Picture a guy who runs his own law firm. He watches an AI tool produce a first draft of a motion in about forty seconds that would have taken him a full day when he was a young associate. It's impressive. Then he goes home that night and can't sleep. It isn't really about money. His firm is fine. What keeps him up is a much older question wearing new clothes: if a machine can do what I spent twenty years getting good at, then what am I for?
I'm hearing some version of this more and more, from attorneys, physicians, founders, engineers. Smart, accomplished men who are watching the ground shift under the thing they built their identity on. Most of them aren't panicking. They're just quietly unsettled in a way they don't have words for yet. I think the word is existential.
For most of the men I work with, competence has been the foundation of everything. You were the smart kid, then the hard worker, then the guy people called when it mattered. Being good at things is how you earned love, respect and safety. Over time, it became who you are. Now, watching software take on parts of that work can leave you wondering how much of your identity depends on being able to do something other people can't.
The threat isn't only to your job. It's to the story you've been telling yourself about why you matter. And when that story starts to wobble, a lot of stuff that was hiding underneath it comes up: old feelings of not being enough, fear about the future, a sense that maybe you built your whole life on something that was always a little shakier than you thought. I don't think that questioning has to be a bad thing, even though it doesn't feel good. Sometimes the ground has to shift before you find out what you're actually standing on.
An older question
It's funny, but some of the thinkers who might help us most with AI were writing in the middle of the last century. Sartre, Camus and Frankl approached freedom, suffering and meaning from different directions, but their work remains relevant to a problem we're facing now: how to live when the things we relied on can no longer give us certainty.
Sartre's answer began with the idea that existence comes before essence. You aren't born with a fixed purpose stamped on you. You create who you are through what you choose and how you live. That idea can feel terrifying at first, but for me it also means your worth was never really located in your job title. It's in the choices you make about how to show up. plato.stanford.edu
Camus wrote about Sisyphus, the guy in the Greek myth condemned to push a boulder up a hill forever. You'd think it's the most meaningless life imaginable. Camus ended the essay by saying we have to imagine Sisyphus happy, finding a kind of freedom in his conscious defiance of an absurd fate. What I take from that is the possibility of meeting life fully even when it offers no guarantee that our efforts will lead to the outcome we want. plato.stanford.edu
And Viktor Frankl, who survived the Nazi camps, said that everything can be taken from a person except one thing, the freedom to choose your attitude in any given set of circumstances. I find all of this weirdly relevant right now. AI might change what we do all day. It can't make the choice about who you're going to be in the middle of that change. That part is still yours. PBS
What stays human
I use AI every day. It helps me think, organize, and get through the boring stuff faster. I'm not anti technology and I don't think the answer is to hide from it. But I do think this moment is asking men to get much clearer about what can't be outsourced.
A machine can write a eulogy, but it can't stand at your father's funeral. It can summarize a medical study, but it can't sit with a scared patient and hold their hand while they get bad news. It can plan the perfect date, but it can't be fully present with your partner at dinner. It can give you a thousand ideas about meaning, but it can't feel the meaning for you.
The things that stay human are mostly the things we've been too busy to give much attention to: presence, relationship, character, courage, and the ability to be with suffering, yours and other people's. Your body and what it knows, your capacity to love someone and be changed by them, deserve a place in that understanding of who you are. The men who come through this well, I think, will be the ones who use this moment to build their identity on something deeper than being useful. Honestly, it might be the most freeing thing that could happen to a lot of us.
Most men I know aren't going to bring this up at dinner. It sounds a little dramatic to say you're having an existential crisis about software. So it sits there, showing up as restlessness, irritability, a vague dread on Sunday nights. In my one-on-one coaching, this is exactly the kind of thing we make room for. Some of it is practical, like thinking through how your role or your business might evolve. A lot of it goes deeper, into what you actually value, what you want the next chapter to be about, and how to build a sense of worth that doesn't depend on being irreplaceable.
I can't tell you exactly what AI is going to do to your industry. What I can help with is examining how much of your sense of self is riding on being the guy who knows things, and what else you want to build your life around. If this one hit close to home, book a first session. Let's talk about what you're actually for.
Grayson McGraw, MA, LMHC (Florida), is a licensed mental health counselor and men’s coach. He works one-on-one with men across the country on relationships, transitions and purpose, drawing on Jungian and depth psychology, existential psychology, pattern recognition, game theory and psychedelic integration. Coaching is not therapy and is not a substitute for mental health treatment. Book a first session.
