I’ve been noticing something unsettling this year. Everyone seems anxious in a way that feels familiar but different.

It reminds me of Covid. That collective unease. That sense of existential threat hanging over everything. But this time, it’s not a virus we’re worried about.

It’s change happening so fast we can’t keep up. It’s the creeping fear that everything we’ve built our identity around might become irrelevant.

I’m watching people I know struggle to sleep. Struggle to relax. Struggle to just be without feeling like they should be learning something, building something, staying ahead of something.

The anxiety is everywhere. There’s a kind of desperate uncertainty we’re trying to mask as curiosity.

People are losing their sense of worth. Their sense of identity. “What if my job gets replaced?”, “What if I can’t find anything new?”, “What if I become obsolete?”.

And here’s the cruel part: the only thing that seems to help the anxiety is the thing making it worse. Endless experimenting. Constant learning. Trying every new tool, every new skill, every new approach. Documenting it all.

But you can’t learn your way out of this kind of anxiety. You just burn out faster.

I’ve felt it myself. I live with general anxiety anyway. I’ve also swung past that milestone age of 50. So yes, there’s extra pressure to stay relevant. To prove I’m still valuable. To demonstrate I can adapt. The relentless feeling of “figure it out or get left behind”.

It’s exhausting.

And the world isn’t helping. The news cycle. The economic uncertainty. The sense that everything stable is shifting beneath our feet.

What I keep coming back to is that we’re in a washing machine.

Right now, we’re all just tumbling. The cycle is running and it’s disorienting and uncomfortable and sometimes it feels like it’ll never stop.

But it will stop.

This turbulent phase we’re in… the AI uncertainty, the rapid change, the identity crisis… it’s temporary. Not because AI will go away or because change will slow down, but because we’ll adapt. We’ll find our footing. The dust will settle.

The washing machine cycle always stops eventually.

The question is: how do we survive the cycle without destroying ourselves in the process?

I don’t have a clean answer. But I know what doesn’t work: burning ourselves out trying to outrun the anxiety. Sacrificing sleep and sanity to stay “ahead”. Treating ourselves like we’re already obsolete and need to prove otherwise.

Maybe the best thing we can do right now is acknowledge that we’re in the cycle. Name the anxiety. Admit it’s hard. And stop pretending that endless productivity is the antidote.

Because it’s not.

The cycle will stop when it stops. And when it does, it won’t be perfect. It won’t suddenly be calm and happy. There’ll still be uncertainty. There’ll still be challenges.

But hopefully it won’t be this. This period of overwhelming, relentless change where the ground shifts every week. It’ll just be… manageable again.

Until then, we’re all just trying to hang on.

And that’s okay.