Reading · Strong Feelings: The Substack of Morra Aarons-Mele

Do you sometimes feel like AI is happening to you, not with you? If you’re like 60% of Americans, you feel anxious about AI, even if you love using it in your daily life.

AI anxiety isn’t a weakness: it’s your brain doing its job. The leaders I worry about aren’t the anxious ones. They’re the ones who feel nothing. When we learn to name what we’re feeling and get curious about why, something shifts. We get our agency back. So do our teams. And so, we have to talk about how AI makes us feel. “We have emotional relationships with our technology.” This quote from Nilay Patel, Editor in Chief of The Verge nails it.

And you know this: when we feel anxious and we don’t process our anxiety, we don’t make the best decisions. We lose our sense of agency. And indeed, anxiety is part of tech’s marketing strategy; they want us to freeze so their power becomes total. ANXIETY IS THEIR STRATEGY, and anxiety is the public narrative of AI. Actually, the public narrative surrounding AI is apocalyptic (see my case study of AI anxiety based on Meta’s recent layoffs for an example of why this narrative is so powerful.)

Brian Solis put it really well:

When the loudest voices in AI keep selling disruption, panic, and inevitability, they should not be surprised when the next generation stops trusting the future. The real race is not AGI or super intelligence. The more important is credibility, capability, and a future people actually want to join.

Fear is rising. Trust is falling. And the AI industry has no one to blame but itself.

And yet, most of the conversation about AI at work is about tools, skills, prompts, and productivity. What’s missing is an honest conversation about what it actually feels like to live through this: The low-grade dread when you read another headline, the meeting where someone casually implies a chatbot is outperforming you, the Sunday night spiral about whether your job will exist in five years, and the frustrating reality many of us feel that the hype around this stuff belies the extremely annoying mandates and “transformation” programs in our jobs. That’s AI anxiety. And it’s not a bug. It’s your nervous system doing its job.

Here’s what I’ve come to understand after years of researching anxiety and leadership: when we feel anxious, it means something we care about is on the line. Our craft. Our livelihood. Our identity. Our safety. Our values! The creativity and relationships that make work meaningful. Anxiety is trying to tell us something — not that we’re weak, but that we have much worth protecting.

The problem is that most organizations respond to AI anxiety with either forced positivity or silence. Neither works. What actually helps is giving people the language and the tools to understand what they’re feeling and why, and then figure out what to do with it.

Attend the HBS AI Institute Leading With AI Event on May 19

That’s what I’ll be talking about at Harvard Business School’s Leading with AI 2026 conference on May 19. The event is built around a premise I deeply agree with: many of us feel like AI is being done to us, not with us, even while we love using it day to day. The conference is a call to rebalance that — to bring the conversation back down to earth, to the people actually living through this change. It’s virtual and open to the public: https://d3.harvard.edu/events/leading-with-ai-2026/

What’s your AI anxiety trying to tell you? What scares you the most?

AI Makes Us Anxious

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