The question nobody is asking about the AI disruption.
- Jessica Keil
- Apr 15
- 4 min read
A 2026 Newsweek analysis named "occupational identity crisis" one of the most significant emerging risks of artificial intelligence.
Not job loss. Not economic inequality. Not automation.
Identity crisis.
And yet every major institutional response to AI disruption right now. Government
retraining programmes, corporate reskilling initiatives, university curriculum overhauls, is framed around skills, roles and economic adaptation.
Not one of them is asking the more fundamental question:
Who are you when the thing you built your identity around is no longer available to define you?
I know this territory. Not from research my own personal . My story is not your story. But the mechanism is the same.
When the thing you've built your identity around dissolves; whether it's a relationship, a role, a version of yourself that made sense for a long time, the experience from the inside is the same disorientation. The same question underneath it all: whose story am I actually living?
I realised I was drowning. In his story. Yes, His. Not mine. The story of who I was with him. The story of the woman I had been in his presence. The story of who I thought he wanted me to be. The story the world had spoken to me. But where was I in all this? I had trapped myself inside the past, replaying it over and over, until it became the foundation of my identity. I had defined myself through my suffering — through rejection, abandonment, failure. It had taken root like an invasive weed, watered and nurtured through my constant attention.
If I kept telling the same story, I would never be anything but that story. As I unravelled, a new thought emerged. One that finally wasn't drenched in sorrow. What if I told a different one?
What if I wasn't drowning?
What if I was being washed clean? What if the water wasn't here to consume me, but to reveal me - raw and unarmoured. Reshaped by what I thought would drown me, for the first time, I saw the gift within the grief. I could choose. The grief, the tears, the anger weren't here to silence me, but to strip me back to truth — layer by layer, until only what mattered remained.
As I stepped into the unknown, I felt the fluidity return in unexpected ways: in my willingness to experiment, to flow with new experiences rather than resist them.
This is what millions of people are about to face.
Not the loss of a job. The loss of the story they've been living inside. And unlike a redundancy package or a retraining programme, there is no institutional response for that.
In 1909, anthropologist Arnold van Gennep identified something universal across every human culture: every genuine transition moves through three stages. Separation from the old. A liminal threshold: the in-between.
The liminal phase, he found, was not a problem to be solved. It was the most important part. In traditional cultures it was held as sacred and deliberately uncomfortable, deliberately disorienting because that disorientation was what made real transformation possible.
We have no equivalent container for this today. When people find themselves in the in-between, we hand them a reskilling programme. We tell them, in a thousand subtle ways, that the discomfort is a problem to fix rather than a passage to be in and move through, slowly and deliberately .
And I know first hand how real the discomfort it. I see it daily in my coaching practice and I know it from my own personal experience too. The questions that surface feel unbearable. The urge to fill the silence with the next thing, the next role, the next credential, the next version of the old identity is almost irresistible. As is asking AI constantly to give us the answers.
And the reason people cannot sit in the unknowing isn't because they are weak. It's that the void is full of emotions they have forgotten how to feel. Sensations that seem too intense - anger, grief, uncertainty, the rawness of not knowing.
Why? For years they have been navigating from their heads, and the body has quietly gone numb. We feel deep discomfort with sensation and our emotions. It is easier to name them bad, or negative and so we suppress, checkout, or scroll. So people run. Back into doing, back into knowing, back into the temporary relief of another course, another strategy, another plan.
That is the the old operating system. It was built on knowledge acquisition, skills accumulation, and achievement as identity. It gave us security, meaning, differentiation. It made sense for the world we were in. But that world is changing, and when that scaffolding falls away and the emotions rise, then what? There is no practiced capacity to hold them.
I want to be clear about something. This is not a survival conversation. Framing this as survival keeps us in the old operating system of scarcity, fear, competition, protection. That's the language of the past, and I'm not interested in perpetuating it.
What I'm seeing is an invitation. A threshold. And on the other side of it, something genuinely better. The liminal space cannot be bypassed. It can only be inhabited — with support, with practice, with the gradual restoration of the body's capacity to feel what is true.
The work of this moment is about restoring access to the full intelligence you were born with. The kind that lives in your body. The kind that knows what is true before your mind can explain it or rationalise it.
What story have you been living inside — and is it actually yours? And how can it shape who you can become?
Endeavors is a community of people who are consciously navigating this transition together. Not consuming content passively, but actively working with themselves, their nervous system, their patterns, their way of choosing. Inside, we practice:
learning to listen to themselves
pause before they perform
feel before they decide
stay with what’s uncomfortable instead of immediately fixing it
build a steadiness that doesn’t disappear under pressure
making decisions from something deeper than analysis alone
Join the community using the following channels:
And if you want to go deeper into my personal story behind this work, Queen of Hearts is available now. It's the book I wrote from inside the dissolving before I had language for any of this.
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