At first glance, this looks like another familiar technology success story. People without technical backgrounds are building their own digital tools, automating taxes, planning travel, analyzing medical data and managing personal admin with the help of artificial intelligence. What only a few years ago might have required a team of developers can now be assembled over a weekend.
But that is precisely where another, less obvious story begins. It is not really about the technology itself. It is about the feeling the technology produces. This is a new form of FOMO. Only now it is not about events, social opportunities or trends. It is about one’s ability to remain sufficient in a world where others are already outsourcing parts of their lives to algorithms.
The issue is not simply that people feel they are missing a trend. It is the growing sense that they may permanently fall behind those who started earlier. In that sense, AI is changing the nature of anxiety itself. It is becoming less social and more existential. If you are not building your own tools, automating your own systems and creating your own “second brain,” does that mean you are slowly falling out of the future altogether?
In Deykom’s preliminary assessment, that is the real shift. Artificial intelligence is no longer being sold merely as a productivity tool. It is being sold as a way not to be left behind. In that logic, the user is no longer simply adopting a new technology. The user is constantly comparing themselves with others, measuring their own degree of AI-competence and feeling pressure to move faster.
The paradox is that the promise of liberation from routine has not yet arrived in the way people imagine. The history of digital technology suggests something else. These systems rarely reduce the amount of work. They transform it and often expand it. Email did not shrink communication. It multiplied it. Smartphones did not free up time. They filled it with new forms of micro-admin and constant low-level obligation.
AI agents promise to go one step further by taking over tasks on a person’s behalf. They can organize calendars, answer emails, write drafts, build applications and even correct their own errors. In theory, that means a radical lowering of barriers. One no longer needs to know how to do something. One needs only to know what result is desired.
In practice, however, a new kind of labor appears: the labor of managing automation itself. In order to delegate a task to AI, the task must first be structured, described, checked and corrected. So instead of routine disappearing, another form of routine emerges—more complex, less visible and often more exhausting.
This creates a circular effect. A person organizes their life so that AI can take over part of it. Then that person supervises the AI to make sure it is working properly. In the end, what they acquire is not the absence of responsibility, but a new layer of it. The feeling of control begins to turn into the feeling of permanent oversight.
The first signs of fatigue are already visible. People who integrate AI heavily into their work often describe not relief, but overload. They take on more tasks, launch more projects and move from idea to execution faster than before. Yet along with that acceleration comes a rise in cognitive strain—the need to manage multiple parallel processes that did not previously exist.
Over time, this may lead to a deeply paradoxical outcome. A technology that promised to reduce burden creates a new productivity baseline instead. What looked yesterday like an extra advantage begins to feel today like a minimum expectation. And once that happens, refusing to use AI no longer appears as a preference. It starts to look like weakness, hesitation or decline.
That is where the deepest tension lies. People begin to feel that their effectiveness is no longer determined only by skill, experience or discipline. It is determined by how well they have integrated artificial intelligence into their own lives. That changes the very logic of competition—from individual capability to the ability to manage technological extensions of the self.
For technology companies, this is close to an ideal commercial environment. Fear of falling behind is one of the strongest drivers of demand. For users, however, it means a permanent condition of low-level pressure. One must keep learning, adapting and experimenting, even when that conflicts with an inner sense of exhaustion or overload.
The optimistic case is that this phase is temporary. Over time, interfaces may become simpler, automation more reliable and users less entangled in technical detail. The pessimistic case is that before any such maturity arrives, there will be a long stretch in which people are forced to work more, faster and under greater complexity simply to keep up with the new standard.
Historically, technological revolutions do often produce greater prosperity in the end. Living through them is another matter. The process is usually uncomfortable, unstable and disorienting. Today that discomfort has taken a new form. It is not only the fear of losing one’s job. It is the fear of failing to become the kind of person the age of artificial intelligence now seems to demand.
