March 2026: Jobs, AI, and Sea Urchin

a trip back to NYC, non-AI moments, and some commentary on careers

Earlier this month, I was in NYC for a week. I came for work, an Anti-Money Laundering Forum - think day-long conference full of compliance people at banks. I put on a suit for the first time since my friend Michael’s wedding in 2024. The event started at 8am and flowed right into a dinner I was hosting on behalf of my company. At 9pm, I said goodnight to everyone who were now all smoking cigarettes outside the Chinese restaurant where I ordered too many spicy dishes. The temperature had dropped to 32 as I walked a few blocks towards the nearest 6 train. Maybe it’s due to the tall skyscrapers, but the wind was shooting straight into my core as I tried to keep my suit jacket closed. The thing is, it wouldn’t button since I got it custom-made as a sophomore during winter break in Hoi An, Vietnam. I’m a bit buffer since then. I couldn’t see them, but I was also sure that my toes were all red from jamming into the narrow front of my Italian leather shoes that I got from a small basement boutique in Hayes Valley.

Being back in NYC after having dabbled in calling it my home between nine sublets over five years was heartwarming. There were a couple of places I wanted to visit, like Cava (for what my Gen Z colleagues call slop bowls) and Shu Jiao Fu Zhou (for cheap dumplings), but more than anything, I wanted to see my friends.

I wouldn’t say that I lack friends back home in Palo Alto, but being in NYC felt different. Day-to-day, i’s hard to keep in touch with friends who don’t live in the same city as you. Not because I don’t have the time, but because of the coordination friction, the distractions that are always within arm’s reach, and the perpetual occupation of the mind. I can’t remember the last time when I truly felt bored and thought to call up a random friend. Culturally, we’ve also stopped expecting calls from our friends, which is a complete 180 from calling our friends’ landlines as kids.

5 Non-AI moments this month

#1 - My friend Isaac celebrated his 30th birthday in Half Moon Bay with a group forage. That morning, I missed the fish n’ chips lunch because I was playing 5v5 basketball at the Stanford gym, but I got there just before the foraging began. I soaked up the warm sun as I walked to the beach in my t-shirt, shorts, and $2 garage sale flip flops. The extent of my preparation was having a single-day fishing license purchased, but other than that, I was winging it. As I walked and waded across the low-tide mix of rock, seaweed, and other ocean stuff, I started to feel the wind pick up. The hill above the beach had been blocking the wind, but not anymore. I was too stubborn to turn back and just got started. The six of us were locked in like truffle pigs, scouring for signs of purple sea urchin. At first, we struggled to find anything worth taking back, but it was like the four-minute mile. After the first uni was harvested, we knew it was possible, and started finding more. My feet were in the cold ocean water and the rest of my body was getting blasted by wind. My right hand wielded a random metal rod to scrape sea urchin and my left was for wiping snot off my face. After half an hour of tunnel-visioning on urchin, we shifted to mussels, which were in such abundance, they made up the ground that we stood on. The harvest was plentiful and I didn’t even get to enjoy it. But it’s all good. It was the activity itself that made it fun.

#2 - Right before I left for NYC, my founder asked me to visit his favorite tea shop in San Francisco to buy some gifts for our customers. I was already planning to visit an old coworker anyways for lunch so I said sure. As I biked to Song Tea & Ceramics with AirPods giving me turn-by-turn directions, it dawned on me how not-AI this was. I couldn’t help but notice I was on this very human side quest of gift-giving. I didn’t even use a manmade machine to get there - just my human-powered bike. AI is a powerful technology but it’s hard for me to envision doomsday scenarios of mass unemployment or AGI terrorism. Even for a company that builds AI agents, we’re still going to conferences every month and I guess in this case, biking to gift tea for our customers.

#3 - On my first night in New York, I went straight to a meetup for Free Agents, the community that I started. We’re all on different journeys, yet share a similar skepticism of the conventional career path. Some are looking for jobs again, while others are working on their own thing. We’re all scattered across the world and meet over Zoom, so getting together in-person was a delightful switch-up.

#4 - Somehow, with all the offerings of a city like NYC, I ended up watching a movie with my friend Joe. After feasting on fish stew, spicy fried chicken, and mapo tofu at Chili, we watched Project Hail Mary. About 20 minutes into the movie, I went to reach for the popcorn and the entire bucket spilled (not quietly) on the floor. Good thing it comes with free refills. Also - the movie itself was awesome, highly recommend.

#5- This past week, I hopped on a call to discuss a potential partnership. This was my first time meeting them, but I was given the context - we had met them at a recent conference in Las Vegas when the hosted a fancy steak dinner. There were two people from the other company on the call, but one guy did most of the talking. I pulled up his LinkedIn profile and saw that he had spent over 25 years in the industry, mostly in business development. At the start, there was more small talk than usual - catching up after Vegas, my colleague explaining that he had his video off since he was taking the train down to San Luis Obispo, and then that somehow turned into a conversation about surfing. The other guy asked if I also surf, which I confirmed. From that point on, the rest of the call was hella chill. We still have to see if it pans out, but the vibes were good. At the end, the other guy told my colleague that the next time he visits his neighborhood pizzeria, he’ll have a free pie waiting for him. Apparently he knows the owner. “Tell ‘em Buzzy sent ya.”

An observation on the current state of careers

Between catching up with friends in NYC and my own experience at work, I notice most people around me fall into one of three career modes:

#1 - Unemployed and looking for a job

They’re having a rough time. I can relate since it took me six months to find a job last year. Job searching is daunting and everyone I’ve talked to feels a bit desperate and anxious, despite the data indicating hiring is actually increasing across roles like PM, engineering, and recruiting. Something doesn’t add up, and I don’t think it’s directly due to AI replacing jobs, although that does seem to be the case for entry-level roles unfortunately.

AI has made it easier to apply to jobs, resulting in employers receiving a deluge of AI-written messages that lack any authenticity or care. As a result, it’s hard to sift through the slop for genuine applications. For example:

Another indirect effect of AI is that companies are tripping over themselves trying to keep up with the pace of change. I see it at my own company. We have open roles we’re trying to fill, but the relative importance of recruiting feels lower compared to pursuing new customers and building new features for existing ones.

There’s also a new bridge AI provides to help lessen the urgency of a new hire. Previously, if there was too much work, then you’d immediately think to hire a new person to take on the extra load. Now, you can first try to augment yourself with AI to be more productive. With tools like Claude Code and Cursor, an individual’s contributions are more elastic and can flex up simply by consuming more tokens. This only works up until a certain point. For example, my startup doesn’t have any marketing or sales people, so we’ve been using AI tools to design materials and personalize messages, but these one-off workflows don’t actually equate to a full-time marketer or salesperson.

Perhaps what I’m trying to say is that the matching process between job seeker and employer has become less efficient. The old way of sending in a resume is no longer effective (although I got my job by directly applying on LinkedIn). When the old way stops working, it doesn’t mean the world comes to a standstill - it just means it’s time to find a new way. For job seekers who aren’t new grads, my advice is to keep learning, be creative, demonstrate intentionality, and most importantly, have faith.

#2 - Unemployed and on sabbatical

I have a few friends who recently quit their jobs and are taking time to figure out what’s next. Given how dynamic things are, I’m glad I have the stability of a full-time job, but I can also see how now is a great time to be untethered. Nearly all knowledge is at our fingertips and an idea can be transformed into a product over a weekend. For those who have the financial resources and the conviction to bet on themselves, it’s never been a better time. Also, it doesn’t have to be about starting your own thing. It’s totally valid to pursue a career break to simply rest, travel, or spend more time with family. Ultimately, it boils down to making an intentional choice and fully accepting it and the associated tradeoffs.

#3 - Employed and overworked

I’m sure some people are coasting, putting in 20-30 hours a week, but it seems like most of my employed friends are grinding on an unsustainable path towards eventual burnout. I caught up with a friend working at a well-known AI startup and he shared his explanation for why work is currently all-consuming. The echo chamber of AI has perpetuated a sense of urgency among the entire industry. If you’re at an AI startup, you need to sprint a marathon every day or else your director competitors or the labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind) will put you out of business. The message is clear: There’s a small window of opportunity. It’s now or never.

I’ve written about sustainable ambition before, and the idea continues to resonate with me. AI is a never-ending buffet of technology. It’s up to us to decide when we’re full.

Given I work at a startup and use AI tools to build AI products, I experience this slippery slope every day. We’ve become more efficient at work, but instead of working less, each individual worker is now producing more more and taking on new tasks that previously wouldn’t have been done. It’s required me to practice self-awareness of how I feel throughout the day and discernment around what tasks are actually going to move the needle.

There’s an economic concept that explains why this keeps happening. Jevons’ paradox suggests that as a machine or tool becomes more cost-efficient, consumption increases. You’d think that if a machine needs fewer resources for the same output, then total consumption would decrease, but actually the opposite occurs. When steam engines became more efficient with coal, overall coal consumption rose. When cities add an extra lane to a highway, there’s induced demand, meaning more people start driving on that highway. When applied to how we work, it means that we’re inclined to fill the newly freed-up time that AI enables with just more work.

AI changes how we work, but it doesn’t relieve us of the responsibility to choose what work means in the context of our overall lives, and what we’re willing to sacrifice at its expense.

The pull of total work has never been stronger. But we don’t win this battle by pushing back. We flow through the resistance through presence, wisdom, and the daily embodied practice of remembering who we are beyond our work.

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P.S. I still coach! It’s honestly been a nice break of not mentioning anything coaching-related, but I still love this work and have continued to coach part-time alongside my full-time job. Check out my coaching website to learn more and reach out!