When fear becomes the driving force in a career
Workers can't quit, don't trust AI, and are finding creative ways to fight back.
In 1944, the CIA published the Simple Sabotage Field Manual — a guide for ordinary citizens in occupied countries to disrupt their workplaces from within. The tactics are delightfully mundane: refer all decisions to committees, bring up irrelevant issues in every meeting, and haggle over the precise wording of every communication. The genius was that it all looked like normal organizational dysfunction. Sabotage was indistinguishable from business as usual.
Eighty years later, the tactics are different, even if they have the same end result.
In mid-2022, 70% of workers said it was a good time to find a quality job. By 2026, a Gallup survey found that number had flipped: only 28% agree, with 72% saying it’s a bad time. “Don’t quit” has become the default career advice.
Labor economists call this era “The Great Stay.” But that framing makes it sound like a choice, when really, it’s more like being stuck. The next company will be the same or worse. Or the fear is that the job market is so frozen there’s nowhere to go at all. People are living with career discomfort, and wondering if it’s the new baseline, rather than a temporary rough patch.
So what do people do when they can’t leave?
They resist from the inside.
The new performance theater
Think back a few years, and remember quiet quitting? Resistance showed up by doing the job as described, nothing more, and definitely nothing extra. But the resistance has evolved into something more active and more creative. The driving factor is forced AI adoption, and workers are pushing back in ways that would make the CIA’s sabotage manual proud.
Companies are mandating AI use, tying it to performance reviews, and treating skepticism as an undesirable trait in its workers rather than a legitimate response. Meta created internal AI leaderboards, and CNBC reported that almost every Fortune 500 company is now tracking overall AI usage. The message to employees is unequivocal: use the tools, or else.
But token usage is a terrible proxy for productivity — and workers know this. A term has emerged for gaming the system: tokenmaxxing. Running up token spend with bad prompts and producing volume without value. Workers see through the metric and are playing the game while knowing it’s absurd. On top of that, AI usage can cost companies thousands — if not millions — of dollars.
And it goes beyond gaming metrics. A Fortune report from April 2026 found that 29% of workers were intentionally sabotaging their company’s AI rollout — out of genuine fear that their roles will become obsolete. Sabotage ranges from putting a company’s proprietary data into an AI tool to intentionally generating low-quality work to make AI appear less effective.
One of my friends saw a job posting recently for a role to come in and train a company’s AI systems. She said, “So I’m training the thing that will replace me?” She wondered if she should go in and intentionally sabotage it.
The response from leadership is always the same: workers should just adapt. But adaptation requires trust — trust that the tool helps the employees, not just the company. When AI fluency is tied to performance reviews while layoffs are happening simultaneously, workers are interpreting the message in front of them: they’re being asked to build the thing that replaces them.
Nilay Patel put it well on a recent Decoder episode: the lack of worker empowerment is “causing a specific kind of nihilism” — and the people pushing these mandates have “all greatly contributed to” it. It’s a rational response to a culture of fear.
An alternative that used to seem riskier
Some workers reach a different conclusion: if no company will listen, leave the corporate system altogether.
At a minimum, the math has changed. The current job market is terrible for finding another corporate role. But that same instability makes the solopreneur path look less risky by comparison. If both options come with uncertainty, at least one of them comes with some control.
Sabotage and disengagement might provide a temporary outlet, but they’re unfulfilling. Most people want to feel like they’re contributing something that matters — not just running out the clock until the next round of layoffs.
And companies are (inadvertently) making this transition easier. The same organizations cutting full-time roles? They’re increasing contractor budgets. They want flexibility without commitment, a workforce they can scale up and down on a whim. It’s a model that self-employed people can use to their advantage. You want to treat labor as interchangeable? Fine. But the arrangement works both ways. Contractors can bounce from client to client, and losing one contract isn’t the same as losing an entire salary overnight.
As a solopreneur, I purposefully don’t require retainers or minimum commitments from my clients. While logistically a bit trickier to juggle, it makes my work an easy “yes” because clients know they can come to me when they need me.
The labor market is genuinely bad, and most people can’t just walk away. But for workers who’ve already mentally checked out — who’ve already stopped caring — the question becomes: if the anxiety about job security is going to be there either way, would they rather be anxious while building something of their own?
Thinking about a career change? Download my guide: 5 Types of Career Pivots.
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