The Strange Death of 9–5 Jobs In 2026 (Especially If You’re Over 40).
And the opportunity you can exploit over the next 6–12 months.
I loved my 9–5 job.
This isn’t going to be an article that bashes corporate employees. The salary, the benefits, and the community from my 9–5 were awesome when I started.
My title gave me a sense of fulfilment and meaning.
My job gave me the ability to get paid to learn high-value skills, build a network, and a personal brand that launched my one-person business.
But I could never go back to working a full-time 9–5.
Here’s why.
The death of the corporate deal
The social contract is broken.
For a long time, a job was the most efficient way to sell your skill set and make money. The transaction costs of contracting or being a freelancer were high. So, selling your time and services to a big company was the norm.
But technology has radically shifted that equation.
Transaction costs have tumbled down to 0.
This is why the younger generation no longer sees a viable career in a full-time 9–5 job.
The younger generation aspire to be creators, business owners, and entrepreneurs.
This isn’t a radical revolution.
What happened can be explained by simple economics.
Technology evolved.
The economy adapted.
We leveraged digital communication tools to connect, grow, learn, and prosper anywhere in the world.
The costs of working remotely are drastically lowered.
There’s software for everything we need to work independently.
Zoom, Slack, Gmail, Cloud Storage, email, laptops, and Wifi.
Obviously, the 9–5 job isn’t fully dead yet.
But the trend is clear.
More and more employees are replacing a traditional 9–5 job with a one-person business built on a portfolio of their interests.
This is the same trend we’ve seen in other ways we’ve worked.
From nomadic tribes to settled farmers.
From farmers to factory workers.
From a factory worker to a corporate employee.
Technology has ALWAYS changed how we work.
And maybe that’s not a strange death. It’s evolution.
“This is John, he is a doctor”.
Growing up, your corporate role was your identity.
Whenever my parents introduced me to one of their friends, they would always use the person’s name and job title.
“This is John, he is a doctor”.
A corporate role was the ID card everyone used to enter and exit social situations. Your corporate role became such a core part of your personal identity.
But a job loss felt like an identity death.
This wasn’t a problem until alternatives became available:
Freelancing.
Creator economy.
Online entrepreneur.
Being a corporate employee meant you had an assigned identity. But being any of the above meant you had to create a new identity.
But being assigned a corporate identity also meant:
No freedom.
No individual personality.
Working with incompetent people.
No control over workload or type of work.
Only 10 days off per year if you’re lucky enough to use it.
Corporate employees started to see the cracks.
A 9–5 job served a purpose. But also had limitations.
2020 broke the traditional world of work.
Suddenly, everyone was a remote worker.
A mysterious bat virus forced everyone to stay at home indefinitely.
I had to go into my office and take everything I needed to work from home. Screens, laptops, keyboards, and mice. Everything. I felt like I had robbed my office space.
People were scared at first.
But over time, people saw the opportunity.
Without the need to commute for 1+ hours, be in a distracting office space, or be micromanaged by an overbearing baby boss, they could finally have the time and space to think.
People used this extra time to create new boundaries.
During this period, I started writing consistently.
I used all the spare time I had to write on Medium. This interest turned into an obsession. Over that time, I built an audience, taught myself everything about online business, sales, and marketing and started my one-person business in 2022.
Those 2 years, locked in my bedroom in Melbourne, accelerated a trend the world was already moving towards.
Almost every corporate employee started a side hustle.
Most side hustles failed. But it demonstrated that everyone had a creative or entrepreneurial tendency when given the time and freedom to pursue it.
In 2025, we are all entrepreneurs. Whether we want to be or not.
Why the 9–5 job is experiencing a strange death.
There are two trends across the world:
Widespread layoffs across many sectors.
People are quitting to pursue a one-person business.
Why?
1/ People want freedom.
In every sense of the word.
People want financial, geographical, and time freedom.
The pandemic taught them they didn’t need to be in an office space to be productive. They could define productivity however they wanted.
2/ Companies want flexibility.
Markets are rapidly changing.
Companies want the ability to rapidly pivot and redeploy resources when needed. AI is wreaking havoc across the tech sector.
Tech jobs are being decimated. Huge workforces aren’t required to deliver exceptional products anymore.
3/ Transactions costs are low.
In the past, it was hard to hire contractors.
But with advances in communication technology, it’s never been easier to work remotely or to be a contractor for a company.
Technology has killed the way we work.
Being over 40 is a competitive advantage, but…
Every evolution creates winners and losers.
Technological advancement doesn’t destroy value. It shifts the value elsewhere.
I met Sarah when she just turned 48.
She had worked for 18 years in her corporate consulting job for the same company. When AI began reducing the workload and empowering younger, cheaper employees to do her work, she was made redundant.
There were no warning signs.
She woke up one day and couldn’t log into her emails.
She received a call from HR, who read from a script. The redundancy was ‘effective immediately’, and that was it. Almost 2 decades of loyalty gone in a 2-minute phone call. Ouch.
She was devastated.
For six months, she kept applying for more and more jobs. Despite her decades of experience, she never got a call back. She started to apply for more junior roles. Nothing.
She would occasionally get an interview, only to be ghosted.
Her confidence took a nose dive.
The job market for her was broken. No employer wanted to hire someone her age. But the opportunity to be a solopreneur was growing. So, we started working together to build her one-person business.
If you’re feeling lost:
Sit down.
Get a pen and paper.
Start listing all your career highlights.
Include things like:
Every project you’ve completed.
The size of the teams you’ve managed.
Every brand-named client you’ve worked with.
The total amount of sales and revenue generated.
Everything counts.
This is real-world data you’ve created in your job.
Now it’s time to leverage it.
As a 40+ year old ex-corporate executive, you’re never starting from 0. You’re starting from real-world experience. Experience that someone would pay you for.
Your age is an asset, not a liability.
But maybe this Strange Death is a good thing?
9–5 jobs are dying because technology enables solopreneurs.
Careers have moved from working for one company for your entire life to creating a company of one.
This shift empowers 40+ year-old ex-corporate solopreneurs.
With decades of experience, knowledge, and industry connections, solopreneurship is a profitable vehicle to sell your services.
What an awesome time to be alive.
Need more help?
👉 Build your PROFITABLE six-figure one-person business while you work a 9–5 corporate job (Even if you have kids or a mortgage). If you want my one-person business growth system, I’ve created a FREE email course for you to get started
