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It's Not Just Jobs That AI Is Taking—It's Our Purpose

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yesterday

"I was going to major in urban planning," my 17-year-old client Matt said, staring at his phone. "But AI is already doing it. Why waste four years studying something that won't exist when I graduate?" He looked up. "What's even AI-proof anymore?"

Matt isn't wrong. He's connecting the dots.

As a psychologist, I'm witnessing unprecedented anxiety. One client discovered AI completes his week's work in an hour. Another, proficient with AI, nervously laughed: "It's amazing...but I can already identify 30-40 positions we could eliminate today. What's our future going to look like?

The Hard Fork podcast just aired a sobering episode on AI job displacement. Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei warned that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next one to five years. Think tanks forecast significant employment disruption. A LinkedIn executive warned that the bottom rung of the career ladder is breaking because of AI. But they're all missing the real crisis.

We're not just losing jobs. We're losing our evolutionary reason for existing.

Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson warned, "The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology." AI supercharges this evolutionary mismatch.

For millions of years, everyone shared one purpose: survive together. We needed our tribe; our tribe needed us. In our modern world, for most of us in affluent countries, our basic survival needs are a given. Yet, we still found purpose in our work. Now we're building a world where being needed is optional. This isn't just........

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