What To Expect In 2026
(And How It Could Affect You)
We’re entering a year that won’t announce itself with a bang.
No single event.
No cinematic collapse.
No neat “before and after.”
Instead, 2026 will feel like a pressure change—the kind you don’t notice immediately, but which alters everything from how people work, to how they think, to what they trust.
This isn’t about geopolitics or battle maps.
It’s about daily life, jobs, income, truth, and the quiet rewiring of the human mind.
Let’s take it step by step.
Work Is Being Reorganised — Not “Taken”
The lazy headline is AI takes jobs.
The real story is subtler—and more unsettling:
Fewer people are needed per unit of output.
More output is expected per person.
More roles quietly become operator + tools rather than craft.
This is already visible.
Factories don’t need armies anymore.
Offices don’t need layers.
Service roles are being shaved down at the edges—ordering, scheduling, compliance, customer contact.
Even leisure spaces are experimenting. Coffee shops. Gyms. Hotels.
Not everywhere. Not perfectly.
But enough to change expectations.
White-collar workers will feel it as compression: fewer seats, higher pressure, more justification required for simply existing on payroll.
Blue-collar workers will feel it as tool creep: automation arrives to “help,” then slowly removes entire sub-tasks—inspection, routing, inventory, quality control.
This is not moral.
It’s economic gravity.
The Real Problem Nobody Likes to Say Out Loud
Here’s the paradox at the heart of 2026:
If automation reduces wages…
who buys what automation produces?
This isn’t ideology. It’s arithmetic.
You can increase supply forever—but demand has to be funded somehow.
Historically, systems resolve this tension in a few ways:
• Cheaper goods
• More credit
• Direct transfers
Credit is already bloated.
Deflation has limits.
Which is why the idea of “free money” refuses to go away.
Universal Basic Income: Closer, But Not There Yet
UBI isn’t science fiction anymore.
It’s also not about to be rolled out cleanly and universally.
What is happening is quieter:
Pilot projects.
Targeted schemes.
Guaranteed income for specific groups or regions.
The evidence so far is remarkably consistent:
People don’t stop working en masse.
Mental health improves.
Stress drops.
People make slightly better decisions when survival isn’t a daily panic.
The obstacle isn’t behaviour.
It’s politics.
Funding.
Legitimacy.
Inflation fears.
And the lingering stigma that “money must be earned or it corrupts.”
2026 is unlikely to bring full UBI.
But it will bring more hybrid forms:
cash cushions, displacement buffers, sector-specific support.
Not as generosity.
As system maintenance.
Wealth Is Drifting East — Whether We Like It or Not
This doesn’t require conspiracy thinking.
On a structural level, economic gravity continues to move eastward—China in particular remains central to manufacturing, logistics, and scale.
Even places people rarely consider—parts of Siberia, long-established science cities—are quietly re-emerging as tech and research hubs.
For the West, the response won’t be to “out-sweatshop” the East.
Instead, we’re seeing near-shoring and re-shoring, but with a twist:
Factories come back.
Jobs… mostly don’t.
Automation-heavy production means fewer humans per square foot.
So no, sweatshops aren’t really coming west.
And even in the East, they’re being phased out—because robots don’t strike, rest, or age.
Canada, Population, and the Quiet Reversal
For a while, Canada symbolised aggressive population growth via immigration.
What’s changed—quietly—is tone.
The new emphasis is stabilisation, not acceleration.
Balancing infrastructure, housing, services, and labour capacity.
That alone tells you something important:
Governments are realising that population growth without structural reform creates fragility, not resilience.
This theme will repeat elsewhere in 2026.
Deepfakes: From “Is This Real?” to “Nothing Is Real”
Deepfakes aren’t dangerous because people get fooled.
They’re dangerous because people stop trusting anything.
By 2026 the real damage will be epistemic:
• Targeted deception, tailored to beliefs
• Pre-emptive disbelief of real evidence
• Truth becoming a tribal badge rather than a method
Add in collapsing trust in mainstream media, political theatre, lawsuits, and endless “exposés,” and you get a culture that no longer agrees on what counts as evidence.
This is why I’ve long said:
Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World
should be required reading in schools.
Not to make everyone hyper-rational—but to teach the shape of a good question.
AI Is Already Changing How We Think
Not dramatically.
Subtly.
Formatting habits.
Punctuation.
Structured answers.
The rise of the em-dash.
These seem trivial.
They’re not.
AI doesn’t just produce content—it models thought structure.
By 2026 we’ll see:
• More people editing than originating
• Less tolerance for ambiguity
• Expectation of instant coherence
• Belief reinforcement for those already inclined toward conspiracy
Some will treat AI as oracle.
Some as god.
Some as demon.
That’s not an AI problem.
That’s a human meaning problem.
So Where Does That Leave Us?
2026 is not collapse.
It’s transition.
And transitions reward people who adapt early, quietly, and without hysteria.
Practical adaptations:
1. Make your work automation-shaped
Be the person who defines tasks, not just performs them.
2. Build an evidence habit
Learn how things work before using them. Especially AI.
3. Decouple identity from job title
Many people will never return to the old “career ladder.” That doesn’t mean meaning disappears.
4. Treat truth as a craft
Verification is a skill. Practice it.
Was the Industrial Revolution This Destabilising?
Possibly not.
Because this time we’re not just mechanising labour.
We’re mechanising parts of cognition, culture, and belief.
That’s why the unease feels deeper.
But here’s the counterpoint:
Those who maintain clarity, agency, and epistemic hygiene
don’t just survive these periods—
they steer them.
A Left-Field Footnote (Because Humans Are Humans)
Yes, I argue for rationality.
Evidence.
Critical thinking.
And yes—I still do ritual.
Anton LaVey understood this perfectly:
humans operate through belief whether they admit it or not.
Sometimes stacking the psychological odds matters.
New Year 2026 Workings are live for those who want to aim themselves deliberately into uncertain terrain.
They’re not a substitute for clear thinking.
They’re an adjunct to it.
Thoughtful piece on "operator + tools" vs craft. The shift from originatingto editing is already visible in knowledge work where people spend more time refining AI output than drafting from scratch. I've found the "make work automation-shaped" advice useful, though it requires thinking in terms of defining task boundaries rather than just executing them, which isn't a skillset most workers developped historically.