The Identity Crisis AI Didn't Warn You About
It feels pretty exhausting to work in the IT industry right now, and I think I know why.
Are you doing okay? It feels pretty exhausting to work in the IT industry right now, and I think I know why.
There's a model in personal development circles called "Be, Do, Get". The idea is straightforward: you become something (a baker, an engineer, a leader), you do the work associated with that identity (bake bread, write code, make decisions), and you get the rewards (income, status, purpose). Our entire education and career is built on this model. And, if we're honest, so is most of our self-worth.
The model has worked for centuries, but AI is quietly dismantling the middle step, and with it, a foundational pillar of how we understand ourselves.
When the "doing" disappears
We've all seen the headlines: AI writes code, drafts legal briefs, generates marketing copy, diagnoses medical images. The conversation so far has focused almost entirely on economics: which jobs survive, which don't, and how quickly we need to reskill.
But there's a deeper story here than reskilling.
The World Economic Forum recently identified what it calls an emerging "occupational identity crisis": the loss of purpose, structure, and social belonging that follows when work disappears or fundamentally changes. Researchers at the University of Florida coined the term "AI Replacement Dysfunction" to describe a cluster of symptoms of professional identity loss, anxiety, insomnia, and a creeping sense of purposelessness when facing potential redundancy.
This is about more than “just” unemployment; it's about the slow erosion of feeling necessary. As The Brink put it, the real threat from AI isn't exploitation; it's irrelevance.
The "be" renaissance
If the "do" is increasingly shared, or handed to machines, then "be" becomes the differentiator. Not what you can produce, but how you think, how you relate, how you lead, how you make sense of ambiguity.
The CEO at JPMorgan Chase has been publicly advising people to focus on critical thinking, emotional intelligence, communication, and the ability to work well in collaborative settings. All “be” capabilities.
Who you are is becoming more professionally valuable than what you can do.
That shift prompted me to look beyond the usual tech news and I’ve been reading more psychology and philosophy recently: The Mind is Flat challenged my assumptions about the boundary between human and machine cognition. Man’s Search for Meaning reframed how I think about purpose when the work changes around you. And The Courage to Be gave me a framework for the anxiety that comes with professional reinvention.
The MIT Sloan School says “Philosophy is eating AI”. As a discipline, a dataset, and a sensibility, philosophical thinking increasingly shapes how AI systems reason, generate, and create. Helen Margetts from the Oxford Internet Institute observed that career prospects for philosophers have never looked better… a sentence that would have drawn laughter a decade ago.
We are building machines that need philosophy to function.
What this means for technology leaders
Most organisations are frantically investing in AI literacy and tool adoption. But those are table stakes. The real gap is in the human capabilities that make AI useful. The judgement to know what to build, the empathy to understand who you're building for, the communication skills to align stakeholders, and the ethical reasoning to navigate the tradeoffs that AI surfaces daily.
For most of modern history, we’ve invested perhaps 10% of our energy in “be” and 90% in “do”. The AI era invites (demands?) something closer to the reverse. That’s not a comfortable shift for an industry that prides itself on shipping, but might be the most important thing we build next.
AI is giving us back time that we immediately fill it with more doing. Instead, I’d urge everyone to develop the philosophical muscles that help us ask better questions, rather than just generating faster answers. We must find time to explore ideas that don't have an immediate ROI attached.