I Spent a Year in the Identity Crisis AI Is About to Give Everyone

One year ago today I walked into work for the last time, handed in my laptop, and walked out of the corporate world. Following a deeply held intuition in my body that doing so was the first step toward the purpose I am here in this very moment in time for.

It was the boldest move I had ever made in my short 38 years on planet earth. It was scary — viscerally scary. Yet the deepest part of me was totally settled. I knew it was the move. I knew it was the time. I can't fully explain how that works, but there was a confidence in what I was doing that came from a place much deeper than the rational mind. It came from deep in the body and at the same time from a place beyond any idea of the body.

When you know, you just know. Ya know?

Anyway — I don't want to write the article you're expecting. This isn't "5 Things I Learned After Quitting My Job." This is about something I think is coming for a lot of people, whether you quit your job or not. And I'd rather tell you about that.

The first few days at home felt like a giant weight lifting off my shoulders, off my back — I could feel it literally like that in my body. A huge exhale.

But that feeling was short-lived.

After about ten days I started to notice a background humming. A low-level panic rising up in my body. This sense that if I wasn't doing something, producing something, I was worthless. My identity was tied to productivity — to what I do for a job. Who am I if I'm not a salesman? Who am I if I'm not accomplishing tasks and making money?

Let me tell you — it's disorienting. And it can feel existential.

This exact experience is now happening to millions of people involuntarily. At least I had chosen to walk away to follow a deeper sense of calling. What happens when AI forces this kind of crisis on a huge portion of the population?

AI is already dissolving the scaffolding of knowledge work. The skills that felt like "you" turn out to be exactly what the models can do. The strategy deck you spent three days building? A model drafts it in minutes. The analysis that made you the smartest person in the room? Done faster, with more data, and no ego. That thing you did that felt like you — it turns out it was a skill, not an identity.

You've probably already felt it. That moment where you watch AI do in thirty seconds what used to take you a full day, and something drops in your stomach. Not because the tool is bad. Because some part of you just whispered: if it can do what I do, then what am I?

The question who am I without my output? is showing up more and more — its not so much just a philosophical musing anymore, but as an actual, lived reality landing in people's nervous systems.

And I have news for you: it's not slowing down. More and more people will come face to face with this question, and it will land in their bodies the way it landed in mine last year. The way it still lives in my body every single day.

The instinct, when this hits, is to reach. To grab for a new identity before the old one has fully composted. To find the next title, the next role, the next container that tells you and the world who you are.

I know the instinct because I felt it and continue to feel it. Your nervous system will demand resolution. It will scream at you to do something, be something, produce something — because that's the only way it knows how to feel safe.

Stay anyway.

Let the question breathe. Tolerate the gap. I know how counterintuitive this sounds — everything in our culture tells us to pivot fast, adapt faster, figure it out. But something is trying to emerge in that open space, and it can't if you fill it too quickly. The gap isn't the problem. The gap is where the real work happens.

When I look back at this past year, I don't really see it as a decision about staying in a job or leaving one. It was about the choice we make every single day: am I going to live?

Am I going to say yes to the life I'm actually here to live — fully, all the way? Or am I going to stay in a life that isn't quite dead but isn't fully alive?

I believe I'm here for a purpose. And I believe that in choosing to live that purpose every day, something larger conspires to meet me. That was the real choice. Not "do I stay or go." But do I say yes to life?

I would propose that we face this decision in every moment. And I am choosing to live. To live big and alive.

AI is going to give people a brutal, unwelcome gift: stripping away the thing they thought they were.

The ones who navigate it best won't necessarily be the fastest adapters. In my opinion, they'll be the ones who know — in their body, with their entire being, not as a LinkedIn platitude — that their worth was never defined by their output.

So what's my closing statement? Honestly, I'm not sure. I don't have it figured out and I'm not going to pretend I do.

But I feel like I have a part to play in what's coming — and when I say what's coming, I also mean what's already here. And I believe you do too.

If something in your body responded while reading this — a flicker, a tightness, a longing — I'd invite you to pay attention to it.

It's a signal.

ALIVE,
Matt