I’m a big fan of LLMs, and have incorporated generative AI into many parts of my professional and personal lives. In other words, I’m not an AI skeptic by any means. But I’ve noticed that I am, like almost everyone around me, feeling AI anxiety and fatigue. I thought I’d try to disentangle the feelings a little bit and see if they resonate with others.
Existential Anxiety
We keep reading headlines about how different professions will become obsolete, and whole industries will be replaced by AI. We see large companies scaling back their headcount, and see an endless of startups that will use AI to replace certain professions. We worry about our own job security—our professional obsolescence, and the economic impact that might have on our lives. But many of us have also entangled our own identities with our professions, and so this existential anxiety permeates even deeper than our job titles and paychecks.
The Capability Treadmill
We constantly worry that we’re not “keeping up”. Each week, a new model or new AI product launches, and we have this constant imperative to constantly upskill ourselves. We’re running harder, just to stay in place, and every time we learn something new, the next thing is just around the corner. The goal posts keep moving.
Technological Coercion
We keep being told, over and over again, by our management that we have to evolve and adopt new AI tools, even if we don’t believe in them. As a manager myself, I’m pretty guilty of this one. But I don’t have a choice. I’ve seen the impact in productivity that AI tools can have. I don’t want to force anyone to use a tool they don’t want to, but at the very least, if something can improve the quality and speed of their work, I have to encourage them and form their own opinion. But I realize that even this encouragement undermines people’s agency.
The Effort Arbitrage Dilemma
This one hit close to home yesterday. My 7-year old has been dabbling with Scratch, a visual coding tool for children. He’s spent a couple hours playing with it, and he loved it. But then he happened to watch me “vibe code” with Lovable, and suddenly, Scratch wasn’t so interesting anymore. “Dada,” he told me, “I want to do it like you do, just tell the computer what to do and have it do it”.
Basically, the tools have made “good enough” so easy, that excellence feels pointless. It almost feels like toil. I’m still a person that values deep work and craftsmanship, but I realize that the fact that shortcuts are so easy and permeable makes it harder to mentally justify the extra effort.
Conclusion
I’m still bullish on AI. I’ve found that it has unlocked a lot of productivity and quality for my own work, and will probably only get better from here. But that said, damn, it’s pretty fucking exhausting out there. Hang in there!
Somehow Manage 