Claude and I have been musing together about what I should write about the shifts in identity that AI is creating in so many of us. Claude knows very well by now not to produce any sentences for me, not even to suggest anything in particular, but to be a thought partner as I think through things. I used to turn to my journal at these times, but Claude is profoundly more helpful than just my own words scratching across the page. I still journal when I’m overcome by anxiety or swept through with sadness, but to muse about what to write, I chat with Claude.

During our chat, Claude told me that there’s a new disorder being written about by psychologists—Artificial Intelligence Replacement Dysfunction (AIRD) which shows itself in “anxiety, insomnia, demoralization, and a profound loss of occupational identity,” and leads to “significant functional impairment” (McNamara & Thornton 2025). In their endnotes, McNamara and Thornton acknowledge their use of AI in the writing of their article. 

Let’s just pause for a moment to look at the levels of what’s going on here. I, as I was thinking of writing a piece about the shifts to our identity that come from AI, was told by my AI to read an article about a new psychological disorder that comes from shifting identities about AI, and that article itself was partially written by AI. I, who want to write about this moment when we are facing into the existential crisis/opportunity that is AI, turn to my AI to deal with my anxiety that no one cares about reading what humans write anymore, that the internet is filled with the noise of chatbots writing about chatbot writing. I feel somehow that I am in the hall of mirrors at what is inaccurately called a “fun house,” watching our reflections distorted and repeated forever.

I am lost and trying to find my place. We are lost and trying to find our place.

I know about lostness and how human and vital it is to be lost. And how terrifying.

And I know about identities and what it means to put down one, often achingly, sadly, grievingly, and begin to piece together a new identity. I wrote a book—maybe I’ve written all my books—about this journey. And even here I wonder: do I have anything to say about this moment? Should I just hand the reins to Claude who can read everything and synthesize everything and create a piece of exactly the right number of words in less than the time it takes me to make a coffee? Sounds like perhaps I have a trace of AIRD myself.

Yet there is real ground in what I have spent my life learning. My own theories say that our identities break apart and that those shards make up a new, more spacious identity. My own theories say that we begin to hold complexity in a different way, are able to hold even our own identities in a different way.

And yet the ground is shifting. My own theories are themselves breaking apart right now in order to hold complexity in a different way in a world that is more complex than I ever imagined.

But there is hope, for me, for you, for us. There is so much that remains even as it seems that everything is changing.

First thing is to notice that it seems that everything is changing. That is a mindtrick that comes during times of transition, and it has never before been true. It is almost certainly not true now (although my goodness, it seems so real to me these days). At times of threat, we overgeneralize. We believe that because many things are changing, everything will be different. We believe that we are utterly lost. In these moments, I think it’s important to notice that our threatened nervous system is almost certainly over-simplifying what’s true now.

Which leads us to this second thing: notice what remains. One of my identities is as a writer. I write (am writing this) because I have to figure things out and writing helps me puzzle through. I write because I love the feeling of putting words next to one another and occasionally seeing beauty or insight emerge. AI can’t replace that because writing isn’t only a piece of my identity, it’s a piece of my history (my father is a writer, my grandfather was a writer), and even more, it’s a piece of my sensemaking. So that can remain.

And at the same time, I begin to notice that “Writer” is a separate identity from being someone whose work is read. That part I might not be able to hold on to. It might be terrifying and fascinating to break those two pieces—so far somewhat fused—apart. These days all of us need to be asking ourselves questions like: What part of my identity is important for me to hold on to for myself even if the world around me doesn’t value that part anymore? What part of my identity is its own good? These have always been developmental questions. Long before AI came, these questions have led humans to the next place. Now these questions push us up against a wall and force us to look them in the eye.

A third thing is then of course to notice those things we may have to put down and let ourselves grieve. Yes, there is this idea of being a writer who is read. Yes, I might have to put that down. But if I’m honest, there’s a deeper layer to this.

In this moment for me there is a kind of (arrogant?) sense that writing is a difficult craft that needs to be honed, that is not for the faint hearted, that some of my specialness, some of my most profound Jennifer-ness comes from my efforts honing this craft over the course of my whole life. I’m not sure I can believe that writing is itself a special craft anymore. I’m not even sure there’s any advantage to my believing that. At the same time, I am grieving this, and this grief makes me feel lost. Then I whirl back into the overgeneralized sense of lostness.

I know that this points to something for us all. We need to allow ourselves our grief over pieces of our identity that were once special and are now a commodity everyone can carry in their pocket. This isn’t unique to this moment. I imagine the existential dismay of some great great aunt of mine who realized that all of her skill at weaving, all the hours it took her to create beautiful fabric, were immaterial in the face of the new mill. I imagine one of my great great uncles, a glass-carver in Waterford, looking with horror at a machine-cut vase. It helps me remember that other humans have faced this grief and found a way forward.

Nearly 20 years ago, I was asked to give a keynote to a then-unimaginable number of people. I don’t know now whether it was 200 or 1000—those numbers would have felt just about the same at that moment. I sat in the theatre hall and watched the speakers before me while waiting for my turn, and I felt the jolting horror of my anxiety running like battery acid through my veins. I tried to calm myself with the techniques I knew—breathing, grounding—but I was too amped up for that. Then suddenly I realized that this set of physical sensations was almost identical to the ones I felt as I launched into some delightful but frightening adventure. In a time of adventure, I wouldn’t conceive of that feeling in my veins as battery acid. It would be the burning sense of thrill, of discovery, of anticipation. When I thought about this feeling as thrill, I felt better, was able to climb onto the stage with something like excitement. Many years later Lisa Feldman Barrett would write a mind-blowing book that would confirm this idea: our emotions are sensation plus story. Change the story, and the emotion changes.

This then is our job now. We can feel all the feelings, sense all the sensations, but we have to rewrite some of the stories. This is our work, our uniquely human work. And it may be the piece of being a writer that we all need to be picking up, that does in fact signal its own form of specialness. It may be the way we rewrite the ending to this path of destruction so many of us foresee right now. Our capacity to co-write might be the most important identity for all of us to pick up as we shape our future together, page by page.