Normally these blogs start when something happens and I have a flash of recognition, a moment where I suddenly realise something I hadn’t thought about in quite that way before. Then I start writing and, while I write, I take more time to reflect and somehow the blog reveals itself. Sometimes I know where it is going to end and sometimes… no clue!
This is one of those where I don’t, because yesterday I had a moment of real panic and anxiety about how our world is changing with AI.
For a long time we’ve been hearing how AI is going to take our jobs and I’ve been firmly in the camp that AI is a tool and that we need to learn how to use it responsibly. I’ve made it my business to learn how to use it in my own world and, as a solo entrepreneur, it has been an incredible resource.
I use it to help me make sense of my thoughts, explore ideas and generally sort through some of the chaos and fluff that seems to be part of running a business on your own. Sometimes I use it as a thinking partner and sometimes I just dump a whole lot of thoughts into it and ask it to help me figure out what I’m actually trying to say.
A bit like this blog, actually. Aaah, the irony!
As a solo entrepreneur, that kind of help would often have been out of reach financially, so suddenly having access to a tool that can help me make sense of a much bigger world has been incredibly useful.
I won’t deny that there has also been a bit of a sense of being a pioneer, experimenting with it and helping people around me explore how AI could change our worlds.
At the same time, over the last few weeks I’ve started picking up another theme. I’m hearing from people who are watching normal, untrained people use AI to do work they might previously have been paid to do. I’m hearing people across different industries beginning to realise that their work is changing and their income is being affected, while trying their best to prepare for changes nobody really knows how to predict.
I knew all of this, or at least I thought I did, but yesterday I felt its teeth.
I realised that perhaps it isn’t as simple as AI taking our jobs. AI is already being used to take pieces of the jobs that give people their income.
I’ve heard versions of this before, but I don’t think I really understood it until I looked at what I was doing myself. Without really thinking about it, I was already using AI to do things I might previously have needed someone else to help me with.
To be fair, I probably couldn’t have afforded those services anyway, but isn’t that exactly how it starts? Small changes happening all around us without us really noticing them, until eventually we look up and realise that the way we work has changed.
Suddenly I understood the panic and uncertainty I’m hearing in a way I hadn’t before. For all the reading, experimenting and learning I’ve been doing, I still don’t know exactly how this is going to affect my work, the people I love or the world we live in.
When I woke up this morning, I realised that this feeling was incredibly familiar.
It was the same fear I felt during COVID: the fear of understanding that my world was changing around me, that there was nothing I could do to stop that change and that burning question:
How do I prepare when I don’t even know what I’m preparing for?!?
I had spent 25 years building my life in the tourism industry. My identity, livelihood, lifestyle, friendships and a huge part of how I understood myself were all wrapped up in it, and then suddenly the world stopped travelling.
My worldview was shattered.
Perhaps one of the hardest parts wasn’t only what we lost in the blink of an eye, but that nobody could tell us what would happen next. There was no way of knowing when tourism would start again, which businesses would survive, whether our jobs would still exist or how long any of it was going to last.
Once I recognised that feeling yesterday, I started thinking about what actually got me through it and, with hindsight, it certainly wasn’t that I didn’t panic. I did. We all did, some probably more than others.
During the first few days of lockdown my Mom said something that has stayed with me ever since:
“Now you are really going to see who people truly are.”
She was right.
Some people disappeared into their own spaces, some carried on as if nothing had changed, some became angry, frightened or overwhelmed, while others quietly stepped up and did whatever they could. Some helped in small ways like fetching rubbish, bringing food or checking in on people, while others helped us make sense of all the noise and tried to solve problems none of us had ever faced before.
We learnt who we could trust, but we also learnt that nobody really knew what was going to happen. There were things we could plan for and work towards, but there was an equally big, if not bigger, part that we simply had to wait and see.
I remember people saying, “We are building this plane while we are flying it,” and strangely that helped me because I understood that we were making up the game while we were living it. There wasn’t an instruction manual I had somehow missed; we were all trying to work it out as we went along.
Realising that I couldn’t just sit back and wait, and that I needed to do something, helped me work through the crisis of who and what I was without tourism. It gave me the opportunity to explore things I might never have explored otherwise and, if I’m honest with myself, I wasn’t in a great place before COVID anyway.
That time gave me the courage to look hard at myself and rethink a lot of things. I can honestly say that I probably would have been too scared to step away from tourism completely if it hadn’t first been ripped away from me.
I didn’t really have a choice. Change was going to happen anyway.
Maybe that is the part I needed to remember yesterday.
As the world seems to be going faster, I think perhaps we should be slowing down and dealing with what is actually in front of us.
We can pay attention to what is changing, learn what we can and think about what we actually want our lives to look like. Most importantly, if the world as we know it is going to change, we can work on making ourselves fit enough to change with it, but on our own terms.
Maybe that is what mental fitness looks like right now: not knowing exactly what is going to happen, but trusting that we can work it out when it does.
Because if you’re reading this, you’ve survived 100% of the things that have happened to you so far.
That doesn’t mean they didn’t hurt, change you or leave scars, and it doesn’t mean you knew what you were doing while you were going through them. Somehow, though, you found your way through.
Maybe COVID was our crash course in learning that we don’t need to know exactly what is coming in order to find our way through it.
AI is here and things are going to change. I don’t know exactly what that will look like, and I’m still a little scared by that.
For now, I keep coming back to the words of Maya Angelou:
“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”
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