More than 120,000 tech jobs have been cut in 2026. Silicon Valley therapists say "complicity grief" over AI is reshaping how engineers view their careers.
The mental state of Silicon Valley's tech workforce has deteriorated. A survey of 8,200 tech workers by the Substack newsletter Lenny's Newsletter found burnout reports rose to 55.7% in 2026 from 44.4% the previous year. Career optimism fell to 48.7% from 54.8%. The therapists treating those workers say the complaints entering their sessions have shifted along with those numbers.
Three years ago the standard opening was exhaustion and burnout, said 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?'"
Layoffs.fyi counts more than 120,000 tech jobs cut globally in 2026. Meta, Google, Oracle, Salesforce, and Amazon have each laid off hundreds or thousands of workers. Oracle's Alpha Score sits at 48 out of 100, a Mixed rating on AlphaScala's scale.
Wright has a name for the AI-specific version of the anxiety: "complicity grief." The engineer who trained the model now displacing her peers built the machine, she said; the founder who raised the round for the agent about to commoditize an entire profession raised it, then went home and sat with what she did.
Nick Sanchez, founder of Silicon Valley Therapy, works with high-performing professionals and has watched the layoffs from the other side. Six of the 25 clients on his roster have been laid off in the last two years, and most have been unemployed for six months or longer. Some are getting by on contract work; others are pivoting to smaller companies or entirely new careers. "I have one client that's trying to pursue the FBI," he said.
Josh Altman, who counsels tech professionals in the New York City area, sees a split reaction to AI. Some clients feel newly powerful. "They're creating at another level," Altman said. "One of my clients, who's a senior engineer, said to me, 'I no longer feel like an engineer. I feel like a sorcerer.'"
The same engineers do not expect the job to last, Altman said. Every senior-level engineer on his client list, people with 10-plus years at a top company, believes they will not be an engineer a decade from now. Among the financially settled he described what he calls 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," he said.
Altman said the AI conversation has made it "abundantly clear that many of these organizations feel more transactional, less sentimental," prompting loyal employees to ask what else is out there. Some of his clients are moving abroad and "will be hiking for the rest of their lives." Others could have exited with great wealth, he said, and quit anyway because the job was too taxing or the environment too toxic. One tech professional left to become president of the board of their local library. Another, who "made millions" at one of the biggest companies, is now self-employed, "working on finding ways to create safety boundaries for AI."
The financial upside of the industry carries its own psychological risk, Wright said. Before clients can cash out, they face what she calls "liquidity anxiety," the distress of being "technically rich on paper and functionally stuck in real life." The wealth exists, she said, and the client can see it without touching it. The liminal space between achievement and reward, Wright said, "can be so psychologically destabilizing for the execs I've sat with."
The next stage is what Wright calls "the arrival paradox." "The IPO is sold to these people for years as the finish line," she said. What they experience instead is an anti-climax. "They expect to feel triumphant. Instead, they feel numb or flat or even depressed, right? And then they feel guilty about that."
Wright, whose client base is women, offered a composite of a half-dozen clients to illustrate the pattern: a vice president in her mid-40s at a company that went public eight months ago, past the lockup expiration, now very rich. The client expected relief and probably a lot of joy, Wright said; what she got was insomnia and a flatness her partner kept criticizing, along with a persistent disorientation. The cause was a realization: the version of herself that thrived in the pre-IPO years, the scrappy do-everything operator with heroic hours, no longer had that job to do at the public company.
"Work is the most socially acceptable addiction," Wright said. "Nobody stages an intervention for a woman who is killing it at work." Once the addictive substance is gone, she said, big feelings bubble up and clients start looking for something else to tamp them down; within six to 12 months of an IPO, overdrive gives way to "overexercising to the point of injury" and "a new and slightly frantic relationship with alcohol, cannabis," along with doomscrolling, compulsive shopping, serial angel investing, and affairs. Ayahuasca tourism, she said, is "so common in Silicon Valley."
Wright places part of the blame on the industry's own design. The tech sector, she said, "bears substantial structural responsibility" for the anxiety it has produced. Her clients, she added, work "inside a system whose incentive structures reliably produce the symptoms we're then asked to help them manage: always-on Slack culture, RSU cliff vesting that makes leaving feel financially catastrophic, an operating premise of infinite scale applied to nervous systems that don't scale."
Ross Nelson, a clinical psychologist in Palo Alto and San Mateo, has seen the same identity problem from within his practice. "Whether that's their job title, their compensation, the name of the company that they work for, or their promotion cycle and how fast they're moving in their promotion cycle, they're linking their worth as a human being to that," Nelson said. "I ask clients at my intakes, 'What do you do for your hobbies?' And people look at me like I'm crazy." His clients who want out are pivoting toward employers with a mission they respect, he said, in fields such as cancer treatment or environmental protection.
Therapy style varies. Nelson, who practices cognitive behavior therapy, uses worksheets he built with AI to reduce catastrophizing and negative self-talk, and coaches clients through small steps like texting a work friend to arrange a social date. Altman guides clients toward building identity and self-esteem outside work; he said he literally encourages them to touch grass. Wright uses EMDR, the eye-movement therapy used to process trauma, alongside somatic work.
Wright offered a composite success story: a senior engineer in her late 30s whose company went public 18 months ago. For six months she felt emotionally flat and sleepless, "embarrassed that the windfall wasn't making her more happy." The first step was naming the condition, Wright said: "I have moral injury about the work I'm shipping, and I think I'm grieving a version of myself that doesn't exist anymore." From there she moved into somatic behavior work and EMDR. The client started running again and took pottery classes. She also read romantasy novels, building an identity separate from work without quitting. The final stage was values realignment.
The fantasy, Wright said, is a breakdown and a run to a goat farm in Vermont. The reality for most of her clients is quieter and more useful. "They become the senior person on the team that can name the thing that no one else is naming. They become a source of sanity in a system that needs it."
Demand shows no sign of letting up. "I am completely full with a six- to 12-month waiting list," said Wright, who charges $950 an hour. "And my fees are very, very, very high."
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