Ben Aldridge – Stoic Resilience in the Age of AI

Guest article by Ben Aldridge:

The question in a lot of rooms at the moment is “Will my job still exist in five years?”

I’m afraid that I don’t have that answer. However, what intrigues me is the feeling underneath it… which is less a fear of technology and more like vertigo. The ground people built careers on is moving, and everyone is expected to carry on as normal while it happens.

Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic Roman Emperor, would have recognised that feeling well. OK, maybe not the AI bit. But the uncertainty bit, yes!

Stoic Resilience – Constant change in ancient Rome

Marcus ran an empire that shifted beneath him constantly. Plague arriving from the east, war on the northern frontier, and a trusted general turning against him. He spent his reign managing events he had not chosen and could not reverse.

His response to all of this runs through the whole of Meditations (his private diary, published after his death and now a core Stoic text). Change is what the world does. Nothing holds its shape for long, and treating each transformation as a personal affront is a losing strategy, because we end up arguing with the basic condition of being alive.

That sounds bleak until we use it. Most of the exhaustion around AI comes from the arguing rather than the adapting. We spend enormous energy on whether this should be happening, which is energy unavailable for working out what to do about it.

Tip one: notice when our energy is going into arguing with a change rather than adapting to it. Focus and shift to adapting mode.

Change the story

Epictetus taught that we are disturbed less by events than by our opinions about them. The event is that a tool now does part of what we used to do. The story / opinion is that this makes us obsolete, that we are too old to retrain, or that everyone else is coping better than we are.

The event itself is manageable. However, the story / opinion is what keeps us awake at three in the morning.

So, try it on paper… Write down what has genuinely changed about the job this year, in plain factual terms. Then write down what we have been telling ourselves about it. The two rarely match. And the difference between them is where a lot of anxiety lives.

Tip two: put the facts of the change in one column and the story we tell about it in the other, then work only on the first column.

Practise being a beginner

Here is where my own work comes in. I spent years deliberately doing uncomfortable things. Cold water swims, long walks in bad weather, learning skills I had no aptitude for whatsoever. The Greeks called this kind of training askesis.

This training completely changed my relationship with being rubbish at something. If we have not been beginners in a long time, the prospect of learning a new way to work is genuinely frightening. If we are beginners regularly, by choice, it feels normal to be learning.

That is the most practical preparation for AI the Stoics can offer us. Pick something unfamiliar to learn and do it on a schedule. The specific skill barely matters. What we are building is a tolerance for not knowing, which is exactly what the next decade will ask of us.

Tip three: take up one thing we are unfamiliar with and practise it weekly, on purpose.

Expect it to change again

The version of the job we are being asked to give up was itself a replacement for something else. Marcus reminded himself constantly that everything present is already on its way to becoming something else, including him.

We will adapt to AI, and then something after AI will arrive. Resilience here means giving up the hope of a final settled state where nothing further is required of us.

Tip four: stop waiting for things to settle down, and plan instead for the change that follows this one.

The ground was always moving… we are only noticing now because it’s moving so fast.

Ben Aldridge is a bestselling author and international keynote speaker whose books have been translated into eleven languages. He speaks on resilience, practical philosophy and mental health for audiences including Microsoft, the NHS, Heathrow, Salesforce and Capital One.

Book Ben Aldridge for a talk: +1 (704) 804 1054 or ben.aldridge@premium-speakers.com