, to jobs inside non-tech companies, or to completely new careers."I have one client that's trying to pursue the FBI," he says.Figuring out what comes after isn't reserved for those on the chopping block. Josh Altman, who counsels many tech professionals in the New York City area, says that some of his clients are excited about the powers AI has given them."They're creating at another level," Altman says. "One of my clients, who's a senior engineer, said to me, 'I no longer feel like an engineer. I feel like a sorcerer.'"At the same time, he says, every senior-level engineer on his client list — people with 10-plus years of experience working at a top company — believes they won't be an engineer a decade from now. The ones who are financially set may be having what's called a "third-life crisis," and for some, the next stage is getting out. "For the first time in my career, I have a lot more male clients who are speaking actively about becoming stay-at-home dads one day," Altman says.Tech workers who have been grinding for years have seen the industry become more hardcore, with longtime employees branded as low performers and told to embrace return-to-office mandates and other policy changes or get lost.Bay Area psychotherapist Annie Wright says that after an IPO, her tech worker clients "expect to feel triumphant. Instead, they feel numb or flat or even depressed."Courtesy of Annie Wright"Something about the AI conversation has shifted, has made it abundantly clear that many of these organizations feel more transactional, less sentimental," Altman says. "As a result, it's causing the employees, some of whom have been very loyal, to ask, 'Oh, what else is out there for me?'" Some of his clients are moving abroad and "will be hiking for the rest of their lives," he says. Some "could have exited with great wealth but found the job so taxing or the environment so toxic that they quit."He mentions one tech professional who quit to become the president of the board of their local library. Another client, who worked at one of the biggest companies and "made millions," is now self-employed and "working on finding ways to create safety boundaries for AI."Ross Nelson, a clinical psychologist who works in Palo Alto and San Mateo, has seen a similar trend."If you've been working for a large tech company," he says, "and you feel like you're not really doing anything that's all that impactful, people are making pivots toward trying to find a company that they have an appreciation for the mission of" — fields like cancer treatment or environmental protection.Tech-focused therapists say that whether their clients have lost their jobs, or downshifted, or hit the IPO jackpot, adjusting to a less frenetic existence torments them b
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