I'm Terrified of Becoming a Tech Relic

I was walking my dog this morning, half-listening to a podcast about AI tools, when I got this sudden uncomfortable flash of the early 2000s.

The “old guys” at my first company. Smart people. Genuinely capable, decades of real value. But somewhere along the way they just stopped. Struggled with email. Struggled switching to word processors. You could watch the world move past them in real time, and there was something unsettling about it, even as a new grad. Like they’d become ghosts in their own offices.

I don’t want to be that guy.

It’s a strange thing to admit. I build with AI every day, tools for work, personal projects. It’s genuinely fun. But there’s self-preservation in there too, if I’m honest.

I’m not an AI doomer. I don’t think the sky is falling. But I’m using this stuff daily, and I can see where it’s going. The gap between people who use these tools and people who are waiting to see how things shake out is growing faster than the paper-to-PC shift ever did.

I’ll keep learning because I enjoy it. But I also keep thinking about those faces twenty years ago. Getting replaced doesn’t always come with a pink slip. Sometimes it’s just the slow, quiet realization that you’ve stopped speaking the same language as everyone else in the room.