How to overcome the daily impulse to quit your job …

For the first half of my twenties, the existential angst of what I should do with my career was centred around the idea that once you’d chosen your career path, you’d actually have to go down it.

For a commitment-phobe, this is a hard concept to get your head around. I spent years hopping around, wrestling with different ideas of what I wanted to be. Ultimately, and still slightly restlessly, I made the decision to stick to the role I’m in now - otherwise I’ll never climb the ladder and start making real money and all that. What’s arisen now is a whole new anxiety - does my job even have a ladder anymore? Or more specifically, is AI going to beat me to the top? I’ll sometimes be sitting at work, feeding systems that are aimed to make the planning aspects of my job more efficient, and quite frankly more bearable, but then I’ll be struck with an overwhelming feeling of unease.

It's a bit like starting to doubt a relationship with a therapist. You’ve sought them out to help you, in exchange you give them reams of personal information, which you hope would never be used against you. You choose to believe the best intentions, but there’s an underlying awareness that once that information is out there it’s fair game and it could be used to undermine you. This is probably a far-fetched comparison, but the point is, every so often I feel apprehensive about how much trust we put into these systems without proper awareness of the long- term effect. The nagging fear I have is that AI, which I tentatively put my trust in every day, is going to learn how to do my job so well it will make my skills redundant. So you can see how the daily impulse arises - I do not want to be mugged off and willingly hand my job over to something that’s pretending to help me. I see through this. I’m out the door.

I suppose what actually stops me from quitting my job is 1) I enjoy it and 2) it stops me going stir crazy and 3) what the hell am I meant to do next? By the time my mind has gone back to the drawing board, floated the possibility of several new vocations (which let me tell you - not a lot out there), a colleague will have given me a new work deadline and I’m back in the room. Back in a room full of actual people not just machines, and questions that need answering right now. So for the time being, I have a reason to stay. I am needed.

Although this only offers momentary reassurance, I also remind myself that we went through a pandemic. Yes there were redundancies, but what it actually showed was that we have the capabilities and motivation to adapt to uncomfortable and disruptive circumstances. According to every therapist putting it out there on social media: ‘we can’t control what happens to us, but we can control how we react to it’.  So I guess in the face of AI, I’d say we have to trust that we’ll have the resilience and creativity to adapt and work with it. Keep an eye out for opportunity and don’t run for the door.

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