Man Plans. AI Laughs. And Then What? |
Something is being taken from you. Maybe gradually, maybe suddenly, but if you work in law, consulting, finance, journalism, or any field where expertise was the product, you have felt it. The future you built your assumptions around is becoming less certain, and the feeling that comes with that doesn’t quite have a name.
It doesn’t need one. It has always felt exactly like this.
We construct plans and then inhabit them so completely that we stop experiencing them as plans at all. They become the shape of life itself, the career, the identity, the quiet assumption that you know roughly how the story goes from here. And then something happens. A technology arrives faster than anyone predicted. A diagnosis. A redundancy. A phone call that changes the grammar of your days. The plan was never a promise. It was always a scaffold, useful, necessary even, but never the building itself. What you discover when the scaffold comes down is the only question that has ever really mattered.
Viktor Frankl arrived at Auschwitz a respected Viennese psychiatrist with a manuscript he had spent years writing. The manuscript was confiscated on arrival. His wife, his parents, his brother, killed. Every plan, every relationship, every material reality of his former life: gone. What he observed in that place, in himself and in the people around him, became the foundation of an entire school of psychology. The people who survived psychologically........