Historical reflection — October 11, 2026: The core of this March 23 essay is my October–December 2025 cycle of twenty plans and the anxiety of tying identity to a revenue trajectory. The historical examples were analogies, not evidence that today’s AI effects, regulation or recovery follow the same path. I have shortened those comparisons rather than present them as a causal history.
From October to December 2025, I revised my plans roughly twenty times. Planning felt like control while my sense of identity was tied to a changing revenue trajectory.
I kept hearing that this was the most significant technological change in history. I could not establish that ranking; what I could describe was how the uncertainty affected my own planning.
People have felt overwhelmed by earlier changes too. That resemblance does not tell us how disruptive this change will be or who benefits.
This has all happened before
The historical parallels I reached for were reminders of uncertainty, not equivalent causes or outcomes. I do not need a universal history of disruption to explain what planning felt like for me.
The throughline
The resemblance I care about is a feeling of uncertainty. It does not establish a single reaction or outcome across generations.
That doesn't make it less real for you. But the pattern is worth knowing.
What happened to me
From October to December 2025, I was in it. The anxiety. The overwhelm. The feeling that everything was moving too fast and I was falling behind.
What I did every day was make plans. Because planning felt like control.
Plan V1. V2. V3. All the way to V20.
Each version got erased the next day because something new would come out — a new model, a new capability, a new benchmark — that proved the previous plan was nonsense.
The ground kept shifting under me, and every plan I built was built on ground that was about to move.
I was still making revenue. The business was still running. But I was afraid that whatever I was doing was already outdated.
Pre-AI thinking. The old playbook. I'd identify things that weren't working but I couldn't identify what would work next.
I could not see a settled answer in late 2025. That was my uncertainty, not proof that everyone else was lying or that no work could remain valuable.
But here's the part that's harder to admit.
I was on a trajectory that felt like it meant something. And then it cracked. The revenue model that was working started showing fractures, then stalled. And I panicked. Not because I was going broke — I wasn't. My burn is low. I have years of runway.
I panicked because my identity was tied to that trajectory. The milestones. The numbers. The plan.
But what was I actually chasing? A number above a number is still just a number. With my lifestyle and my burn rate, what does more revenue actually change? Fifteen years of runway instead of ten? Thirty instead of fifteen?
At some point, more runway stops having meaning. And I realized I was panicking over something that wouldn't change my life even if I caught it.
Those analogies could not tell me how AI would unfold or resolve what I should do next.
I cannot rank historical people’s adaptation by how much they panicked. For me, slowing down made it easier to notice that anxiety and financial urgency were different things.
I don't know yet if I've adapted or if I'm still in the middle of it. But I stopped planning. I stopped panicking. And for the first time in months, I can see again.