Everyone lives in anxiety. Whether they use AI or not, people shout that their way is the right way. Right or wrong, I think it's ultimately about finding the organization that fits the workflow you want.

I use AI, but I don't feel the need to convince those who don't to use it. Conversely, if someone who doesn't use AI tells me not to, I'll just agree and move on.

I see the ongoing AI driven transformation as part of the early adoption phase of a technology, a period where it's often 'overused.' I think there will come a time when we acknowledge its limitations and adopt a more mature approach. Right now, I feel we're still in the early stage.

I don't know if the two examples in the post are real or fabricated, but even if they are, I don't see a reason to think relying on that technology is necessarily bad. Because I've seen a 30 year old woman with the intellectual capacity of a 15 year old use AI effectively. She asked about everything she didn't know, and it actually helped prevent a crime, a case of voice phishing.

Ultimately, technology is value neutral. But society's demands can reshape themselves around technology.

If that's the case, we should first question the nature of the anxiety itself. Why does a husband earning $550,000 still cling to something despite that? Why does a startup founder want even his dates to be evaluated?

It's because society demands those values and norms. From an Eastern perspective, we often say to step away from those value frameworks and realize who you truly are. But even that value framework is itself a kind of frame and a shackle.

The real question is where most anxiety comes from. It arises whenever individuals feel the need to conform to societal norms.

Both examples show that. Society demands self optimization through performance and competition, and AI simply makes that demand cheaper and more granular. The first example is about maximizing competition for promotion, wealth, and status using AI. The second example, the startup founder, treats even human relationships as improvable metrics.

We always feel anxiety in the gap between norms and our current state.

Even with a $550,000 salary, if the surrounding norm is 'a better house, higher AI productivity,' it will feel insufficient.

Even if a date was enjoyable, if the question is 'Was I empathetic and attractive enough?' then evaluation becomes necessary because you care about how you'll be perceived on her social media.

'Never Enough' isn't because desire is infinite. It's because the evaluation criteria are constantly updated externally, so we can never feel satisfied.

> I think it's ultimately about finding the organization that fits the workflow you want.

This is a key point, and one that is rarely articulated.

The problem -- for me, anyway -- with the Current Era is specifically the workload, but the relentlessness.

I'm old enough to remember the Old Days of big release dates. You'd grind for a while, sometimes in a deathmarch, but after the release the organization would relax and there would be _some_ slack.

Now it's an endless river of prompts, push to prod, fix, repeat ad nauseam. Because implementation is now much cheaper but genuinely good ideas are as scarce as ever, companies are turning into a random walk optimizations weirdly mirroring training regimes. The idea apparently being that you make enough features/changes you'll eventually find the key to unlocking hyper-growth.

But unlike a training system, all these intermediate steps compound. Customers find their software mutating under them at an alarming rate. Maintainability becomes barely possible, even with Claude doing a ton of work. We're just creating technical debt we expect the future AI to fix, and getting no closer to the "revenue unlock."

Many are chained with fear to this dehumanizing and demoralizing system, and it sucks.