When the Algorithm Takes Your Job: AI, Anxiety, and the Human Cost of Disruption in Washington
What the tech layoff wave means for your mental health, your sense of self, and the people you love.
If you live in Seattle, you know someone who has been laid off in the past year. Maybe it's you. Maybe it's a partner, a close friend, or a colleague whose desk went empty without warning. The numbers are striking, but behind every number is a person who spent years building expertise, earning seniority, and identifying deeply with what they do, only to find that a shifting corporate bet on artificial intelligence moved the floor beneath them.
This is not a post about whether AI is good or bad. It's a post about what it's actually like to live through a seismic disruption to your career, your identity, and your relationships and what it looks like to get real support while you do it.
Seattle Is Ground Zero
The data is hard to ignore. Seattle sits at the top of global rankings for AI-driven tech layoffs in 2026, with 16,590 employees affected by decisions made out of companies headquartered here — more than any other city in the world. San Francisco came in second. Seattle was first.
Washington State recorded over 19,500 layoffs in early 2026, a massive increase compared to the same period last year, when fewer than 2,700 people lost their jobs. Across the entire U.S., January's layoff numbers reached their highest levels since the Great Recession in 2009.
Nearly 13,000 people were laid off in the Seattle–King County region in 2025, and more than half of them were in the information sector. The numbers have only accelerated since.
"It's like a tale of two cities. You have that really booming tech economy… on the other side of the coin, you have layoffs… people whose jobs are being shed, and it's not just entry level. These are senior people with years and years of experience, trying to navigate this labor market."
— Jeremy Warren, Director of Impact, Workforce Development Council of Seattle–King County, via KUOW
Amazon cut nearly 2,200 Washington-based jobs, more than half of them in core product and engineering roles. T-Mobile announced 393 layoffs in Washington, while Expedia and Meta also reduced headcount. These moves are not isolated. They reflect a broader structural shift as companies race to integrate AI, automation, and robotics into their operations, often faster than their organizations, cultures, and people can adapt.
The People Behind the Numbers
Seattle has long defined itself by its tech industry. Roughly 65,000 Seattle residents worked in computer and mathematical occupations as recently as 2024, with tech workers accounting for about 15 percent of all employed Seattle residents, the highest share among major U.S. cities. For many people here, a tech career was more than a paycheck. It was a calling, a source of pride, and often, the reason they moved here at all.
Now many of those same workers are being asked to do something deeply disorienting: use the very technology that displaced their colleagues or may be coming for their own role next. One University of Washington graduate sent out 150 applications and faced rescinded offers, blaming AI's efficiency in replacing junior roles. Tech sectors, once a beacon for computer science majors, are proving particularly difficult for new and early-career workers.
Artificial intelligence was the leading cause of workforce reductions across the economy, with about a quarter of all job cuts tracked across multiple industries blamed on AI — though experts note the full picture is complex. Companies betting on generative and agentic AI are looking for ways to fund that investment, and reducing headcount is a quick answer, even if it's not always the long-term one.
What This Does to a Person
Losing a job is never just about money. It disrupts your daily rhythm, your professional identity, your sense of competence, and often your understanding of where you fit in the world. When the loss is tied to a technology that feels both inevitable and out of your control, the psychological weight compounds.
Researchers are taking notice. Two University of Florida researchers have developed a new clinical model — AI Replacement Dysfunction (AIRD) — to describe the psychological distress related to AI's impacts across the workforce. Individuals may experience cognitive and emotional shifts that surface as anxiety, insomnia, paranoia, denial of AI's relevance, loss of identity, feelings of worthlessness, resentment, and hopelessness.
The psychological toll of feeling replaceable by a machine should not be underestimated, as it affects workers' sense of identity, purpose, and self-worth in ways that go beyond financial hardship. Studies show increased rates of depression, anxiety, and substance abuse in communities experiencing rapid automation-driven job losses.
The feelings of uncertainty, lack of control, and cognitive overload triggered by continuous AI integration may facilitate the development of anxiety or intensify pre-existing symptoms. For people who have always excelled at their work, the experience of suddenly feeling obsolete can be destabilizing in ways that are hard to articulate, even to the people closest to them.
"Being the one who's laid off can feel like a gut punch — a shock that brings grief, fear, anger, and self-doubt."
— Carol Zizzo & Shanon Olsen, Henley Leadership Group, Seattle, via Seattle 24x7
Signs the stress may be bigger than it looks
Difficulty sleeping, or sleeping far more than usual
Withdrawing from friends, family, or social activities
Persistent irritability or low-grade anger that feels hard to trace
Questioning your worth or value in ways that feel new
Anxiety about the future that shows up physically — tight chest, restlessness, fatigue
Feeling like you need to have it figured out before you can let anyone in
What This Looks Like in Relationships
Job insecurity and career disruption don't stay at work. They come home. They sit at the dinner table. They sleep in the bed.
Partners often notice the signs before the person going through them can name them. One person in a relationship may be carrying a weight of dread or shame that they haven't fully processed and the other person may be interpreting the withdrawal, irritability, or distraction as something about the relationship itself. Neither person is wrong. But without a shared language for what's happening, disconnection can quietly grow.
Family structures are strained as primary earners lose income and struggle to retrain while maintaining household responsibilities. In dual-income households where one or both partners work in tech, the anxiety can be mutual — and yet each person may be managing it alone, not wanting to add to the other's worry.
The shift in identity that comes with AI disruption is particularly complex to navigate inside a partnership. When someone has built their sense of self around being a skilled engineer, a senior developer, or a valued product lead — and that identity is suddenly uncertain — the ripple effects touch everything: how they show up as a partner, how they handle conflict, how they engage with parenting, how they think about the future.
Couples therapy isn't only for relationships in crisis. It can be a space to get ahead of the distance before it becomes a divide — to understand what each person is carrying and to build a shared response to an external stressor that has nothing to do with the quality of the relationship.
Why therapy is important here.
Individual therapy offers something the job market cannot: a consistent space to process grief, recalibrate identity, and build psychological flexibility. Losing a career trajectory or watching one transform into something unrecognizable is a real loss. It deserves real attention.
In therapy, you don't have to perform resilience before you feel it. You don't have to skip ahead to the part where you've figured it all out. Therapy makes room for the anger, the confusion, and the fear that AI-era disruption tends to produce and helps you work with those feelings rather than around them.
For couples, therapy provides a structured place to do something most couples don't do naturally: slow down and actually name what's happening between them. When external stress is high, it helps to have a third person in the room helping you hear each other clearly, not as adversaries managing a crisis, but as partners navigating one together.
What couples therapy can specifically address in this moment:
What couples therapy addresses right now
Helping one partner understand the emotional reality of the other's career disruption without minimizing or problem-solving prematurely
Creating shared language around financial anxiety, so it doesn't become a source of shame or conflict
Strengthening emotional intimacy during a period when stress tends to create distance
Working through identity shifts that affect how each person shows up in the relationship
Building collaborative resilience and facing uncertainty as a team rather than two individuals in parallel crisis
This Isn't the End of the Story
The tech disruption happening in Seattle right now is real, and its human costs are real. But disruption, even painful disruption, doesn't have to mean permanent loss. People adapt. Skills evolve. New meaning gets built from unexpected places. The workers navigating this moment are not failures. They are people caught in a structural shift of historic proportions, and many of them are doing it without adequate support.
Therapy is one form of support that matters. Not because it fixes the economy or slows the adoption of AI but because it gives you somewhere to land, to think clearly, and to remember what is actually true about who you are.
If you're in Washington and you're feeling the weight of this moment — in your career, in yourself, or in your relationship — you don't have to wait for things to get worse before you reach out.
You don't have to figure this out alone.
Witness Therapy offers individual and couples therapy for people navigating stress, identity, and life transitions — virtually and in person in Seattle.
