A client told me recently she'd stopped opening LinkedIn.
Every scroll felt like a referendum on how far behind she'd fallen. One post celebrated someone who'd "10x'd their agency with AI agents." The next warned her entire profession would be obsolete by year's end. She closed the app, then felt guilty for closing it — because surely the people getting ahead knew something she didn't.
That tight feeling in her chest? That's the real story of this moment. Not the technology. The nervous system responding to it.
The fear is real, and it's growing
This isn't a handful of anxious professionals overthinking things. Mercer surveyed nearly 12,000 executives and employees worldwide and found that fear of losing jobs to AI jumped from 28% to 40% in just two years. That's a twelve-point spike in cortisol across the global workforce!
And fear has its own economic consequences. People who believe their role is about to disappear stop investing in their development, stop taking risks, sometimes step back entirely — even when their specific job isn't under immediate threat. The anxiety spreads faster than the actual disruption.
It's also not landing evenly. Stanford research tracking payroll data found employment for software developers aged 22 to 25 has fallen roughly 20% from its recent peak — even while employment for developers over 26 kept growing. The entry-level rung of the career ladder is exactly where the floor feels least stable right now.
This fear isn't irrational. Fear is information. It's your body registering genuine uncertainty. The question isn't whether to feel it — it's what you do with it.
The five ways people are responding (and why four of them backfire)
When something this large and ambiguous arrives, we reach for a position. Something that makes the uncertainty feel resolved. I keep seeing the same five responses:
- The Ostriches."I don't really follow all that AI stuff." Cool. Neither did the travel agents in 1999. How'd that work out?They've decided it doesn't concern them. There's a kind of wisdom in not doom-scrolling, but avoidance and discernment are different things. The person who refuses to understand AI isn't protecting their peace — they're handing their future to whoever else decides.
- The Moralists.Won't touch AI on principle — the water usage, the energy, the billionaires getting richer. And honestly? The concerns are legitimate. U.S. data centers burned through roughly 17 billion gallons of water for cooling in 2023 alone, with projections to double or quadruple by 2028. But here's the problem: moral clarity about a technology and functional ignorance of it are not the same position, even though a lot of people are treating them like they are. You can object to how something is deployed and still understand it well enough not to get flattened by it.
- The Panic Buyers.Seventeen browser tabs open, six courses enrolled, zero completed. Signing up for everything, absorbing nothing, performing productivity while actually just feeding their anxiety a new stimulus every four minutes. Motion is not progress. Subscriptions are not skills
- The Gold Rushers."This is the wealth event of my lifetime." Maybe. But the economics are worth a pause. The world's largest tech companies are pumping hundreds of billions into AI infrastructure while the actual revenue those investments generate is a fraction of that — and they're bridging the gap with debt. A large majority of enterprise AI initiatives have yet to show measurable returns. This has a name. It rhymes with "dot com bubble." Nobody wants to say it.
- The Quietly Defeated.The largest and most invisible group. Not boycotting, not chasing. Just... done. Convinced the game is rigged and the outcome already decided. This one's the most dangerous because it feels like maturity. It's actually just giving up dressed in a cardigan
The truth nobody says out loud
Nobody knows how this ends. Not the founders. Not the researchers. Not the people charging £997 for a prompt engineering bootcamp.
The World Economic Forum says AI could destroy 85 to 92 million jobs by 2030 while creating 97 to 170 million new ones. That sounds like net positive until you sit with what it actually means — the jobs lost and the jobs created are not the same jobs, not the same skills, not the same salaries, not the same geography. Telling a redundant administrator that the economy "created more jobs" is not a careers strategy. It's a press release.
And layered underneath all of this is a geopolitical arms race that most people are completely ignoring while they argue about whether ChatGPT can write their emails. The U.S. and China are in a technology rivalry that some policymakers are comparing to the space race — except the capital involved dwarfs the entire inflation-adjusted cost of the Apollo program. The outcome of that race will determine which AI models get built, who controls the infrastructure, what your data is exposed to, and what your electricity costs. It is not background noise. It is the entire context.
So when your nervous system tells you this is genuinely uncertain — it's right.
The thing the mania crowd and the refusers have in common
Here's what I keep noticing: the person chasing every new AI tool and the person refusing to look at any of them are doing the exact same thing.
Both have taken an unbearable uncertainty and collapsed it into one comfortable story.
"It will save us. It will destroy us. I must chase it. I must reject it."
Both have traded the discomfort of not-knowing for the false comfort of certainty. And both, for exactly that reason, will struggle when reality turns out more complex than the story they've committed to.mThere's an old idea about walking a middle path — not as a lukewarm compromise between two extremes, but as a refusal to be captured by either. Think of balancing on one leg, up on your toes. The stillness there isn't stasis. It's a thousand tiny adjustments, constant attention, active tension. The moment you lock your knee and decide you've got it sorted, you fall.
What the people navigating this well actually do
None of it requires predicting the future.
They stay close to the ground. Rather than consuming takesaboutAI, they use the tools on real problems from their own work — enough to build an honest feel for where these things genuinely help and where they fall apart. Direct experience dissolves both the mania and the dread, because reality is always more specific than the story.
They notice when they've gone certain. In either direction. Certainty is the signal to get curious. Ask:what would I have to believe for the opposite to be true?
They invest in what doesn't get automated. Judgment, relationships, the capacity to sit with ambiguity, the ability to ask a better question. These compound regardless of how the technology breaks.
And they keep their nervous system regulated — because a frightened mind can't think clearly. When we're activated, our thinking narrows and we grab for the nearest certainty just to stop the discomfort. Calm attention is where insight actually shows up. That's not soft advice. It's the precondition for everything else.
The openings in a real transition rarely appear where the spotlight points. They show up at the edges — in the gaps between what's overhyped and what's being ignored. You can only see those gaps if you're looking clearly.
Which means you can't be drunk on the hype. And you can't have your eyes shut.
The wave is coming either way. The question isn't whether to ride it.
It's whether you'll be steady enough — and clear enough — to see where it's actually going.
What story have you already decided is true about AI? And what might you notice if you set it down for a week?
