Hello, fellow humans. As we move from work spaces into the holiday spaces, now is a good time to reflect on who we are, and where we’ve been over the past year. AI is posing some difficult questions about who we are and what makes us valuable as humans. So what happens when a computer system “knows” more than you? Because even though ChatGPT can answer your questions with real confidence and even empathy, it doesn’t know anything. It cannot feel for you. It can only select the most mathematically likely response. Which means that it also cannot have perspective; it cannot have a point of view. It can only provide a mathematical consensus.

So it is all the more important that we establish our personal and professional identities and protect our “cognitive sovereignty” as we learn how to leverage AI in productive and ethical ways while still preserving our sense of self.

Today, we share three pieces from Psychology Today that dig into these questions.

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A powerful piece in Psychology Today involves how AI is forcing professionals to reconstruct their identities as expertise becomes less defining. Stories explore the "highest-risk moment for professional identity" and the need for adaptation through recognizing loss, reframing expertise, and rebuilding through action.

Fortunately, this article provides helpful guidance on how to rebuild your identity in the face of reskilling or seeing AI creep into your expertise domain. If you’ve always identified yourself as “the woman who fixes things,” or “the man who pulls together all the data,” or “the woman who answers customer questions,” and now you’re seeing your role slowly get replaced by AI as you go through reskilling training, you might experience what they call “narrative collapse.”

The author, Trond Arne Undheim, Ph.D., shares three stages for how to define yourself and rebuild your identity if you’re experiencing a narrative collapse about who you are in the workplace.

He also lists five ongoing practices to integrate into your routine if you are defining a new chapter in your career, being shaped by AI.

In Psychology Today, Grant Hilary Brenner dives into the challenging questions around who we are when a chatbot can (in some ways) feel like a better friend, companion, collaborator than our own human friends and colleagues. It gets to fundamental questions about human identity in an AI-augmented world.

AI has some fundamental gaps with humans that have been spelled out in the "Human-Moment Gap Framework" (HMGF; Frimpong, 2025), including emotional imitation without depth, a lack of a relationship continuity, and lacking a sense of dignity for the human experience. But intially, chatbot response can feel like a salve, even if it is superficial substitution for a real human connection.

The article also discusses how people are experiencing identity confusion, dependency anxiety, and "cognitive sovereignty" concerns - questioning whether they are the authors of their own thoughts. This represents what researchers call the "fourth narcissistic blow" to human ego, following Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud's revelations.

In the end, the conclusion here is that maybe the biodigital singularity is the path forward. I am not convinced that people will accept that; historically, the degree and depth of human adoption of technologies becomes a cultural differentiator. CDs see wide adoption, then vinyl makes a comeback as a taste differentiator. Camera phones have a certain cachet, then a subculture develops around rejecting them in favor of dedicated cameras. There will always be enclaves of adoption and rejection, and at this point, there’s no way to see if one approach will come to dominate others.

We only have so much regenerative capacity. We can only rebuild so much of our knowledge, psyche, and emotional strength at a time. Psychology Today digs into this question because of how AI is challenging our identities. So even for the the most resilient of us — maybe even espcially for the most resilient of us — stories that consistently highlight the "adaptation gap" - humans struggling to keep pace with AI advancement challenge our emotional and cognitive health. In the AI space, this matters for the cognitive dulling, de-skilling, and dependency patterns where people avoid independent emotional processing during distress. The concern centers on whether convenient AI tools improve efficiency at the cost of human capacity-building.

The article discusses how “failing fast” sometimes gets us out of the problem space too quickly for us to really learn the lessons and gain the insights that we need. Pivoting away too soon also takes a stress toll. The author suggests that failing slowly allows us to feel the full force of a failure so that we can learn deeper lessons, and in that moment of failure, step back and allow ourselves the full space needed to grow after a trauma.

The piece offers six mechanisms for building adaptive coping. The important thing is that all of them require human connection and building peer networks. But doing that with human support networks is the path to building superior resilience through alternating cycles of strain and recovery.

I hope you all take this holiday time to double down on recovery.