We’re losing our professional identity, and denial won’t help

For most of recorded history, thinking was a protected occupation. Not formally protected — no guild, no license — but protected by scarcity. Most people were too busy surviving to do it at scale, and the ones who weren't became the class that advised, designed, strategized, and interpreted. Knowledge work, as we came to call it, was built on that asymmetry. The asymmetry is ending.

Understand (truly) what’s happening

You used to need a researcher to map the market, a strategist to frame the opportunity, a designer to evaluate the approach, a developer to assess the build. Each handoff added weeks and a layer of organizational politics. Each person brought genuine expertise — and also their own agenda, their own backlog, their own interpretation of the brief. The work arrived somewhere different from where it started.

That chain is not being shortened. It is being compressed into a single session between one person and a machine that has read more than any research team could read in a decade. You can now go from a market hunch to a working prototype without convening a single meeting. You can stress-test a business model at midnight without a finance director.

You can generate, evaluate, and discard ten product concepts before anyone else in the organization knows you were thinking about it. You can write the brief, design the solution, and ship a version of it. Alone, in a week, for almost nothing.

This is not an augmentation. It is an entirely different kind of work, process, purpose and outcome. And it is producing, in the people who have built careers on the old kind, something that looks a lot like loss.

Losing your position

There is a well-known framework for how humans process loss. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross described it in 1969: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. She developed it to understand how people face dying, and over the following decades it migrated into almost every domain where something irreversible is happening. The stages were never meant to be a checklist. Grief, she insisted, is not a set of steps. It is a terrain.

In 2019, David Kessler (who had collaborated with Kübler-Ross in the final years of her life) proposed a sixth stage. He arrived at it the hard way: his son died suddenly, and he found himself, the grief specialist, unable to locate solid ground inside the framework he had spent decades teaching. What he eventually wrote about was meaning. Not closure: he was explicit that closure is the wrong goal. Meaning is what you build with what remains after the loss has settled into the structure of your life.

Uncloud and step up

Today, creative intellectual work, strategic work, the work of designing how organizations think and move is in a moulting stage. It is dying, and will resurface in some other shape. But now know where (and if at all) we will fit in the picture is the cause of all sorts of emotions.

And emotions, admittedly, cloud judgement. We say “we will always need” translators, or graphic designers, or consultants. That may be true, but on what scale? How many jobs will be available out there? It’s the same denial of the factory floor workers dismissed, and offered a job in quantum engineering, if they qualify.

So in order to uncloud judgement, and take a sobering step towards what is happening, and see our options, this is how the terrain looks when the thing being lost is a professional identity (and how making meaning out of this can take us forward).

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Six stages: where are you now?

Denial:  AI is a tool, not a replacement.

The position feels reasonable from the inside. You add an AI layer to your existing process and call it transformation. You produce the same deliverables slightly faster and slightly cheaper and tell yourself the core of what you do is intact. The tell, looking back, is that you never seriously examined what that core actually was.

Why it manifests The professional identity built over a career is not a small thing to question. Denial is not stupidity — it is the mind buying time while it figures out how serious the situation is. The problem is that in this particular case, time is the resource that runs out fastest.

You've heard this before — "AI can't replace real strategic thinking." — "Our clients need the human relationship, not just the output." — "I use it as a tool, but the judgment is still mine."

Signs you're moving through it You stop describing AI as something you use and start noticing the places where it has genuinely changed what you are capable of — and what that means for the parts of your work that haven't changed yet.

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Anger: Something real was taken, and nobody is accounting for it.

Less a sharp emotion than a sustained low-grade indignation. At companies that replaced whole teams with subscriptions. At the particular absurdity of being asked to demonstrate value that, two years ago, required no demonstration. The concerns underneath the anger are real: something is genuinely lost when judgment gets flattened into output, when the person accountable for a recommendation disappears. But anger is also, in this context, grief wearing a political coat.

Why it manifests Injustice is easier to hold than loss. Injustice has an actor, a cause, a potential reversal. Loss has none of those. Framing the situation as something done to you by irresponsible companies or short-sighted executives is more bearable than accepting that it is structural, and that no one is coming to fix it.

You've heard this before — "They just want cheap output. They don't care about quality anymore." — "These companies are going to regret cutting their research teams." — "The people making these decisions have never done this work."

Signs you're moving through it You find yourself making the legitimate version of these arguments — specific, evidenced, aimed at something fixable — rather than the generalized version, which is aimed at the feeling.

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Bargaining: If I adapt enough, I can keep what matters.

The most populated stage right now. It sounds like: if I integrate AI deeply enough into my process, my position is safe. Or: the value I provide is the human layer on top of the output. Or, in the more sophisticated version: I will build a methodology around this transition, write about it, consult on it. All of these responses contain genuine insight. They also contain, in varying proportions, a negotiation with a situation that may not be fully negotiable.

Why it manifests Bargaining is productive anxiety — it generates motion when paralysis would be worse. The risk is mistaking motion for resolution. A methodology is not the same as a position. A LinkedIn post about AI-native work is not the same as doing it.

You've heard this before — "I'm repositioning myself as an AI-augmented strategist." — "The value is in the prompt engineering and the curation." — "I'm writing a framework for how teams should work with AI."

Signs you're moving through it You can tell the difference between the bargaining that is producing something real — a genuine new capability, a new kind of client relationship — and the bargaining that is producing the appearance of adaptation without the substance.

One thing worth remembering: the stages are not sequential, and they do not stay where you put them. You can reach acceptance about one part of the work while still bargaining about another. You can find meaning and still cycle back through anger on a particular Tuesday. The terrain is not linear. Kübler-Ross would have wanted that said.

What stage are you in?

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Depression  The repricing is already happening, and it's quiet.

The methodology is good but the market for it is thinner than you needed. The skills that defined your career are being repriced in real time — not in some projected future, but now, in the responses you get when you describe what you do, in the budgets that used to exist for work like yours. This is not a single event. It accumulates quietly, over months, until one day you notice you have been spending a lot of energy maintaining a professional identity that the market is no longer organized around.

Why it manifests The object of the loss is diffuse. A role, a sense of what you are for, a set of capabilities that used to feel foundational. You cannot point to a specific day when it ended, which makes it hard to grieve and easy to mistake for a general malaise, a bad quarter, a temporary dip in confidence.

You've heard this before — "I don't really know what I'm selling anymore." — "I keep getting to the final round and then losing to someone cheaper." — "I'm doing the same work I always did but it doesn't feel like enough."

Signs you're moving through it You stop trying to recover the old position and start asking, with some genuine curiosity rather than dread, what a new one could actually look like.

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Acceptance  The execution layer is not coming back. The question is what's at the other end.

Not peace, and not agreement that what happened was good. The recognition that the question is no longer how to protect what existed but what a credible position actually looks like from here. The ends of the chain that remain — problem framing on one side, accountable judgment on the other — are not the parts that were ever easy to automate. Knowing which question will unlock a room. Staging evidence so people arrive at a decision they trust. Standing behind a recommendation when it is uncomfortable. These never were about intelligence alone.

Why it manifests Acceptance tends to arrive not as a decision but as an exhaustion of the alternatives. You have tried denial, you have felt the anger, you have built the frameworks. At some point the energy required to maintain the previous position exceeds the energy required to move.

What it looks like in practice — You stop describing your work in terms of what you used to do and start describing it in terms of what you can see that others can't. — You become more selective about clients and projects, not less — because you now have a clearer sense of where your judgment is actually irreplaceable. — You feel less anxious about what AI can do and more interested in what it still cannot.

Signs you're moving through it Acceptance is not a destination. You will revisit the earlier stages. What changes is that you return to them faster, with more distance, and with a clearer sense of what you are actually grieving.

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Meaning (David Kessler's sixth stage, 2019)  The new work you build because of what died

Kessler's formulation: healing occurs not when grief gets smaller but when life gets bigger. In professional terms, meaning looks like building something that is only possible because you went through the full sequence — the denial, the anger, the bargaining, the depression, and arrived at acceptance without shortcuts. The writing that comes from having sat with the uncertainty long enough to describe it accurately. The consulting work that carries weight precisely because it was earned through disorientation, not around it. The methodology that a subscription cannot replicate because it is built from a specific, hard-won point of view.

Why it matters here specifically Most frameworks for professional reinvention skip straight from acceptance to action — as if knowing what to do is the hard part. Meaning is different. It is the recognition that the loss itself is now part of your material. What you understand about this transition, because you lived it rather than observed it, is not a credential. It is the work.

What it looks like in practice — You find yourself describing the transition to others with more precision than you expected — because you have actually been through it. — The work you are building now references what you lost, rather than pretending it didn't exist. — You are less interested in recovering your old position than in doing something that the old position would not have made room for.

One thing Kessler was clear about Meaning does not mean the loss was worth it. It does not mean you are glad it happened. It means you have found something to do with it.

The messy nature of life (and work)

These stages do not happen linearly. You can reach acceptance about one part of the work while still bargaining about another. You can find meaning and still cycle back through anger on a particular Tuesday. Kübler-Ross was frustrated her whole life by how people tried to make the terrain linear. It is not. It is something you move through in every direction, sometimes quickly, sometimes over years.

Work won’t disappear, but the fixed idea of what it is about, might. I used to be thrilled by bringing a new insight to a room that I had bought to surface after days dealing with a material and that, all of a sudden, popped with clarity into my mind. An LLM can bring a lot of insights to surface. So my spark of joy at work drifted from “owning an idea” to having the landscape laid over a room, and getting to the point where others around me agreed that’s what we will do.

And my conclusion is that maybe this would have been a better focus from the beginning, but I was clouded by the task of making sense of messy information.

Another thing was to cross the Rubicon and get my hands into command-line interfaces with Claude code and, with close guidance, create my repositories in GitHub, brush up my skills with CSS and actually build applications. That feeling was a real thrill. Personal projects, live prototypes and ideas exploded in a profusion of possibilities.

The information is no longer messy, I don’t need to scavenge, and I don’t own fancy reports anymore. But I did find meaning in moving away from that.

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This is a recurring theme in Everybody's Smart — how work is changing for people who do creative, strategic, intellectual work, and what it means to navigate that change without pretending it is smaller than it is.