How to Stop Panicking About Your Job in the Age of AI |
There is a particular kind of psychological exhaustion that has taken hold over the past two years.
It is not simply about working too much. Many people feel tired even when their workload has not changed. They sleep, take breaks, reduce commitments, and still wake up with a low-grade sense of unease. A feeling that something important is slipping. That their job, career, or sense of direction is no longer as solid as it once was.
For many professionals, this feeling intensified with the arrival of large language models such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Capabilities that once seemed firmly human appeared suddenly replicable. Writing, analyzing, summarizing, planning, and even advising began to look less exclusive. Not obsolete, but exposed.
This is often described as burnout. But burnout implies depletion. What many people are experiencing instead is anticipatory loss. A fear of being overtaken before they have time to adapt. A sense that effort today no longer guarantees security tomorrow.
That fear is not irrational. It is a predictable response to fast, visible, and poorly bounded change. The question is not how to make the fear disappear. It is how to stay psychologically functional while the future accelerates.
Technological change has always reshaped work, but AI does so in ways that feel uniquely........