If it’s true that America is sailing toward a Golden Age, Americans are not seeing it yet. Instead, the horizon is foreboding, with clouds of uncertainty blowing in on bitter winds.

According to LinkedIn’s new workforce confidence survey, “workers are feeling more pessimistic about their career growth, finances and job prospects than they have in years.” Confidence in all those areas “has hit never-before-seen lows since we started tracking worker sentiment in April 2020—including during the early months of the pandemic when the economy took a dive and whole industries came to a standstill.”

That’s pretty jarring news given the emanations from certain corners of the conservative commentariat that all is well and good. In contrast to such rosy rhetoric, respondents to this survey said they felt more optimistic in April 2020—at the height of the standstill—than they do today about their prospects for improving their near-term situation.

The difference between then and now is that people knew the pandemic would recede eventually and life would return, more or less, to normal. Of course, that’s not exactly what happened. We are yet dealing with any number of those lingering effects. Still, the pandemic was an event, which meant it had a beginning and an end.

A lot of what is driving American anxiety in the workforce today seems to be a sense that things are afoot that will change life in permanent, unknowable ways, and that there will not be an end to the coming disruption. “This pessimism comes amid a slowing job market, new economic policies and predictions that artificial intelligence advancements will disrupt most professions,” the survey found.

Among the concerns listed, artificial intelligence is arguably the biggest and still the most underappreciated threat to people’s livelihoods. In a Pew Research Center survey published last month, half of workers said they’re worried about “the future impact of AI use in the workplace,” while a third “think it will lead to fewer job opportunities for them in the long run.”

That anxiety is compounded by the fact that there doesn’t seem to be much meaningful opposition to the rising tide of tech, least of all in the White House.

While speaking at the American Dynamism Summit last week, Vice President JD Vance insisted that we must lean “into the AI future with optimism and hope.”

“We shouldn’t be afraid of artificial intelligence,” Vance said. “In a healthy economy, technology should be something that enhances rather than supplants the value of labor, and I think there’s too much fear that AI will simply replace jobs, rather than augmenting so many of the things that we do now.”

It was a strange message, considering that he represents a supposedly populist administration, and the “AI future” is already here and supplanting the value of labor as we speak. It makes more sense when you consider that Vance comes from and is backed by a faction of elites out of Silicon Valley who have a vested interest in the rapid advancement of this proliferation. Their glittering horizons in the Golden Age are very different from yours.

Creative destructive is fine when it comes to startups. It is a different story altogether when it comes to a nation, one that has already been beleaguered by Biden-era malaise. For those workers who are already feeling the pain, all that glitters is not gold.