My friend crashed out on my couch. I’m not talking about sleeping, like full-on fits of anger and hot tears streaming down her face.
She did everything “right.” She went to college, took out the loans, worked in finance, went to graduate school, strove for the promotion, survived COVID by the skin of her teeth. Got the promotion. She got laid off this year. Now she’s traveling the world. London is her first stop, and it all caught up with her when she found my couch and finally crashed out.
We’re all on the verge of crashing out (if we haven’t already). You were told the loans were necessary, the college far from home would be worth it, and the investment banking job would be temporary to pay back those loans. You were told marriage as an institution would bring fulfilment, not necessarily marrying the “right” person. So you settled down. young. You were told if you played dumb, you wouldn’t scare them away. You were told if you recycled enough and adopted a flexitarian diet, you’d slow the impending climate crisis. You were told if you stopped ordering avocado toast, you’d be able to afford that mortgage.
You were told AI would bring abundance, equality, and the end to grunt work. You were told AI is the next industrial revolution. You were told to build a personal brand to avoid being laid off.
You were told.
You were told.
You were told.
Modern life has thrown us into complete and utter disillusionment. As I walk around London, I see the disillusionment all around me. The grass in my local park has turned brown from drought. Climate change isn’t coming; it’s here. I walk past construction sites of new builds starting at half a million pounds, and I ask myself who is buying these apartments (in this economy???) Another vacant lot seeking buyers.
Disillusionment is what happens when there’s an ever-widening gap between expectations and a promised reality. Despair becomes the norm. The neatly constructed beliefs about who we are, where we find meaning, and how we obtain success are collapsing. The American dream is no longer a white picket fenced mortgage and an under 30-minute commute. It’s escape. Working remotely, leaving the U.S, either permanently or frequently, and detachment, not because we don’t want stability, but simply because it is out of reach.
Last December, I recorded a podcast episode on my prediction for AI in 2026. I argued that backlash would be imminent. Has Ai delivered on the promises of abundance, cures, and relief from drudgery? Of course not; wealth continues to be concentrated in Silicon Valley, cures take years to materialise, and your boss now expects you to do even more work with less headcount.
For most of 2025, CEO after CEO after CEO said AI is coming for your job....until the guillotines started coming out (I actually meant this as a French Revolution metaphor, but while editing I found someone brought an actual guillotine to a data center protest). Now everyone is changing their tune, and it’s “AI for Everyone.” Zuckerberg recently published his essay “The Future is for Everyone” in which he said:
“There are several reasons to be optimistic that there will be an abundance of jobs in the future. No matter how intelligent AI becomes, there will always be a finite amount of compute and therefore an opportunity cost for how we use it. If people can use AI to invent incredibly valuable new things, then it will make more sense to allocate it towards that rather than automating existing jobs.”
I know enough people laid off from Meta to know he most likely still believes in automating jobs. Nonetheless, I’ve long said investments in localAI and sovereignAI are the only way we prevent the mass concentration of power and the usurping of democratic norms. So while AI is here to stay, it’s too expensive and unsustainable in its current form.
Some of you may say, “But I’m only paying $20/month.” There’s a whole world of private lending and investment that is significantly subsidising your AI use while AI companies continue to accumulate massive historic losses. Investors are getting tired of subsidising without a clear path to profitability and ROI, so it won’t be cheap for long.
I was chatting with a friend who is a senior engineer at an AI startup, and he simply could not understand the backlash and frustration people are feeling right now. He and I both know the long time horizons for an ROI, especially in the GreenTech and HealthTech space. He doesn’t leave his lab much, but as someone with one foot in both worlds, I used this as an opportunity to explain the polycrisis we’re living through. It’s not just AI, albeit Ai is making everything more expensive from Apple products to your electricity bill.
When people can’t sleep because of the noise pollution from data centers, they can’t seem to find work no matter how many jobs they’ve applied for, and the Strait of Hormuz keeps opening and closing like the back door during summertime, you can understand why many are on the brink. People don’t want to hear about relative stats that show overall things “are not that bad.” They want relief from their immediate present circumstance. As we prepare for our 5th heatwave here in London and families are being told in certain parts of England that they have to ration water, I have become acutely aware of many of these frustrations.
I just want to acknowledge all of this because constantly hearing everything is relatively fine only adds gas to the flame.
Some researchers say nostalgia. I was quite intrigued by this proposal from a group of psychologists:
“Disillusionment arises when life experiences strongly discredited positive assumptions or deeply held beliefs. Under these conditions, people feel lost, confused, and disconnected from their social environments. Ultimately, disillusioned individuals struggle to maintain meaning and inhabit a state of existential concern. However, the past can provide solace as a refuge of meaning and social connection. Indeed, nostalgic reflection is a commonly cited source of meaning in life.”
Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103120304017
We can buy the flip phones, dumb phones, Bluetooth landlines, vintage point and shoots, and refurbished iPods. Nothing wrong with that, but it doesn’t automatically bring back the meaning associated with those materials. It can tether you to the past, but not reconstruct the minimal social and community safety nets we had back then.
Who doesn’t want to escape to the countryside and start a regenerative farm? Who doesn’t want to delete all their socials and become an anonymous artisan in Brazil? Well, ask the people who actually do that kind of work, and they’ll tell you it’s hard as hell. It’s a knowledge worker’s fantasy because we think physical labor after being stuck to a desk for several years could relieve the cognitive load.
But once you have to start calculating how to make sure you’ll make it through the rest of the year because the drought stole your harvest and you stubbed your toe while hiking and therefore can’t walk to the barn to feed the chickens, you’ll realise the escape isn’t necessarily easier or harder; it’s just different and worth acknowledging.
Okay so then what’s the answer, Shae??? I don’t want to give you all the answers. I just want to think alongside you and offer my theory, which you are welcome to agree or disagree with. It’s a theory, not a definitive answer.
I would argue for defiant rebellion as an antidote. I’ve been rereading Albert Camus’s The Rebel for a separate project, but I want to expound upon this quote from his 1951 essay:
“Meanwhile, we can sum up the initial progress that the spirit of rebellion provokes in a mind that is originally imbued with the absurdity and apparent sterility of the world. In absurdist experience, suffering is individual. But from the moment when a movement of rebellion begins, suffering is seen as a collective experience. Therefore the first progressive step for a mind overwhelmed by the strangeness of things is to realise that this feeling of strangeness is shared with all men and that human reality, in its entirety, suffers from the distance which separates it from the rest of the universe. The malady experienced by a single man becomes a mass plague. In our daily trials rebellion plays the same role as does the “cogito” in the realm of thought: it is the first piece of evidence.
But this evidence lures the individual from his solitude. It founds its first value on the whole human race. I rebel—therefore we exist.” (page 22)
We are living through absurd times (and if you would like to delve more into absurdist philosophy, I recommend reading more Albert Camus). We’re in the midst of transition and disruption. The world is being completely redone. And my first thought is not escapism or nostalgia (those are totally fine btw, I was just adding context earlier); my first thought is planting. When I was going through a tough time last year, someone said to me, “rock bottom is the perfect place to plant seeds.”
“I rebel-therefore we exist”
To be clear, I am not telling you to go order guillotines. Much like Camus, I don’t think violent insurrection will take us far or be as productive as some may think. What I am saying is, in the midst of the chaos, can we conjure up our imaginative capacities to imagine a different way of life? When one individual decides to make the art, build the school, create the technology, design the workplace program, prevent the AI tutor from robbing your children of human social connection, that stands in rebellion to our current polycrisis. We, the collective, exist.
“In our daily trials rebellion plays the same role as does the “cogito” in the realm of thought”
Especially for knowledge workers, we can think while we plant. We can think while engaging in tiny acts of rebellion.
I am generally speaking a pragmatic optimist, so this is why I don’t think it’s enough to diagnose a problem and leave you feeling worse off than when you first started reading this. I know how paralysing despair can be. Instead of spreading that paralysis, I want to encourage collective movement because you are not crashing out alone. When you have nothing left to lose, you have everything still to gain.
Keep on planting in the cracks of collapse 🌱
p.s. For those new here, I recommend my podcast episode: Why Does Work Feel Pointless?
P.s.s. I clearly am not plugged in enough to the UK arts and culture scene because I somehow missed Ms. Lauryn Hill performing at diaspora calling this weekend in the UK 😭 She said it best,
“I find it hard to say
That everything is alright
Don’t look at me that way
Like everything is alright
‘Cause my own eyes can see
Through all your false pretenses
But what you fail to see
Is all the consequences”
I Find It Hard to Say (Rebel) by Ms. Lauryn Hill
For Paid Subscribers, your deep reads and tech review below:
With care,
Shae
A Beginner’s Guide to Local AI
Critical Thinking Skills Guide
Hi, I’m a PhD Candidate at Harvard, bridging the gap between AI and the Humanities. You can find me on YouTube, Insta, and Threads. Posts may contain Bookshop affiliate links, which means if you make a purchase, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Thanks for supporting my work!
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