Warm Collar Labor

The economy is getting touchy-feely.

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You wouldn’t know it from the typical reports. You probably wouldn’t know it if you’re on the 9 to 5 career ladder, and you certainly wouldn’t know it from the census. But if you study culture, you see it growing.

Bridesmaids for hire, death doulas, breakup doulas, life coaches, community managers, rent-a-mourners, findom, dating coaches, spiritual coaches, retreats for every life threshold, estrangement therapy, witches who’ll cast a spell for you - many of these are not new work, but they are moving in from the margins.

We typically divide the market into two kinds of labor: physical labor and mental labor. But this growing pool of labor doesn’t easily fit into that binary.

It’s emotional, yes, but also more than that. Arlie Hochschild coined the term “emotional labor” in her landmark research, but that term is about managing your own feelings to do a job (think the flight attendant's smile or the bill collector's intensity).

I like to call this kind of work warm collar labor, and it’s the inversion of what Hochschild was describing: the feeling isn't a cost the worker swallows to deliver the service, the feeling is the service. The product is the client's sense of being cared for, witnessed, accompanied. It necessitates the holding of space, the real promise of sincerity, and the monetization of things we’re usually more comfortable leaving to custom. It’s work that requires a shared pulse.

Warm collar labor will only grow, driven by two equally powerful pressures - an economy that’s shrinking the space for human work, and a culture that’s expanding what it’s willing to put a price on.

Both of these pressures are about to collide in a market that has no rules for managing it, and it will reach into every corner of the labor spectrum, from blue collar to white.

When automation first transformed the US economy in the 70s, it started a permanent migration of workers out of manufacturing and into the services sector. Offshoring and a steady squeeze on labor costs all pushed in the same direction. Workers had to land somewhere, and that somewhere was services. Today, 72% of Americans work in the services economy, in jobs that tend to be local and hard to organize, which means weaker leverage and lower pay.

AI is accelerating a second migration to services. Kyla Scanlon recently wrote about how the jobs most resistant to automation are the ones that read the most human - which you can argue are most synonymous with dynamic, highly relational services. It’s worth asking ourselves, Are we just all going to be in the service economy at some point?

AI is already squeezing knowledge worker jobs, and when AI makes its next leap with robotics, physical work jobs will shrink even more.

Farmers, our American poster boys for physical labor, are already getting a taste for this, with some farmers are finding they make more money selling the feeling of farm life on social media than they do selling their actual crops. You can say the same of many influencers that got rich by selling the feeling through reels rather than the actual business they were in.

It makes sense. Social media has always been a weak shadow market for warm collar services. A friend at TikTok once told me that if you categorize all of the content on the platform, the largest kind by far would be what he called the ‘offloading of cognitive burden’: memes that do the labor of naming something you couldn’t articulate yourself.

People respond to this kind of content because emotional release is addictive. It feels good to have your in-between feelings, especially the weird, unnameable ones, finally mirrored back to you by someone else who gets it. It’s the smallest unit of warm collar labor there is.

We’ve been on the long, slow onramp of paid warm collar labor for a while now, but today there’s a real market pressure for it to accelerate.

On the other side of all of this is the fact that we have culturally become more open to pricing things that used to live inside friendship or family or community. Hochschild calls this the “commodity frontier”. This can, in large part, be explained by the fact that a lot of the unpaid institutions that used to provide friendship and ritual and witnessing have thinned out. We don’t live near our families as much anymore. Housing regulations have physically isolated people from each other. The general forces of gathering, like churches or clubs, have waned. But we still need these things, and so small, disjointed markets for them have appeared over the years.

In 2021, the New Yorker published an article about how therapy speak left the couch and entered our everyday lives. The notion of boundaries, healing or toxicity, even phrases like ‘working on myself’, pried our brains open a little bit. Therapy speak made language a far more emotional domain, and so we filtered our experiences through a therapeutic lens. It created the ideal conditions for warm collar labor to find its verbiage.

These two forces are manifesting a more mature and concrete warm collar market. AI is pushing warm collar in from the edges, and our cultural norms are pulling it further into daylight.

But it’s worth noting that the rise of warm collar labor isn’t simply the byproduct of market and cultural forces. Those are supply side forces that are definitely amplifying it, but there is also a very legitimate demand.

Every warm collar offering speaks to a core human hunger. They might look like modern inventions, but being witnessed in grief or accompanied through a threshold, being told the right words in really hard moments, these needs are ancient. And when someone answers those needs, it’s a genuine craft.

There is the pessimistic view that we are now paying for things that used to be part of a dignified human experience encoded in our culture. True, but there is the more optimistic take that sometimes these things are done better when they are paid for. A real death doula or a very skilled friendship coach can be incredible partners. That kind of work demands presence and attunement and judgment. It requires a kind of emotional stamina that, in some cases, should be paid instead of siphoned from people for free.

The sociologist Viviana Zelizer spent her career dismantling the assumption that money and intimacy are ‘hostile worlds’ that spoil each other when they intermingle. What she found instead is that people are remarkably good at folding payment into care without cheapening it. We already pay therapists, midwives, and teachers without believing the price makes it fake.

The obvious objection is that AI will absorb all of this too, that a chatbot will hold your space and witness your grief or perform sincerity for free. And some of it will. Some warm collar work lives at the low end, and AI will do that cheaply.

But the higher you go, the more the humanness is the product. The value is that a real person chose to spend their finite attention on you, and meant it. AI can't supply that. That’s why AI can be so jarring in our interpersonal communications, because it violates the invisible contracts we hold so dear between ourselves and others. It will simply do here what it does everywhere - flood the bottom and make the genuine version the premium thing.

What can make people uncomfortable is that those same death doulas and friendship coaches share a spectrum with findom OnlyFans creators and people selling hexes. But it’s no different than the spectrum that holds licensed perimenopause doctors trying to change women’s health care together with wellness gurus selling obscure tinctures. This discussion isn’t about moralizing it so much as it is about understanding how it changes market dynamics. Warm collar work is entering a market with no rules for any of it.

When Etsy kicked spellcasting witches off its platform earlier this year, it was the clearest sign yet of warm collar work struggling to fit into the rules of our current labor market. Etsy had rules against predictions and supernatural offerings for a long time but abruptly closed down many shops that had been operating on its platform with huge success, some of them having even been promoted by Etsy itself.

Warm collar labor was starting to grow on the platform, and it seemed they didn’t know how to manage it.

That’s because even though warm collar labor might be growing, it hasn’t been given the time it needs to evolve its norms. How do we know people aren’t being exploited? How do we know what fair prices are in this kind of exchange? How do we know what sellers and buyers owe each other?

Those kinds of rules take time to emerge, and we never had to create those rules before because it always existed in the margins. Now that it’s rushing in, these questions become more pertinent.

Warm collar labor is arriving in the mainstream. Economic and cultural forces are making it inevitable, and there’s an authentic demand underpinning all of it, but it’s arriving ahead of its norms. It needs a place to live, but it won’t work on the typical platforms or marketplaces we’re used to.

The warm collar layer is already hiding inside jobs we don't think of as new at all, like the nurse whose real deliverable is increasingly "compassion" or the teacher at the private school that’s measured on whether a kid feels seen. I can tell you that even in my brand strategy agency, we’re getting more and more briefs where the job is explicitly about creating a safe space for executives to evolve their mindsets and quite literally ascend to a new mental reality.

Warm collar labor is only becoming more visible, and given all the dynamics happening around it, it seems very likely that it will not just be its own category but also become a standard across categories. It might be easy to see it as a contained niche, but its real effect is much bigger. It will change the baseline for everything around it.

Once that service of a shared pulse becomes something that we can name and buy, we’ll start expecting it from every service. Warm collar makes being cared for in a distinct way a distinct feature, and when features become visible, they become expected everywhere. This is how market conditioning works. It’s how Amazon made us expect everyone to deliver within 48 hours. It’s why we get so angry when everything doesn’t feel like a smooth Netflix recommendation engine.

Food, pharma, finance, healthcare, education, beauty, real estate, you name it - these industries already run on care and relationship, but they’ve been allowed to deliver it in a very thin and subpar manner. Soon, more and more of us will be aware of the difference between the doctor that spends 11 minutes with you versus the death doula who spends the entire afternoon. We will see the difference between a school that boasts its college acceptance rates and a school that boasts the mental health of its children.

The floor is rising, but I don’t think many people see it yet. If you’re in an industry that has hidden behind the guise of efficiency, you’ll now have to compete on whether people feel held or witnessed. Whether they feel a sincerity of care. That’s always mattered, but perhaps it’s been hard to see. Or maybe just easy to ignore.

Proper warm collar careers might feel like the “other” for the years ahead of us, but that doesn’t mean warm collar expectations won’t permeate the world around us.

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The New Influencer Archetype

Last month inside Exposure Therapy we pulled apart the old archetypes people have used for a century to figure out how to act in the world. They were built at a time when the chaos was out there. They were to help you survive conflict, play a role, or protect yourself from danger.

That’s not the only chaos most of us are managing anymore. A lot of the disorientation now is internal. Less what to do out there, more how to process what’s happening on the inside.

So I gave my members a bonus talk and put a new card on the table: The Thought Leader.

She belongs to this moment specifically because the way we earn trust has completely changed. We used to trust credentials, but now we trust people we can watch think in real time, whose ideas obviously cost them something to arrive at, who have visible stakes in the conversation they're having.

The card shows her feeding her own garden with her own hands. You don't get to hand down conclusions from a safe distance anymore. You have to give something of yourself (openness, bravery, experimentation) where people can see it.

People think they need to figure out their voice, their thesis, their brand before they're allowed to publish, but with this new archetype it's the exact opposite. You don't create those things, you excavate them. People want to see you expand and grow and wrestle with big ideas. That's how they come to trust you.

There's already something in you, ready to meet this moment. And the quest to pull that out of yourself, to both teach and learn at the same time, is what makes you powerful as this new archetype.

Your transformation is the actual offering.

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One Last Thought

Being a strategist is hard. You have to consume all of the ugliest parts of culture and yet still stay optimistic enough to create new things.

So I’ve created some rituals that allow me to let go of the pain before I come to play:

• A notebook where I keep score of all the good things happening in my world, and our larger collective world, to retrain my brain to look for the positive so it’s easier to stay resilient.

• Keep a “universe list” pinned to my pin board where I write down all the bullshit problems I want taken care of, so I can release them from my mind. Every few weeks I return to it to find, to my delight, that in fact everything has been taken care of.

• Literally lie down on the floor and do 20m guided meditations, and now that my kids are home from school, they do it with me.- A small altar in my office filled with beautiful and meaningful things that I can gaze upon when I need a mental reset.

• Always give myself a free pass to work on my passion side project before diving into deep work.

• Direct Slack channels with friends if I need to get something off my chest or share a feeling before returning to my work.

• *New one I’m adding: Seeking out acts of moral courage. Awe researcher Dr. Dacher Keltner came and presented to us at Exposure Therapy recently and I learned that moral awe, the most powerful form of awe for mental health and healing, is also the hardest one for me to personally tap into.

Stay curious friends. Save this list and borrow a ritual when you need it. And if you have any rituals of your own, I’d love to hear them!

Yours,

Hi, I’m Jasmine Bina. I’m a cultural futurist. If you love this newsletter and need more:

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