The Fear of Becoming Obsolete

AI is changing work. But what is the anxiety about AI doing to your work right now?

There is a new kind of anxiety showing up at work.

It isn't necessarily the fear that your job will disappear tomorrow.

It's the growing awareness that something you have spent years becoming good at can suddenly be done faster—or at least appear to be done faster—by AI.

A report that took hours can be produced in minutes. Research that once required experience and persistence can be assembled almost instantly. Writing, analysis, design, coding and problem-solving are increasingly being performed alongside machines that seem to get more capable every month.

And somewhere in the background, a question starts running:

What does this mean for me?

Am I keeping up? Are the skills I've spent years developing becoming less valuable? What should I be learning? Does everyone else understand this better than I do? And perhaps the most uncomfortable question of all:

Could I become obsolete?

I think of this as obsolescence anxiety.

And while much of the conversation about AI focuses on what the technology can do, I'm becoming increasingly interested in what the anxiety about the technology is doing to us.

ENTER SELF 1

My work has been deeply influenced by Tim Gallwey and the Inner Game.

One of its most useful ideas is that performance isn't simply determined by our capability. There is also interference—the internal commentary, judgment, fear and self-consciousness that can get between what we're capable of doing and what we actually do.

Gallwey described this internal voice as Self 1.

Self 1 loves an environment like this.

You're falling behind.

You should know how to use this already.

Other people are adapting faster than you.

What happens when AI can do what you do?

You need to figure this out.

Some of those concerns may be legitimate. That's important.

AI is changing work. Some skills will become less valuable. Some roles will change substantially. Pretending otherwise isn't particularly useful.

But there is a difference between responding to change and becoming consumed by our interpretation of it.

That's where interference begins.

THE PARADOX

The Inner Game is often expressed through a simple relationship:

Performance = Potential − Interference

When interference increases, less of our capability becomes available to us.

Think about what obsolescence anxiety can do.

Attention moves from the work in front of us to worrying about the work that might exist tomorrow.

Curiosity becomes comparison.

Experimentation becomes hesitation.

Learning becomes something we feel we should be doing rather than something we want to explore.

We begin monitoring ourselves: Am I keeping up? Am I still valuable?

And that creates an interesting paradox:

The fear of becoming obsolete can interfere with the very learning required to remain relevant.

At precisely the moment when curiosity, experimentation and learning matter most, anxiety can make all three harder.

REFRAMING THE QUESTION

Perhaps we've been asking the wrong question.

Will AI replace me?

It's understandable. But for most of us, it's also impossible to answer with any certainty.

There may be more useful questions available to us right now.

What is changing about my work?

What am I noticing?

Where is AI genuinely making me better?

Where am I feeling threatened by it?

What am I curious about?

What would be worth learning?

And what part of the story I'm telling myself is creating unnecessary interference?

These aren't questions designed to make the uncertainty disappear.

They're designed to help us work with it.

At Work Reframe, I look at our experience of work through three interconnected dimensions: Performance, Learning and Enjoyment.

AI gives us an interesting reason to examine all three.

Performance: Is uncertainty about AI affecting your attention, confidence or ability to do your best work?

Learning: Are you becoming more curious and experimental—or more defensive, overwhelmed or afraid of falling behind?

Enjoyment: Not whether work is “fun,” but how it feels to be doing it. Is anxiety about AI changing your relationship with work—your sense of meaning, connection, fulfillment or simply whether the work still feels worth the effort?

Those questions won't tell us exactly what AI will do next.

They can tell us something potentially more useful:

what is happening to us while the change is occurring.

Because the challenge isn't simply to predict the future of work.

It's to remain capable of performing, learning and adapting while that future is being created.

AI is going to keep changing.

The question is whether we allow Self 1 to turn that change into interference.

So perhaps the most useful question isn't:

Will AI make me obsolete?

It is:

What is my fear of becoming obsolete doing to my ability to perform, learn and experience my work today?