The Old World Is Dying - by Jasmine Sun

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🌻 the old world is dying<br>opinionated advice for c/o 2026 graduates

Jasmine Sun<br>Jun 10, 2026

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J.M.W. Turner, Rain, Steam, and Speed - The Great Western Railway<br>It’s a scary time to be twenty-two. Recently, I’ve been watching videos of college commencement speakers getting pummeled by boos for talking about AI. I’ve seen the charts showing post-graduate employment rates for engineering majors falling by 5 to 15 percent. And it’s not as if young people were having an easy time getting good jobs, buying homes, and starting families before AI. They say that every technological revolution screws over the transitional generation. Today, it’s all transition, all the time.<br>A little over five years ago, I also graduated into a global crisis. In 2021, Covid kept us quarantined in four-to-ten person pods, Zoom calls still dominated socialization, and long vaccine waitlists rationed real-world mobility. Tech companies were beginning to recover from 2020’s hiring freezes (though new grad hiring would take another nosedive in late 2022); everywhere, newsrooms continued to shrink. After taking a leave of absence from Stanford and extending it three quarters in a row, I finally internalized the fact that I was never going to return. I broke up with my college boyfriend, moved first back home, and then into two co-ops full of strangers. I found and started work with no diploma. Once vaccinated, I signed a lease in New York for no reason except that I could. Forward was the only way.<br>Those Covid years were the most transformative of my life. It was creative destruction. Most people’s experiences were not rosy—yes, I recall the death, trauma, isolation, and chaos—which is why I don’t like to talk about how good it was, for me. But it was. The pandemic acted as a permission structure to make unconventional decisions, to escape campus pressure and sort out what I really wanted to do. My first career, at Substack, was made in Covid’s wake. My second, in journalism, is being made by AI.<br>That has taught me some lessons: in times of change, your disposition is as important as the hard skills that you build. So this is my attempt to share guidance for young people making a career—and a life—in the age of AI.

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First, no nostalgia! The old world was bad. Those staid institutions and rigid hierarchies are not worth mourning. I went to a grinder high school and a grifter college. Both were mostly shitty and anti-human ways to live. Nothing makes you feel as compressed, quantized, and box-checked as AP season or the college application process. The notion that teens can smoke weed and skim Hegel for four years and have a cushy office job waiting on the other side was always doomed. Did new grad engineers have a God-given right to a $200k starting salary, while schoolteachers and paramedics grind for a fraction of the wage? There have to be better credentialing systems than one’s willingness to go into debt.<br>So don’t shed a tear for the strivers. Think of the rules, norms, and strictures that you feel most suffocated by. Enumerate every if only in your life, all the things you’d do if you were brave enough, if nobody was judging. What would you do if you were barred from the rat race? Now is your chance!<br>The thing about crisis is that it makes the world topsy-turvy. Consider the following provocations:<br>Freelancing is as secure as employment

Founding a startup is as secure as a big tech job

Young people know as much as seasoned professionals

Physical labor is valuable; cognitive work is cheap

Nothing is sacred; everything is fallible

Some insist that touching AI will leave your soul forever stained, while others insist that tokenmaxxing is the only way out of the permanent underclass. I think both are wrong, and we should learn from the economists. What is your comparative advantage as a human? What traits will be scarce? How can you stay a complement to machine intelligence? These are the qualities to lean into most.<br>charisma, people skills, personality hires

AI makes the world more nepo. So go make some friends. Let’s say there is a “human premium” where there are some services where people would prefer humans over machines doing them, even if the people are technically inferior. Well, this only works if the human is a really good hang. Become the good hang. Sometimes people assume that social skills aren’t practicable, but they are. You can choose to be funnier, kinder, and more empathetic. Pay attention to the people you like best, and study the traits that make them glow.<br>Become more visible, because this makes it easier to make friends. I detest the term “personal brand,” because a brand is artificial and strategically constructed. Instead, be yourself, but more loudly than you were. Pick one online platform to be active on—that’s the easiest way to stand out in a crowd. Or if you hate the internet, join a club...