The Existential Middle

There’s a specific emotional pattern I keep seeing in technical people right now, and I want to name it because I’m living it.

It goes like this.

Stage one: the window is open. AI tools arrive. You can suddenly do things that used to take weeks. You feel a rush of possibility. The world is your oyster. You start projects. You imagine futures. You feel alive.

Stage two: the window is closing. You realize you’re not the only one who noticed. Everyone else has the same tools. The first-mover advantage you imagined is evaporating. A strange urgency sets in. You need to build faster. You need to launch. You need to claim territory before the cat is out of the bag. Your day job starts to feel like it’s in the way of something more important.

Stage three: the window closed. It’s over. Everyone has access. Your tools aren’t special. Your outputs aren’t distinctive. The things you could build, anyone can build. The expertise you accumulated feels devalued. You don’t know what you have to offer that the next person with an API key doesn’t. You’re not sure what to do.

That third stage is where I’ve been living for a few weeks. I want to write about it honestly because I think a lot of skilled technical people are there with me, and nobody’s saying it out loud.

Why this happens

The progression isn’t random. It’s a predictable emotional response to a specific kind of disruption.

Before AI tools, most of us built our sense of value on scarcity plus skill. You had capabilities other people didn’t. You worked in environments where those capabilities were recognized. The combination of “I can do this” and “not many people can do this” gave you a stable sense of professional identity.

AI tools break that equation in two places at once.

First, they commoditize the skill. The things that used to require years of training are now one good prompt away. Not perfectly — the output needs judgment, which we’ll get to — but well enough that the scarcity argument weakens.

Second, they collapse the hierarchy of access. For most of our careers, senior people had more capability than junior people because they’d accumulated more learning. Now a junior person with the right tools can produce output that looks like senior work. The ladder we climbed isn’t the ladder anymore.

Both of these are real. I don’t think they’re overstated. They’re also not the whole story.

The error in the pattern

When the scarcity evaporates, our instinct is to conclude we have no value. This is wrong, but it’s wrong in a specific way that’s worth understanding.

Value was never just scarcity plus skill. That was a shortcut our brains used because it was easy to measure. The real equation was always scarcity plus skill plus judgment plus context plus consequence.

• Scarcity — can others do it?
• Skill — can you do it well?
• Judgment — do you know when, how, and whether to do it at all?
• Context — do you understand the environment it’s going into?
• Consequence — have you felt what happens when it breaks?

AI tools flatten the first two. They don’t touch the last three. And the last three are where most real value actually lives — we just couldn’t see it clearly before, because the first two were doing most of the visible work.

The technical person who’s been through five failed AI pilots knows something the smartest model on earth doesn’t know: what specifically goes wrong, for whom, in which order, and why. That’s not information. That’s memory shaped by consequence. It can’t be prompted into existence.

Why it feels like nothing

Here’s the part that’s hard to admit: the reason it feels like we have nothing is that the things we actually have are invisible to us.

Judgment doesn’t feel like an asset. It feels like common sense.

Context doesn’t feel like an asset. It feels like “the way things are.”

Consequence doesn’t feel like an asset. It feels like scar tissue.

These are the most valuable things we’ve accumulated, and they’re the hardest to see from the inside. From the outside, someone with fifteen years of watching AI deployments succeed and fail has enormous signal. From the inside, they just have a lot of stories about projects that didn’t work.

The feeling of having nothing special is actually a signal that the special thing is so integrated into how you see the world that you can’t distinguish it from the world itself. That’s what deep expertise feels like to the person who has it. Fish don’t notice water.

The urgency trap

The “I need to build fast before it’s too late” feeling is worth examining on its own, because it’s a trap.

The urgency is real, but it’s pointed at the wrong thing. It’s not too late to matter. It’s too late to be early. Those are different problems.

Being early mattered in 2023 when the space was empty. It doesn’t matter now. What matters now is being consistent. The people who will define this space in five years are not the people who moved fastest — they’re the people who kept showing up while everyone else got distracted, burned out, or gave up on the urgency.

The urgency convinces us that if we don’t sprint, we lose. The actual dynamic is that if we sprint, we burn out, and the people who paced themselves win by default. This is the opposite of what the urgency feels like.

And the “stuck in my 9-to-5” feeling — that’s not the job being in the way of the work. That’s the urgency making the job feel like an obstacle to something that doesn’t exist on that timeline. Slow down. The job is fine. The work will happen.

What I’m doing about it

I don’t have this fully figured out. But here’s what’s working for me in the middle of it:

I’m writing. Not to build an audience. Not to prove anything. To think. The act of writing clarifies what I actually know, which turns out to be more than I thought when it was all intuition. Every post I publish is a piece of evidence against the voice that says I have nothing to say.

I’m paying attention to what I notice that others don’t. When I see a pattern in an AI deployment that nobody’s talking about — like the identity layer nobody prioritizes, or the feedback loop nobody built — that’s signal. That’s the thing AI can’t generate. I try to name those patterns specifically, in writing, so they exist outside my head.

I’m deprioritizing speed. Not because speed is bad, but because the urgency was making me chase the wrong things. The question isn’t “how fast can I ship?” It’s “what am I building that’s worth keeping?”

I’m accepting that the feeling is real and also not the full picture. The existential crisis isn’t wrong. AI tools did change the landscape. A lot of what we built our identity on is less load-bearing than it used to be. But the feeling that I have nothing to offer is a reaction to a specific kind of loss, not an assessment of the actual situation.

Where this leaves me

The middle is hard. The window-closing phase is over and the new-ground phase hasn’t started yet. I don’t know exactly what I’m building toward. I don’t have the five-year plan I had six months ago.

But I also notice something: the posts that resonate most on this site, the field notes that get the strongest response, the conversations that go deepest — none of them come from the version of me that was rushing to build before the window closed. They come from the slower version. The one that notices things. The one that’s been in rooms where AI systems failed and can tell you specifically why.

That version of me isn’t obsolete. It’s just quiet. And I think the quiet part is what I have to offer that the urgent part never could.

If you’re somewhere in this progression too — if you’re feeling the specific combination of “I have amazing tools” and “I have nothing special to contribute” — I want you to know you’re not alone. The feeling is real. The conclusion is wrong. And the way through isn’t a sprint. It’s paying attention to the things only you can notice and writing them down so other people can see them too.

That’s the part that doesn’t get commoditized. Not because it’s scarce. Because it’s yours.