Dear Friends,
To the new faces here this week, welcome. You showed up at a good time.
For a couple of years now, the story about AI and jobs has had one main character: the young person. The recent graduate, first on the chopping block, watching the entry-level rungs get pulled up before they could reach them.
A study I read this month points somewhere I didn't expect.
It comes from the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, where an economist named Geoffrey Sanzenbacher looked at government labor data against a measure of how exposed each occupation is to AI. His question was narrow and specific. Since ChatGPT arrived in late 2022, have older workers in AI-exposed jobs started leaving work sooner than they used to?
The answer was yes.
And here's the part that stayed with me. It isn't the physical jobs seeing the change. It's the desk jobs, the programmers and the accountants and the analysts. The very careers that used to be the safe ones, the ones you could ride comfortably into your late sixties because the work wasn't hard on your body. Those workers are now leaving earlier. For computer programmers, the model predicted a jump of more than twenty-five percent in the rate of exit from work.
The careers that were supposed to last the longest are the ones getting cut short.
And a meaningful share of those departures didn't look like retirement at all. They looked like unemployment. Out of work, still looking, not able to find the next thing.
I want to be careful here, because this is early data and the researcher himself is careful about it. This isn't a prophecy. It's a signal.
But the signal is worth sitting with, because of what it does to the shape of a transition.
Most of the work I do rests on an unspoken assumption that people rarely say out loud, which is that you'll get to choose your moment. That the exit will come when you decide it comes, when the number is right, when you've had enough, when you're ready to hand it off and walk into whatever's next on your own two feet. So much of the planning conversation is built around that assumption. Design the next chapter. Take your time. You've earned the runway.
But what this research names is the possibility that the timing isn't always yours to set.
Sometimes the chapter ends before you've written the next one. The role dissolves, or gets automated, or simply stops needing you, and you find yourself standing at the threshold of Act Three a few years earlier than the plan assumed, holding a question you thought you had more time to answer.
And this is the thing I most want to say.
When the timing gets taken out of your hands, the identity work doesn't become less important. It becomes the only thing you actually control.
You can't fully control whether your field gets reshaped. You can't control the pace of a technology that's moving faster than any of us can track. What you can do, the one piece that's entirely yours, is the internal work of knowing who you are underneath the role, before the role is the thing deciding your timeline.
I keep coming back to a number from an AARP survey buried in the same research. Among adults fifty and older, about a quarter said they see AI as a threat to their line of work. Nineteen percent saw it as an opportunity.
I understand the fear. I'm not here to talk anyone out of it.
But I'd gently point at what sits underneath it. A threat to what, exactly? For most people, the fear isn't really about the technology. It's about what the technology might take. The title, the standing, the sense of being someone who's needed and knows what they're doing. The structure that has told you who you are every morning for thirty years.
That's the Identity Gap. And a forced timeline doesn't create it. It just removes the luxury of ignoring it.
The people who move through this kind of disruption with their footing intact are almost never the ones who saw it coming from a mile off. They're the ones who had already done some of the work of separating who they are from what they do, so that when the what changed, the who was still standing.
That work is available to you right now. Today. While the choice is still, at least partly, yours.
You don't need a crisis to start asking the question. And the whole point is not to wait for one.
If you haven't sat with it lately, and I mean the actual question of who you are becoming as this next chapter comes into view, not the logistics and not the numbers, this might be the week.
The technology will do what it does. The one variable you own is how ready you are, underneath all of it.
Warmly,
Cara
Future Identity Strategist
Founder, Good Morning Freedom
P.S. The Future Identity Snapshot exists for exactly this: finding language for where you are before the moment forces the question. It's a reflective assessment, not a personality quiz, a way to see the picture clearly while the timing is still yours.