Dealing with AI Anxiety
Can I be honest with you? I’ve been losing sleep over this AI stuff. It sounds dramatic but it’s true. Last Tuesday I was up past midnight reading article after article about which jobs are supposedly “safe” and which ones aren’t, and I just kept spiraling. My brain wouldn’t shut off.
My older sister called me the next day. She works in accounting and has for almost twenty years now. Her voice was weird. “I watched a demo,” she told me, “where this AI did something in forty seconds that normally takes my team three hours.” Then she didn’t say anything for a while. I could hear her breathing. “I’m fifty-three years old. Who exactly is going to hire me to start over?” I didn’t have an answer. I still don’t.
If you’re reading this, you probably know exactly what I’m talking about. That strange feeling where you’re impressed by how cool the technology is but also genuinely scared about what it means for your future. Where part of you wants to learn everything immediately and another part wants to stick your head in the sand and hope it all blows over.
Here’s what I’ve been thinking about though, and it’s actually helped a bit. This exact same panic has happened before in history. Many times. Those medieval scribes who’d spent their entire lives perfecting beautiful handwriting suddenly faced the printing press. Telephone switchboard operators watched automation roll in. Factory workers in England saw those first mechanical looms and must have felt exactly what we feel now—this sense that the thing that made them valuable was about to disappear.
But here’s the interesting part: some people managed to stay okay through all of it. Not by somehow stopping the change from happening—nobody can do that. But by holding onto something deeper about what makes a life actually worth living. Something no machine can ever touch.
You’re not the first to carry this
Voices Across Time
I’ve been reading a lot of old philosophy lately, looking for anything that might help. And I found these four thinkers from across two thousand years who all faced their own versions of chaos. What they discovered won’t make AI disappear or give you job security. But it did something better for me—it helped me stop feeling so panicked about who I am and what I’m worth.
“Never value anything as profitable that compels you to break your promise, lose your self-respect, hate any man, suspect, curse, act the hypocrite, or desire anything that needs walls or curtains.”
Marcus Aurelius — Roman Emperor, 121–180 CE
Meditations
Think about this for a second: this was the actual emperor of Rome. The most powerful person alive at the time. He had wars happening everywhere, a plague killing millions of people, and his own generals trying to overthrow him. And what did he do at night? He sat down with a candle and wrote himself reminders about what actually matters. Not power or success or being remembered. He kept circling back to this one simple truth: anything that can be taken away from you was never really yours in the first place. Your job title? That belongs to whoever pays you. But how you treat people when nobody’s watching? That’s something entirely different. That’s actually yours. No software or algorithm can ever change that about you.
“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested.”
Seneca — On the Shortness of Life
This was written two thousand years before anyone could have imagined artificial intelligence. But the more I think about it, the more relevant it feels. Maybe the real reason we’re so terrified of losing our jobs is because at some point we started believing our jobs were our lives. We spent decades collecting credentials and chasing promotions and worrying about performance reviews. And maybe—just maybe—not nearly enough energy on the things no algorithm will ever be able to copy. Real friendships where you can be completely yourself. The ability to just sit quietly sometimes without needing distraction. Noticing beauty in completely ordinary moments. What if all this AI anxiety is actually trying to tell us something? What if it’s forcing us to finally ask: what have I really been measuring my life by? And was it the right thing to measure?
“Some things are within our power, while others are not. Within our power are opinion, motivation, desire, aversion, and whatever is of our own doing; not within our power are our body, our property, reputation, office, and whatever is not of our own doing.”
Epictetus — Enchiridion
What strikes me about Epictetus is that he was born a slave. Actually owned by another human being. If anyone in human history understood what it means to have absolutely no control over your circumstances, it was this man. Yet he spent his whole life teaching about freedom. Not the freedom to change your situation—sometimes that simply isn’t possible—but the freedom to decide how you respond to it. Whether AI takes over certain jobs isn’t something you or I can control. I know that’s hard to accept but it’s just true. But how we prepare ourselves? What we decide we’re actually worth? The meaning we find regardless of what happens to the economy? That part is entirely in our hands. Always has been. The anxiety we’re all feeling might be trying to tell us something important—that maybe we’ve been placing our sense of identity in things we were never really in control of anyway.
Viktor Frankl survived Auschwitz. I honestly still don’t know how to properly talk about something like that. He lost his wife, both his parents, his brother. A manuscript he’d worked on for years was destroyed. Everything external that defined who he was got completely stripped away. And there, in that unimaginable darkness, he found something that no circumstance could ever touch: the ability to choose what things mean. He later wrote that “those who have a why to live can bear with almost any how.” I keep thinking about how this applies to AI. Because the real question technology is forcing us to confront isn’t about money or jobs. It goes much deeper than that. It’s asking: who are you when your job description no longer exists? Finding the answer to that question might be the most important work any of us ever do. More important than any career could ever be.
“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves. Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.”
Viktor Frankl — Austrian psychiatrist, 1905–1997
Man’s Search for Meaning
What connects them
What They All Understood
When I step back and look at what all these thinkers have in common across all those centuries, it comes down to something pretty straightforward. Just really hard to actually accept. The things we can lose were never truly ours to begin with. Jobs have always come and gone throughout history. Entire industries have always risen and collapsed. Skills that took years to develop have always eventually become obsolete. This isn’t actually anything new. AI is just making it impossible for us to keep pretending otherwise.
But I’m starting to think there’s something genuinely freeing about accepting that. If your worth was never actually about your output, then no algorithm anywhere can diminish it. If who you are rests on things that no machine can replicate—genuinely caring about other people, continuing to grow as a human being, creating meaning even when everything feels chaotic—then the future suddenly looks a lot less threatening. Less like something coming to destroy you and more like an invitation to finally ask the real questions you’ve probably been putting off for years.
Before you go
A Moment for You
Look, the anxiety we’re feeling is completely real. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. The changes that are coming are real too. But here’s what else is real: our capacity to face whatever happens as complete human beings. Not just as employees who might become redundant. Not just as skill sets that could be automated. As people who are capable of meaning and growth and love no matter what happens with technology or the economy. The thinkers who came before us lived through plagues and wars and exile and entire civilizations collapsing around them. And they found meaning anyway. Purpose anyway. Themselves anyway. We can too.
If any of this resonated with you and you’d like to spend more time exploring these kinds of questions, you might want to check out InnerCalm+. It has guided reflections that can help you work through the deeper stuff. Because sometimes the best way to prepare for an uncertain future is to first get really clear on who you actually are underneath all the job titles and roles. The real you that’s been there all along.
This content is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you’re struggling with mental health issues, please consult a qualified healthcare provider.
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