Newsletter · Change and resilience
The Sky Has Been Falling For 200 Years. And We’re Still Here.
Our brains are wired to expect the worst. AI is just the latest thing we’ve decided will end us.
I was sitting across from a client last week, a smart guy who runs a mid-sized consultancy, and about fifteen minutes into our mentoring session he put his coffee down and said something I’ve been hearing a lot lately.
“I just don’t see how any of us survive this.”
He wasn’t talking about his health. He wasn’t talking about his marriage. He was talking about AI.
He’d spent the weekend doom-scrolling through articles about ChatGPT replacing lawyers, designers, coders, writers: basically everyone he knows, including himself. By Monday morning, he was half-convinced his business would be irrelevant within three years and his kids were training for jobs that wouldn’t exist by graduation day.
I let him get it all out. And when he was done, I didn’t pull up a reassuring TED Talk. I told him about a Wall Street Journal article from 29 December 2008.
The Day America Was Supposed To Fall Apart
At the peak of the 2008 financial crisis, the Wall Street Journal (not Reddit, not a conspiracy blog, the Wall Street Journal) ran a front-page story about a Russian professor named Igor Panarin, who predicted the United States would disintegrate into six pieces by mid-2010. California to China. Texas to Mexico. Alaska back to Russia. The whole map, redrawn.
As Morgan Housel writes in The Psychology of Money, this wasn’t the ramblings of a tinfoil-hat newsletter. This was on the front page of the most prestigious financial newspaper in the world. And at the time? It felt plausible. That’s what fear does: it makes the absurd feel inevitable.
Spoiler: America is still one country. It even added a few Starbucks since then.
We’ve Done This Before. Many, Many Times.
My client laughed when I told him that story; not because it was funny, but because he recognised himself in it. Humans have been confidently predicting the end of the world with every major invention, and then quietly getting on with things when the world refuses to end.
The Industrial Revolution brought machines that were going to make human labour obsolete forever. The Luddites smashed looms in protest. What actually happened? Entire new industries were born, and living standards went through the roof.
When electricity arrived, people were genuinely terrified of it. President Benjamin Harrison reportedly refused to touch light switches in the White House. Today we get anxious if our phone drops below 20%.
The automobile wiped out thousands of jobs in the horse industry: stable hands, farriers, carriage makers. But it created millions more, including, eventually, the guy who details your car while you’re at brunch.
The internet in the 1990s was simultaneously “a fad for academics” and “the death of all physical business.” Neither happened. Instead, the world adapted: messily, unevenly, but it adapted.
Every single time: new technology, mass panic, doomsday headlines, and then humanity figures it out.
Why Our Brains Do This To Us
There’s a name for it: negativity bias. Our brains give more weight to threats than opportunities. On the savannah, this kept us alive; overreacting to a rustling bush was smarter than assuming it was just the wind. But in 2026, that same instinct means you read one headline about AI replacing 40% of jobs and your nervous system reacts like a lion just walked into the office.
Layer on the availability heuristic (we judge how likely something is based on how often we see it) and your algorithm-curated feed full of AI doom starts to feel like objective reality. It isn’t. That’s not the world talking. That’s your phone.
What Actually Matters Right Now
After we talked through all of this, my client asked the question that actually mattered: “So what do I do?”
Stop mistaking panic for information. Most of what you’re reading about AI is designed to generate clicks, not clarity. The people writing “AI will replace all workers by 2027” often don’t know what they’re having for dinner tonight.
Study history. Not to be complacent (real disruption is real, and transitions genuinely hurt some people) but to calibrate your fear. Every generation has had its version of “we’re all doomed.” None of them were right.
Invest in what makes you human. Every technological shift has ultimately rewarded the things machines can’t do: empathy, judgement, creativity, the ability to make someone feel understood. AI can draft a decent email. It cannot sit across from a frightened client and know exactly when to tell them a story about a newspaper article from 2008.
Get curious, not fearful. The people who thrive through disruption aren’t the ones who froze, and they’re not the ones who ran around screaming. They’re the ones who said, “Huh, how can I use this?”
The Bit That Stuck With Him
When we wrapped up, my client looked different. The paralysing, sleep-disrupting terror had loosened its grip. Not because I’d solved anything (the AI revolution is real and the questions are genuine) but because context changes everything.
“You know what’s funny?” he said on his way out. “If you’d told me that Wall Street Journal story last week, I’d have said, yeah, but this time it’s different.”
I smiled. “That’s what they say every time.”
And every time, it isn’t.
If change or AI anxiety is keeping you or your team up at night, let’s talk it through.