The symptom
You open LinkedIn on a Tuesday morning. Three posts telling you that if you’re not using AI you’re already obsolete. One announcing a course on “mastering AI in 7 days.” Another from someone who just automated their entire company with an agent. And you, drinking your coffee, with that nagging feeling that you’re falling behind.
That has a name. It’s called AInxiety. And it’s more common than it seems.
But it’s not just LinkedIn. Every week Google DeepMind, Anthropic, OpenAI and the rest of the big labs launch something new. A more powerful model. A capability that didn’t exist before. A benchmark surpassed. The pace is so fast it’s almost impossible to keep up with everything. I ended up automating my own newsletter just to filter the noise. Because if you don’t, the volume buries you.
AInxiety isn’t abstract fear of the future. It’s a constant, daily pressure that mixes the noise of social media with the real speed of technology and produces something quite uncomfortable: the feeling that nothing is ever enough, that there’s always something new to learn, something to adopt, something you can’t afford to ignore.
The problem is that feeling, for the most part, is manufactured.
The paradox nobody mentions
There’s a 19th century concept that explains very well what’s happening. It’s called the Jevons paradox. When more efficient steam engines were invented, logic suggested coal consumption would drop. The opposite happened: efficiency made coal cheaper to use, so it was used for more things, in more places, by more people. Total consumption skyrocketed.
With AI, exactly the same thing is happening.
A study from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business published in Harvard Business Review in 2026 tracked employees at a company that adopted AI tools for eight months. The result was uncomfortable: employees worked faster, took on a broader scope of tasks, and extended their working hours. Nobody asked them to. They did it on their own because AI made “doing more” feel possible and accessible.
We’re not going to work less because AI is faster. We’re going to work more, on more problems, in less time. The demand for productivity doesn’t shrink when it gets cheaper. It expands.
If you’re waiting for AI to give you your afternoons back, that expectation might need revisiting.
The problem with the tool that does everything
AI can write, code, analyze data, search for information, generate images, summarize documents, translate, make presentations. And that’s exactly the problem.
When a tool does too many things, most people don’t know what to do with it.
I’ve seen companies pay for AI subscriptions for months without using them in any meaningful way. Not because the tool is bad. But because nobody stopped to ask what specific problem they wanted to solve. They buy the tool first. Look for the problem after. And many times they never find it.
The people who get the most out of these tools aren’t the ones who know the most about AI. They’re the ones who are very clear about which part of their work they want to improve. A tool that does a thousand things doesn’t give you an advantage on its own. Knowing exactly what you’re using it for does.
The useful question isn’t “what can AI do?” It’s “what specific task in my day do I want to stop being my problem?”
The anxiety business
This isn’t a coincidence. AInxiety is also a market.
Every time someone feels like they’re falling behind, someone else shows up ready to sell them the solution. Courses on “mastering AI in a month.” Prompt engineering masterclasses. Consultants who will help you “transform your company with AI” before it’s too late.
I’m not saying all of that is bad. But a significant part of it feeds directly off fear, not off real value. Worth keeping in mind before reaching for your card.
And there’s something else AI is doing to us, this time at a cognitive level, that deserves attention. I’m looking into exactly that for the next article, and the data I’ve found is fairly unsettling. I’ll give you a preview here: AI might be making us a little less sharp without us noticing. More on that soon.
Relax. Reality moves slower than your feed
Here’s the part nobody talks about.
According to McKinsey’s State of AI 2025 report, 88% of companies already use AI in some function. That sounds like total transformation. But the same report says only a third have managed to scale it meaningfully across their organization. And only 6% are seeing real financial impact.
In other words: almost everyone has the tool. Very few know what to do with it.
Big technological shifts always look faster from the outside than from the inside. The internet took decades to truly change how we work. So did the smartphone. AI won’t be different in that sense.
That doesn’t mean it won’t change things. It will. But the real timeline is more human than the headlines suggest. You have time to learn, to experiment, to make mistakes and correct them. You don’t need to know everything tomorrow.
AInxiety thrives on constant comparison and infinite scroll. The antidote isn’t another course or another tool. It’s asking yourself one simple, honest question: what specific problem do I actually want to solve with this?
If you have an answer, go for it. If you don’t, waiting isn’t falling behind. It’s being smart.