Tech has made speed the measure of everything: faster releases, smaller teams, more output, with AI setting the pace. But people are not machines. Machines don’t tire, worry, or lie awake after a bad meeting. People do, and a workplace that forgets that pays for it in ways no dashboard shows.
In my psychotherapy practice, I work with many people in tech. They are thoughtful, capable, and proud of what they build. What they describe now is not just working too much. It’s being held to a standard no person can meet. These are some of the themes I have heard repeatedly over the past few years.
The ground keeps moving
Teams reorganize. Projects that took years are cancelled overnight. Colleagues disappear on a Tuesday, and the 2 p.m. meeting still happens. According to Layoffs.fyi, more than 125,000 tech workers had lost their jobs by early August 2026, already more than in all of 2025. Many companies cited AI.
You don’t have to lose your job for this to take a toll. The American Psychological Association calls this an “age of uncertainty.” In its 2025 Work in America survey, 65 percent of workers ages 26 to 43 named job insecurity as a significant source of stress. Among workers 18 to 25, it was 75 percent. Job insecurity is linked to poorer physical and mental health, lower job satisfaction, and less trust in employers. (Kirsten Weir, “Workers Are Facing an Age of Uncertainty,” Monitor on Psychology, APA, January 2026.)
A part of you is always scanning. Is my team next? Is this project real? Should I be learning something else? Will my job exist in five years?
When uncertainty follows you home
The workday doesn’t end when you close the laptop. When people don’t know whether their team, project, or role will exist six months from now, the mind keeps trying to solve a problem it cannot solve. So they prepare. They work harder, learn another skill, stay visible. But no amount of preparation can create certainty where there isn’t any.
Sleep, exercise, boundaries, and time off all help. They just don’t resolve the underlying problem: living in an environment where the ground keeps moving.
When being good at your job stops feeling like enough
Most people spend years becoming excellent at something. Competence stops being a line on a résumé and becomes part of who you are: I know how to solve this. People come to me for this. I’ve spent fifteen years getting good at it. Then a tool does part of it in seconds.
Researchers Erik Hermann, Stefano Puntoni and Carey Morewedge argue that generative AI can threaten three basic psychological needs at work: competence, autonomy, and relatedness. We need to feel capable, to have some say in how we work, and to stay connected to other people. When AI supports those needs, it feels like a tool. When it erodes them, it feels like a threat. (“Why Gen AI Feels So Threatening to Workers,” Harvard Business Review, March–April 2026.)
So when someone is told AI will “make your job easier,” and then watches leadership discuss needing fewer people, their unease is not irrational. It’s an accurate reading of the room.
The machine’s speed becomes yours
When a task that took three days takes three hours, you might expect to get time back. Rarely. The expectation becomes three more tasks. Do more with fewer people.
After enough layoffs, saying this workload isn’t sustainable stops sounding like an observation. It sounds like volunteering to be next. For older workers, women, and people of color who often already feel they must prove they belong, that fear can run deeper.
What gets lost when faster becomes better
The first things to go are the ones no dashboard tracks.
Rest. Sleep, weekends, an afternoon with nothing to produce. They feel optional until they’re gone.
Time to absorb loss. A team you built together disappears in an afternoon, and the work goes on as if nothing happened. There is no room to grieve the people, the projects, or the version of the job that is gone. Research cited by the APA suggests people handle change better when they feel valued, informed, and safe. Few get the chance.
Honesty. People stop saying what they need when saying it feels dangerous.
Craft. The slow thinking, the second look, the pride of doing something well get squeezed out by the demand for more.
Self-worth. When your worth depends on how useful you are, any slowdown feels like a threat.
There are no easy answers. Most of us can’t walk away, and the technology isn’t slowing down.
What can’t be rushed
Speed is what machines do best. It was never what made work good.
When my clients describe the best work they’ve ever done, it rarely sounds like speed. It sounds like judgment, curiosity, trust, the ability to sit with a problem long enough to understand it. Often it involves two people thinking together, one person’s question changing the other person’s idea. They leave with something neither brought into the room, and often feeling more alive than when they sat down.
AI may make many parts of work faster. But faster cannot be the only measure of better. People need time to think, to make mistakes, to talk to each other, and sometimes to do less.
The challenge ahead is not figuring out how humans can keep up with machines. It is remembering what we lose when we try.