Dear Friends,
In September I went to hear Viet Thanh Nguyen speak at the Printers Row Lit Fest.
The program listed him as a professor at USC, where he had taught for 28 years. During the talk, he corrected it. He had resigned. And part of the reason, he said, was AI and what it has done to teaching.
This is a Pulitzer Prize winner who had risen to the highest faculty rank his university offers. He could afford to walk away, and he did.
He has said the same thing on the record. In a podcast interview published in August, he put it plainly: “one reason I quit is because I didn’t want to deal with artificial intelligence.”
He was talking about the classroom. In his final seminar, he banned devices from the room, had students write in class every time they met, and replaced the final with a one-on-one oral exam. It worked. It was also enormously labor-intensive, the kind of thing you can do with nine students and not with a lecture hall of 150.
AI was one reason among several. He also wanted his time back for writing, and more freedom to say what he thinks.
He isn’t the only experienced professional rethinking a career around AI. Some are leaving for a simpler reason. Fortune profiled a 60-year-old who retired this year after more than thirty years in tech rather than take up a technology she disliked. The Wall Street Journal has profiled others who read AI’s arrival at work as their cue to go.
There’s no hard count of these retirements yet. The clearest data so far shows AI pushing older workers out involuntarily, which I wrote about in July. But the choice is real, and it has a history. When personal computers spread through offices, the pressure to adopt them pushed some older workers into early retirement. The ones who used computers regularly tended to keep working longer.
Here’s the part of Nguyen’s story that stayed with me.
Later in that same interview, he described how he uses AI himself. It helps with research for the novel he’s writing. He turns to it for everyday questions, like which bike to buy. And he noted that his Google searches default to AI answers whether he wants them or not.
He wasn’t refusing the technology. He was done with a version of his job that AI had made much harder to do well.
He left the job. He did not leave AI.
That separates two decisions that are easy to mistake for one.
The first: am I done with this job?
The second: am I done with this technology?
The first has an exit. You resign, you retire, you sell. The job stays behind.
The second doesn’t. AI isn’t staying at the office. It’s moving into how you’ll manage your health and your money, how you’ll plan travel, how you’ll find information and people. Nguyen didn’t have to go looking for it after he left. It was waiting in his search bar.
And the life after the job may be long. Social Security’s actuaries put average remaining life expectancy at 65 at about 18 years for men and 21 for women. Those are averages, and many of you will have more. That’s two decades in a world being rebuilt around this technology.
So I’ll say plainly what worries me. The people who opt out of AI entirely won’t stay where they are. They’ll fall behind, working or not, and the gap will widen every year.
It’s why AI has become part of my work with clients. I have most of them work through AI prompts as part of our time together. The prompts aren’t the point. Comfort is. I’d rather someone get used to this technology on low-stakes ground, with support, than meet it for the first time when something important depends on it.
None of this means you owe your current job another decade of adapting. Nguyen looked at what his job had become and decided he was done, and he had good reasons. If you’ve realized you’re done with your work, that’s a real answer, and maybe an overdue one.
Just make sure it’s the only decision you’re making. Knowing where you actually stand comes before deciding where to go. Here, that means knowing which question you’re answering.
You can retire from a job.
You can’t retire from the world AI is reshaping.
Warmly,
Cara
Future Identity Strategist
founder, Good Morning Freedom
P.S. The Future Identity Snapshot helps you see where you stand before you make a call like this one, including what you’d carry forward and what you’re ready to leave behind: https://www.goodmorningfreedom.com/future-identity-snapshot