What Your Resistance, Anger and Nostalgia Are Really Telling You

We are grieving the end of the world as we knew it.

Yet, most of us have no idea that what we are feeling is grief.

Grief is the emotional response to loss. It’s what we feel when something familiar, stable, or meaningful is taken away, even when we didn’t realize what we had until it was gone.

Right now, many of us are experiencing the loss of the world we knew pre-AI.

It’s showing up as resistance. “I don’t need this. I’m good the way things are.”

It’s showing up as anger. “Why am I being forced to learn AI? I did not sign up for this.”

It’s showing up as nostalgia. “In my day, we actually had to search for information in an encyclopedia.”

It’s showing up as overwhelm. “Everything is changing so fast. This is exhausting. I can’t keep up.”

It’s showing up as denial. “AI is going to destroy us. We should stop using it entirely.”

Perhaps you’ve found your child using AI for help with homework, and felt a wave of sadness – like you were losing the ability to guide them through a world you no longer understood yourself.

Or you’ve opened your laptop, typed a question into AI, got five complete solutions in 30 seconds, and closed your laptop because it was just too much.

AI moves at the speed of our thoughts, while our nervous system continues to process through time, breath, and reflection.

When ‘AI Everywhere’ Turned Intro Processed Grief

I remember the moment I felt grief at the realization of ‘AI everywhere’. I kept being bombarded with ads, posts and conversations about AI for productivity. Oh how quickly AI became conflated with automation, optimization, efficiency, ROI, and other made up capitalistic metrics.

I sat with my feelings of frustration, and I realized I was grieving a time when those terms did not define how human contribution was understood or evaluated in the world that I knew.

And although AI didn’t create those frameworks, it sure did accelerate them. It amplified their reach tenfold. It intensified their presence. And for me, that surfaced sadness. I grieved for ways of working grounded in depth, care, relationship, and meaning that have never translated into performance metrics.

Recognizing this helped me understand what I was feeling. I was grieving a cultural shift in how worth is measured, and AI’s role in catalyzing that shift.

We catch ourselves thinking things used to be simpler, and there’s an ache behind that thought many of us are still learning to name.

This is grief.

The pre-AI world – slower, familiar, predictable – is gone. AI is everywhere and it’s only accelerating. This realization carries an emotional charge for many of us. The old world may have been far from perfect, but it was known.

What makes this different from past technological shifts? We don’t get years to catch up and process it.

Previous generations could take their time adapting to new technology. They could ignore it for years, resist it privately, ease into it slowly. The telephone. The television. The computer. Even the internet gave us time to adjust.

We don’t have that luxury with AI.

AI is moving too fast and touching too many parts of our lives. We’re being asked to grieve and adapt simultaneously, consciously, collectively, and in real-time.

We’re Trying to Adapt While Grieving at Warp Speed

Unprocessed grief stays stuck in the body. It can harden into something else, like dis-ease. Seriously. (Read more here)

Most of us don’t know how to grieve in a healthy way.

As a Western society, we were never taught how to identify grief in our bodies or understand how it moves through its stages. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross identified five stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance – and we’re seeing all of them play out in how people relate to AI.

The resistance is denial. “I don’t need this.”

The frustration and irritation is anger. “Why am I being forced to change?”

The bargaining shows up as “maybe I’ll just automate the small stuff but keep the important work human.”

The exhaustion, the heaviness, the impulse to just lie down – that’s depression.

And for those who’ve moved through it, there’s acceptance. A grounded choice about how to engage.

Unprocessed grief becomes a barrier.

When grief isn’t acknowledged, it transforms into resistance, fear, deep sadness, and a loss of agency. It blocks us from adapting with emotional intelligence.

We end up blaming AI for feelings that are actually about loss – loss of familiarity, loss of slowness, loss of a world where effort gave things meaning.

This is collective grief.

An entire generation processing massive technological and cultural change at the same time, at a speed humanity has never experienced before.

We have to name what we’re feeling, so that we can move through it together.

Or, we’ll just stay stuck – some of us resisting, some of us burning out trying to keep up, and many of us wondering why this feels so hard.

Something shifts when we can name our grief.

Once I could name mine – grief around how human worth is measured and how capitalistic productivity language dominates the narrative – I was able to create a purposeful relationship with AI. One that now drives everything I do in my work.

The way I teach AI changed. The way I talk about AI changed. The way I promote and advocate for AI use became anchored in that awareness.

The awareness of my grief shaped my boundaries. It influenced my messaging. It informed how I invited others to interact with AI – emphasizing intention, humanity, and care alongside capability.

When you can identify what you’re grieving, you can engage with clarity. You begin acting from understanding rather than reacting from fear. You participate with agency. You shape the narrative instead of being carried by it.

Let Grief Become Your Orientation

The grief is inevitable. Loss is loss. The world has changed. This type of loss is hard to explain though, because there is no clear before and after, so it can also be referred to as “ambiguous loss”(Read more here).

What we can do is learn to identify it, move through it consciously, and grieve in ways that allow us to adapt with care instead of powering through or shutting down.

Here’s how to recognize grief when it shows up:

1. Notice your resistance.

When you feel yourself pulling back from AI, ask: Is this actually about the technology? Or am I grieving something familiar that’s slipping away?

2. Name the feeling.

“I’m feeling nostalgic.” “I’m feeling angry.” “I’m feeling overwhelmed.” Then ask: “Could this be grief?”

Once you name it as grief instead of confusion or inadequacy, you will stop blaming yourself. You stop blaming the technology. You recognize you’re experiencing a normal human response to profound change.

3. Let yourself feel it.

Processing grief doesn’t need to be rushed. It needs to be acknowledged. Give yourself permission to feel sad about what’s been lost. To miss the slower pace. To mourn the world where effort gave things weight.

You don’t have to love AI to adapt to it. You’re allowed to grieve what came before.

4. Check in with your body.

Where does the grief live? Heaviness in your chest? Tightness in your throat? Exhaustion in your limbs?

Your body knows what you’re feeling before your mind names it. Pay attention.

5. Choose how you engage.

Once you’ve acknowledged the grief, you can make a conscious choice about how you move forward.

You can use AI in ways that honor slowness instead of speed. Quality instead of quantity. Depth over productivity.

Ask AI meaningful questions like, “What am I not seeing about myself in this situation?“ alongside the standard questions like, “How can I do this faster?“

Use it to deepen your understanding of yourself, not just to produce more.

AI Is Teaching Us How to Grieve at Scale

We have a chance to do something older generations didn’t: grieve openly, collectively, and consciously.

Previous generations spoke of past eras with longing because they never learned to grieve them. They just kept moving forward, carrying unprocessed loss.

We can do this differently.

AI may be the first technology that teaches humanity how to grieve at scale. Which means it may also open the door to grieving much older layers of loss – the decades-long erosion of craft, care, and human-paced creation.

If we can metabolize the end of an era together, we can meet what comes next with emotional intelligence instead of just reactivity.

This is about evolving our emotional maturity at the same scale as our technological competency.

You can grieve the past and still embrace the future. Those two things can coexist.

In fact, they have to.

Because the future is already here. And grieving the loss of the past allows us to adapt better.

So feel the grief. Name it. Move through it. And then choose how you want to engage with what comes next.

The world has changed. We get to decide how we change with it.