I know why you’re anxious about AI and how to fix it because I’ve done it before.

You’re scared of losing your job, losing your relevance, losing your voice (if you write), losing your mind.

I struggled with agoraphobia for a long time. Agoraphobia isn’t what most people think because a correct definition, when written down, sounds insane to those that haven’t lived it*.* Simply put, it’s a fear of having a panic attack and being unable to retreat to a “safe area” during the attack. For me it showed up big time on planes. I was never scared of flying. I was scared of having a panic attack and being unable to get off the plane. Sounds ridiculous, not ridiculous when you’re living it though, quite real and life-or-death feeling. I got over it and the same lessons apply to unfucking your mentality around AI.

Commit

Once you commit to an approach anxiety diminishes. The tech oligarchs have decided that software will be written by AI. I had the luxury of committing by my own free will when I booked plane tickets and got on flights. We don’t have that luxury in this situation. This was decided for us.

The decision is immutable.

Commit yourself to that reality first and foremost.

“But it doesn’t write software as good as a human!”

“What about the bugs?”

Plausible thoughts. Mental masturbation. Your brain is in hyperdrive trying to figure a way to get off the plane. You cannot. You are on a plane. Commit yourself to the reality that you are on the plane for the duration of the flight. This is a one way ticket and there is no going back. Rich and powerful men have invested untold riches into this technology and now it must become the new operating paradigm.

Take a moment to vent, then commit yourself to reality. This isn’t a “sit down and shut up” speech. Instead, this will give you back the brain processing power to figure out control.

Control

You are not a slave to “being on the plane”. You can control all sorts of stuff. You can go anywhere in your mind, choose to recline your seat, or write a novel. Once you free your mind up from fruitless thoughts of escape you can turn that extra energy towards actually constructive pursuits.

This doesn’t mean you need to become an AI-evangelist or move to SF, look and sound like everyone else in the bay working in tech and start a shitty ChatGPT-wrapper startup while begging VCs for a few million.

BUT

You might free your mind up to write something by hand without “running it thru Claude”. That writing could connect you to another human because you (another human) actually struggled to get it right, and that, if nothing else does these days, still links us together. That’s why I opened this article talking about my vulnerability. It’s why I write this newsletter by hand, never with an LLM (although I do use LLMs for research, code, automations). It’s not necessarily about the end-result, it’s about struggling to get it out of my head into text. You could choose to undertake that struggle too. It’s something we have in common, and these days we’re so atomized it’s hard to find stuff in common.

Once your fear goes away enough you might even find yourself enjoying being on a plane. I love flying now. Every time I have a Biscoff cookie and a bacteria-laden coffee in a leaky paper cup at 30,000 feet I feel like I summited Everest, every time it’s like a victory lap (and woe to the airlines that don’t have Biscoff cookies!).

We only need to fear God. For everything else, fear is rarely the useful response. See the thing for what it is, not what you want it to be, and proceed.

- Dr. J.