Naming what you feel with more precision predicts how well you regulate it, research indicates.

AI-assisted work may create in its users feelings that typical workplace vocabulary does not yet handle.

What remains mine, for now, is deciding when the work is done.

I am writing this paragraph slower than the AI assistant on my screen would write it, and I know that, and the knowing is part of what I am trying to describe.

For three decades I built a career on ideation, drafting, research, and editing—the early stages of intellectual work where the shape of an argument gets found. Those stages are the parts I used to love.

A few years into intense AI use, I do not love them anymore. I do not even dislike them. Something flatter than that has replaced the feeling, and I cannot yet say what it is.

The word that arrives first is boredom. That is not quite right. I am bored because what I enjoyed has been taken from me, and that is a more specific state than boredom—boredom is the absence of stimulus, and this is the presence of a stimulus that no longer belongs to me.

Numb is closer, but numb implies I am protecting myself from something painful, and I do not think pain is what is here. Redundant and useless are the words that show up at three in the morning, and they are about role, not feeling. None of them is the word.

The thing in the room with me, the one displacing the feeling, is also........

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