"There is a particular kind of psychological exhaustion that has taken hold over the past two years. It is not simply about working too much. Many people feel tired even when their workload has not changed. They sleep, take breaks, reduce commitments, and still wake up with a low-grade sense of unease. A feeling that something important is slipping. That their job, career, or sense of direction is no longer as solid as it once was."
"For many professionals, this feeling intensified with the arrival of large language models such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Capabilities that once seemed firmly human appeared suddenly replicable. Writing, analyzing, summarizing, planning, and even advising began to look less exclusive. Not obsolete, but exposed. This is often described as burnout. But burnout implies depletion. What many people are experiencing instead is anticipatory loss. A fear of being overtaken before they have time to adapt. A sense that effort today no longer guarantees security tomorrow."
A distinctive psychological exhaustion has emerged that is not simply the result of overwork but a low-grade unease about slipping stability in career and direction. Large language models made many cognitive skills suddenly feel replicable, exposing previously secure professional advantages. The experience looks less like depletion-driven burnout and more like anticipatory loss: fear of being overtaken before adaptation is possible. This fear is a predictable response to fast, visible, and poorly bounded change. Psychological stability improves when people focus on short, visible actions and engage directly with AI tools to make change feel concrete.
Read at Psychology Today
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