Constant Change Is Not New

"We are living through the most significant technological change in human history."

I've heard this sentence a thousand times in the last two years. And the thing is — it might be true. But it also might not matter the way you think it does.

Because people have said this before. Many times. And they were right every time.

This has all happened before

In the 1890s, doctors literally diagnosed something called neurasthenia — nervous exhaustion caused by telegraphs, railways, and city noise.

The world was moving too fast. The human brain wasn't designed for this pace. People were overwhelmed, anxious, burning out.

Swap out telegraphs for Slack notifications and railways for AI model releases and you have the exact conversation happening on Twitter right now. Same language. Same fear.

Push buttons — doorbells, elevators — scared people because they couldn't see how things worked anymore.

You pressed something and something happened and you didn't understand the mechanism. That's the same anxiety people have about AI today. I don't understand what's happening inside the box.

The Luddites smashed textile machines between 1811 and 1816. History remembers them as anti-technology, but that's not what they were.

They were skilled craftsmen who had spent years developing expertise, watching their leverage evaporate overnight.

The machines weren't better than them at everything. But the machines were good enough, and cheap enough, that the math changed.

That's knowledge workers right now. Lawyers, consultants, analysts, copywriters, developers.

Watching something do in seconds what they trained years to do. Not perfectly. But good enough. And getting better every quarter.

Gutenberg's printing press threatened the entire scribe class and the Church's monopoly on information. The Church tried to regulate it.

That's the same impulse behind every "we need to regulate AI" conversation happening in government right now — an incumbent power structure trying to maintain its grip on who gets to distribute knowledge.

The Protestant Reformation blew up a thousand-year monopoly on truth. Suddenly anyone could interpret scripture for themselves.

That's what's happening with expertise right now.

The consultants, the advisors, the credentialed experts — watching their monopoly dissolve. Not because they were wrong. Because access changed.

Pre-1914 Europe carried ambient dread for twenty years. Art, philosophy, politics — everything had this undercurrent of something building toward something terrible.

And then World War I actually happened. Which is the uncomfortable part of the analogy. Because sometimes the dread is justified.

The throughline

Every generation thinks they're the ones living through the unprecedented moment. They're always both right and wrong.

Right, because the change is real. The printing press reshaped civilization. The industrial revolution destroyed an entire class of skilled labor. The internet changed everything.

Wrong, because the human reaction to it is never new. The overwhelm, the anxiety, the desperate scramble to figure out what to do next — that's been the same for five hundred years.

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.

Nobody could. If someone tells you they figured out what's AI-proof back in late 2025, they're lying.

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.

The telegraphs didn't end the world. The printing press didn't end the world. The machines the Luddites smashed didn't end the world.

The world changed. The people who got still long enough to see clearly adapted. The ones who panicked the hardest adapted the slowest.

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.