The Fear of Becoming Obsolete
AI is changing work. But what is the anxiety about AI doing to your work right now?
AI is changing work. But there is another question worth considering: what is the anxiety about AI doing to our work right now?
There is a particular kind of anxiety showing up at work. It isn't necessarily the fear that a job will disappear tomorrow. It is the growing awareness that something we 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.
That can raise some uncomfortable questions. What does this mean for me? Are the skills I've spent years developing becoming less valuable? What should I be learning? Am I keeping up? Underneath those questions can sit an even more unsettling one: Could I become obsolete?
I think of this as obsolescence anxiety. Much of the conversation about AI understandably focuses on what the technology can do and what it may be capable of doing next. I'm increasingly interested in something else: what the anxiety surrounding the technology may already be doing to us and to the way we experience our work.
Enter Self 1
My thinking about this is influenced by Tim Gallwey and the Inner Game. One of its most useful ideas is that performance isn't determined simply 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.
AI gives Self 1 plenty to work with. We can find ourselves thinking that we're falling behind, that other people understand this better than we do, or that we should already know how to use the latest tools. We can begin wondering whether the expertise we've built over years will continue to matter.
Some of those concerns are legitimate. AI is changing work. Some skills will become less valuable, others will become more important, and some roles will change substantially. There is little value in pretending otherwise. But there is a difference between responding to change and allowing our interpretation of that change to interfere with our ability to respond well.
The Paradox
The Inner Game is often expressed through a simple relationship: Performance = Potential − Interference. The premise is that when interference increases, less of our existing capability is available to us.
Consider what obsolescence anxiety can do in that context. Attention can move from the work in front of us to worrying about the work that might exist tomorrow. Curiosity can give way to comparison, and experimentation to hesitation. Even learning can begin to feel like something we should be doing to keep up rather than something driven by genuine curiosity about our work and what we're capable of doing next.
This creates a paradox worth noticing: the fear of becoming obsolete can interfere with the very learning required to remain relevant. At precisely the time when curiosity, experimentation and learning may matter most, anxiety can make all three more difficult.
A More Useful Question
It is understandable to ask, Will AI replace me? For most of us, however, that question is impossible to answer with much certainty. We don't know exactly how technologies will develop, how organizations will use them, or how individual roles will evolve.
There are questions we can answer more readily. What is changing about my work now? Where is AI genuinely helping me? What am I becoming curious about? Where am I hesitant to experiment? What would be worth learning? And where might my own assumptions about what is coming next be creating interference?
These questions don't make uncertainty disappear. They give us a way to pay attention to our own work while that uncertainty exists.
A Wider Lens
Work Reframe looks at the experience of work through three interconnected dimensions: Performance, Learning and Enjoyment. AI provides a useful reason to consider all three, because a change in technology can affect much more than the tasks we perform.
Performance is about turning effort into meaningful results, including whether the way those results are being achieved can continue over time. If uncertainty about AI is consuming attention, increasing hesitation or making familiar work require more effort, that is worth noticing even if the results still look good.
Learning is about building capability through experience, increasing what we can do now and preparing ourselves for what comes next. In a period of significant change, the question isn't simply whether we're acquiring more AI skills. It is whether we remain open enough to experiment, learn from experience and continue developing our capability.
Enjoyment isn't about whether work is fun. It is about whether work continues to provide enough energy, meaning, connection, belonging, fit and purpose to remain worthwhile. Anxiety about becoming obsolete can affect that relationship with work long before it shows up in a performance measure.
Looking at all three dimensions doesn't tell us exactly what AI will do next. It helps us see what may already be happening in our own work while the change is occurring. That matters because the challenge isn't simply to predict the future of work. It is to remain capable of performing, learning and adapting while that future is being created.
What Is the Fear Doing?
AI will continue to change, and so will the work around it. Some of those changes will create genuine reasons to learn, adapt or make different choices. But before deciding what needs to change, it may be useful to understand what is happening now.
So instead of beginning with Will AI make me obsolete?, I find another question more useful:
What is my fear of becoming obsolete doing to my ability to perform, learn and experience my work today?
That is a question we can actually begin to answer.
See Your Work More Clearly
Sometimes we know something about work feels different before we can clearly identify what has changed. The Work Frame Reflection offers a way to step back and look at your current experience of Performance, Learning and Enjoyment, including what appears strong, what may be changing and what deserves your attention.
It won't predict what AI will do to your work. It may help you better understand what is already happening in yours.