We've been so focused on whether AI is going to take our jobs that we completely missed the more uncomfortable question: what happens when it takes the parts of our jobs we actually love?

The collaboration. The creative friction. The feeling of building something with people who challenge you. That stuff is already quietly disappearing and we don't have language for what comes next.

In this one, I'm reckoning with something that started as a gut feeling during my own job search and turned into a rabbit hole I couldn't climb out of. It touches on identity, mental health, LinkedIn behavior, a horse meme, two years with Spanish culture, and a brand new clinical diagnosis that didn't exist until recently.

Brodotype:
Brody, everyone's obsessed with whether AI is going to take their job — but you're making a different argument entirely. You're saying AI is going to take what you love about your job long before it ever eliminates the job itself. Where did that realization hit you, and what were you doing when it clicked?

Brody:
You know, i've been playing with this idea since I had to start interviewing and looking for a new job. I was feeling a bit... meh about every job posting and conversation I had and It was leaving me frustrated. I have always been someone who loves work - solving interesting problems with really great people gives me energy (much needed energy for managing toddlers). But the conversations have switched... every conversation, every interview, had an expectation of solving problems with agents, or models, or chatbots. I wanted people.

Brodotype:
So paint me a picture, what does that moment actually feel like for someone? Like, is it a slow fade or is it one specific morning where you open your laptop and go... wait, something's different here. Something's gone.

Brody:
This is absolutely a slow fade. In the United States, as a society, we have a strong identity tied to our work. It's the first thing we tell people when we introduce ourselves (bleh), and the majority of our "meaningful connection" comes from the people within our companies - for better or worse. The problem is that we don't like to admit it - so we manufacture narratives about how it's not true, or how it's a positive that we rely on our coworkers for so much of our personal identity. I wouldn't have come to this conclusion if I wasn't forced to reckon with the loss of coworkers and immediately thrust into trying to find new ones.

Your coworkers aren't gone - but the way you collaborate and challenge each other on a professional and personal level is starting to dissipate.

Brodotype:
You said something that we all know, but ignore - in the US especially, we don't just have jobs, we ARE our jobs. 'What do you do?' is basically 'who are you?' So if AI quietly hollows out the meaningful core of work while leaving the job title intact... what exactly are we left holding?

Brody:
That's exactly the tension I keep coming back to. In America, we don't just have careers, we are our careers. And that's always been complicated, but at least it was relational. You were a great engineer because of how you collaborated. A great manager because of how you developed people. The job was the vessel, but the meaning came from the humans inside it.

And then I started noticing something on LinkedIn; and I've been on that platform since the beginning, so I have some pattern recognition here. Something recently shifted. People stopped posting interesting things about other people. They started posting interesting things they found with or about AI. And then reflecting on what it meant to interact with that AI.

Think about that loop for a second. You're promoting yourself, by highlighting your interaction with a machine, by reflecting on what that machine gave you. There's no other human in that story anywhere.

That's not just a social media quirk - that's a signal. We are already starting to outsource the relational texture of work to AI, and repackaging it as personal achievement. And if the meaning of work used to live in those human moments — the collaboration, the mentorship, the creative friction, and AI absorbs all of that... the job title remains, but the identity that was built inside the job? That's what's quietly disappearing.

Brodotype:
We've survived automation before… the assembly line, the ATM, self-checkout. People always said 'it'll create new jobs' and technically it did. Why is this time different? Why won't that same story just play out again?

Brody:
Look, I get why people reach for historical precedent here, it's comforting. 'We survived the assembly line, we survived the ATM, we'll survive this.' There's a meme floating around that captures the optimist's argument perfectly: a man telling a horse, 'The car won't replace you, but horses that learn to drive cars will.' I laugh every time. But I think perfectly reveals the absurdity and flaw in that logic.

Because here's what's different this time: AI isn't automation. Automation replaces a task. AI replaces judgment and action.

The self-checkout machine was never going to shop for you — it couldn't. The assembly line couldn't redesign the car to make itself more efficient. Those technologies had a ceiling, and human intelligence and connection lived above that ceiling.

But everything we are doing in tech right now - every model we're training, every system we're building, is explicitly designed to acquire knowledge, apply skills, and improve at the things humans currently do. Better and faster. That's not a side effect. That's the stated goal.

So the question isn't 'will new jobs be created?'... they probably will, and we can "upskill" ourselves for them. The question is whether those jobs will carry the same meaning, the same creative ownership, the same sense of I built that. And I think that's where the horse analogy breaks down. The horse never had an identity crisis (probably) after the car. We will.

Brodotype:
You work at the intersection of tech and mental health, which puts you in a pretty unique seat here. What's the mental health consequence that nobody is talking about?The one that's coming for us that we are completely unprepared for?

Brody:
Here's what's wild to me, I've been sitting with this idea for a while, thinking it was mostly a gut feeling. And then I started digging into the research, and the academic world is literally just now catching up to this in real time.

There's a psychiatry professor at the University of Florida who just coined a brand new clinical term... AI Replacement Dysfunction. AIRD. And what he found is that the psychological damage isn't coming from actually losing your job. It's coming from the threat of obsolescence. The identity erosion. The loss of purpose. Symptoms that don't fit neatly into any existing diagnosis we have.

And that's the blind spot nobody is talking about. We have no clinical framework for this yet. We're building the plane while flying it.

But here's the part that really got me. The WHO has existing research showing that mental health deteriorates most severely in people who identify strongly with their work. Not just unemployed people. People whose sense of self is tied to what they do. In America, that is almost everyone.

So connect those two dots. You have a country that has spent generations tying identity to career. And you have a technology that is quietly hollowing out the meaningful core of that career - the creative parts, the collaborative parts, the parts that made you feel like you built something — while leaving the job title perfectly intact.

That's not a labor problem. That's a mental health crisis that we don't even have language for yet. And by the time we do, it'll already be everywhere.

Brodotype:
Okay last one, and I want you to go somewhere hopeful but honest. If this transition is inevitable, what does a person actually DO with this? How do you protect your sense of self, your identity, your sense of meaning... when the thing that gave you all of that starts getting quietly outsourced?

Brody:
I spent two years working with a team in Spain. And what stuck with me from that experience was how differently they related to their work. It wasn't that they worked less or cared less. It was that their job was never the majority shareholder in their identity. Their community was. Their relationships were. The life happening outside the office was.

And I think that's the answer.

The most proactive and protective thing any of us can do right now is to slowly, intentionally start diversifying where our sense of self comes from. Stop letting your career hold the controlling stake in who you are. Become what I'm going to refer to as a personal, social entrepreneur. Someone who is actively building, maintaining, and investing in value with the people around them. In their neighborhood. Their friendships. Their community.

For me personally, what gives me energy is exactly this; interesting conversations with people who challenge my thinking. And here's what I had to reckon with: that was never only available at work. Work was just the easiest place to find it. The most convenient container. And at some point, convenient became default. And default became identity.

I'll be honest, sitting with this has been a little daunting for me personally. Because it means I have to be more intentional about finding that outside of my work day. I'm not there yet. But maybe that's where AI actually earns its redemption arc… if it gives us time back, the real question is whether we're brave enough to spend that time on ourselves.

Companies have a role to play here too. But don't wait for them. They weren't the ones who built your sense of self. They can't be the ones who save it.