Buy-Havior is always written by me, not Chatgpt!
“I just want to be useful,” she said, as the tears came. “I’m not even sure what I’m doing out here anymore.”
I run an intimate weekly mastermind with a small group of super-high-level women. One member said this: everyone nodded vigorously.
These are top-of-their-craft, successful women.
And.
And post-Covid changed a lot.
And AI changed a lot.
And several of us have landed in the same place, which is a question that always sounds on the surface like what do I do?, but underneath is really more like what do I be?
What’s my identity if this job title disappears?
Who am I if this business that used to print money is suddenly, painfully quiet?
Or if the skillset I grew my whole life just…isn’t the one people want anymore?
And funny enough, in the way life serves us themes on big shiny platters, I was interviewed for a podcast right after that meeting.
The central podcast question: How is AI changing our identities?
And to be clear: it is.
Job losses that leave people scrambling for meaning.
Expertise that took decades to build suddenly subsumed by a robot, in a few clicks.
The destabilization of not knowing how long your work gets to be your self-definition.
I had shoulder surgery a month ago and was back at PT today. He pushed and pulled, I winced and flinched. “You gotta understand,” he said, “the outside looks good, your bruises are gone, but deep in there your bone is still as red as your nail polish.”
The women in the mastermind looked good too. But in that session, our bones were showing.
And, as with all things, it’s not all doom and gloom. Many of you have heard of Narrative Identity Theory, which I find wildly helpful at times like these. It’s the idea that we are never one identity, but that psychological health lies in letting the evolving self-story have themes, arcs, pivots, and meaning as it unfolds.
Not “Who am I?”, but “Who am I in this chapter?”
Not “What do I do?”, but “What do I choose now, knowing all moments evolve and change?”
One of my favorite Gen Z contributions to the lexicon is the idea of Main Character Energy.
No Main Character ever said, “Everything is terrible, poor me, might as well sit down on this street corner and die.”
No. They dug in, red bones and all, and found new capacities, new identities, new self-definitions that expanded beyond the old ones.
Want a taste of your own?
Try this.
Prompt it Like it’s Hot: (Your weekly cut/paste AI prompt)
Apply the idea of Narrative Identity Theory to everything you know about my life and work right now. What directions am I expanding into? Where is my narrative identity asking me to evolve?
Fair warning:
-Claude gave me a lovely answer to this one.
-ChatGPT, a system I don’t even use much anymore, was like, “Allow me to rip your guts out by the roots and lo, I shall spread them for you upon this page.”
So. Use at your own risk.
And if you’re really daring and a robot made you ugly-cry, send me your results. (You know I live for this stuff.)
Then we can laugh about how absurd it is to notice that AI is changing our identities and go to AI to ask it how our identities are changing.
Until next week (I’ll send the podcast link then, if this topic is one you’ve also been thinking about!),