Collective GRIEF about the loss of life as we know it.

Hi friend,

Recently, I’ve spent a lot of time helping my clients process their feelings about AI, and I think we need to talk about it.

The AI revolution is already underway and shit is changing fast.

• Google just announced that it no longer sees itself as a search engine, but as an AI platform. 

• Bumble is experimenting with a future where your AI avatar dates other people’s AI avatars before you ever speak to a real human. 

• Entire industries are reorganizing themselves around tools that didn’t meaningfully exist a few years ago, while whole career categories and industries are being erased and replaced practically overnight. 

In my view, the “information age” has officially come to a close (as of the last few weeks or so), and the AI age has officially begun… meaning that folks of my generation are now heading into our third era!

These new AI changes and rollouts are happening so fast that it can be difficult to keep up and follow the news about it, let alone figure out how you feel about the fact that it’s happening!

For a lot of folks right now, it feels like it was only a few months ago that we all started the early stages of consideration around what an AI revolution would look like, and how it might change society. We assumed we’d have time to come to a consensus before anything was decided, but then… we blinked and it was suddenly just happening everywhere. 

There’s been a lot of conversation about what this shift means—economically, ethically, culturally, etc.—but much less attention given to what it actually feels like to live through it in real time.

For many people, the feelings that come up around this topic are messy, complex, existential, and often really difficult to even put words to. 

Most commonly, I’m seeing people experiencing a lot of frustration, irritation, rage, and a kind of simmering resistance that shows up every time people encounter a new feature, a new announcement, a new way that something familiar is being replaced or redefined. 

And while I don’t personally know anyone who feels this way, the companies shoving AI down our throats right now are certainly always acting like “most people” are excited and enthusiastic about the potential for what this new technology might unlock. So most likely there really are some people who are feeling that way, outside of the silicon-valley-investor-bro-culture folks we generally associate with it.

To be honest, all of this makes sense to me, and no matter how you’ve been feeling about AI, please know that your feelings are normal and valid.

But what I’m interested in here is something a little quieter and less obvious, which is the possibility that underneath many of these reactions is something else deeper—something

that disguises itself to protect us, but still shapes the overall texture of our experience.

That deeper something is grief.

Not the kind of grief that follows a single, discrete loss, but rather the kind of grief that emerges when something foundational to your sense of reality begins to shift. When the ground you’ve been standing on starts to feel uncertain and unstable, not because anything has gone catastrophically wrong (yet), but because everything you once took for granted as

“how life is” is suddenly behind you.

The loss that I believe we are all grieving right now, is the pre-AI world. 

Because whether or not we’ve consciously acknowledged it, we are all currently living through the death of an era— including all of that previous era’s rules, customs, expectations—and we know there is no going back.

The “information age,” which started during my childhood in the 90s, was one in which curiosity drove education, knowledge was something people searched for, expertise was built and demonstrated in relatively stable ways, creative output was clearly tied to individual humans, and many careers were rooted in the person’s skill, experience, and mastery over a specific topic.

This era has now given way to… something else. 

And even if that “something else” ends up being something great; even if it leads to new forms of scientific breakthroughs, creativity, connection, healing, or support… it’s still going to completely uproot and replace the “old world.” A world that, for better or worse, felt like it made a certain kind of sense, because we’d spent decades learning how to navigate it. A world that felt familiar, and predictable, and therefore, to some degree, safe. 

Grief doesn’t require that the thing being lost was perfect, or even particularly good. It only requires that it was known, and that it provided some kind of orientation or structure that provided a feeling of certainty or trust in “the way things are.”

And when that structure begins to dissolve, it’s not unusual for the nervous system to respond with a kind of protest—an impulse to push back, to dismiss, to minimize, or to try to regain a sense of control in whatever ways are available.

Sometimes it looks like fear and anxiety. Sometimes that looks like frustration and rage.

Sometimes it looks like numbness and disengagement. What I’m seeing the most right now is that it often looks like an almost compulsive need to form a strong opinion about what’s happening, as a way of trying to stabilize oneself amidst the uncertainty.

And all of that is understandable. But underneath it all, for many of us I think, is  a vast lake of sadness and grief about the massive loss we’re collectively experiencing (and will continue to experience for years to come) as a society right now.

Personally I think it’s extremely important that we explicitly name this grief for what it is, both because shit is about to start changing exponentially faster than we’ve ever seen before, and because when grief goes unnamed, it tends to bubble up and cause tension, dysregulation, shame, mental health issues, and compulsive coping behaviors.  

To be clear, acknowledging shame doesn’t mean you need to do anything to solve or resolve it, at least not right now. Shame only needs to be named and noticed, then 

That might just look like letting yourself acknowledge the parts of this shift that feel unsettling or scary, or noticing where you feel resistance, without immediately trying to override it or justify it. It might look like allowing yourself to feel a sense of loss for ways of thinking, working, creating, or connecting that are already beginning to fade. 

It might also mean recognizing that different parts of you can have different responses to these changes at the same time. You might feel grateful that you can now afford to rebuild your website, for example, while simultaneously feeling scared about how AI will wipe out whole industries, and disgusted by the thought of AI art. 

None of those parts need to cancel each other out.

If anything, being able to hold that complexity is what allows for a more nuanced and grounded relationship to the massive social change that has already begun, rather than falling into the trap of binary moralizing.

Because the truth is, this shift is happening whether or not we feel ready for it…which doesn’t mean you have to rush yourself into acceptance, or enthusiasm, or even understanding! 

It just means that whatever you’re feeling in response to it is likely part of a larger, deeply human and society-wide process of adjusting to change that includes not only adaptation, but also loss.

And how we move through this transition will depend, at least in part, on whether or not we allow ourselves to fully acknowledge what we’re losing, and hold space for our grief—both personally and collectively—with kindness and compassion.

How are you feeling about the AI revolution? Feel free to hit reply and share your thoughts!

Big hug,

Jessi