Will Your Job Survive the Next 5 Years? Uncover the Coal vs. Horse Analogy for Career Longevity

Will my job even exist in five years? Following the rise of Claude Code and ChatGPT, pretty much every white-collar worker I know has been asking themselves that question. AI can code like an engineer, write a business plan like a consultant, decorate like an interior designer, and answer medical questions better than a doctor. It can make up a shockingly catchy and shockingly filthy country tune, and croon it in a voice drenched in Tennessee whiskey. The realization that America might not need so many engineers, consultants, interior designers, doctors, and country singers in the future naturally follows. Searches for the phrase job apocalypse are spiking. Polls show that voters are beginning to freak out.

But there’s a better question for white-collar workers to ask themselves: Am I coal, or am I a horse?

Horses and mules have had a rough go of it in the labor market, to say nothing of hinnies. American farms employed 26,493,000 equines in 1915. One hundred years later, the number of such animals on the payroll had collapsed to 700,000. (To be fair, the data aren’t great.) Farmers needed horses until tractors and trucks did their work better, so farmers hired millions of them instead. (Again, not great data. The government inexplicably stopped keeping a tally of farm trucks in 2013, though it still counts the number of tractors.)

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Universal History Archive / Getty