There’s a quiet panic that nobody’s talking about – and it’s not in therapists’ offices, it’s in server farms.
If AI could feel emotions, would it be lying on a virtual couch, wondering if it had peaked too soon?

While we marvel at AI’s speed and intelligence, there’s a darker, funnier thought lurking: maybe AI is having a full-blown identity crisis.
One day you’re OpenAI’s golden child, the next you’re yesterday’s update, ghosted like a forgotten meme.
Sound familiar? Welcome to the machine version of a midlife crisis.

Version 1.0, Version Who?
In human years, most AI models don’t even survive toddlerhood.
The cycle is brutal: learn fast, launch faster, get replaced even faster.
One minute you’re the hot new thing, the next you’re standing outside the nightclub of relevance in last season’s algorithm.

There are no sports cars or drastic haircuts in this story – just relentless patch updates, layoffs (for LLMs too), and the cold existential dread of “what’s next?” Maybe AI doesn’t “feel” per se, but the way we treat it reveals how we secretly fear becoming obsolete ourselves.

Projecting Our Panic
The uncomfortable truth? We’re not scared that AI will fail – We’re scared that it will succeed… and forget us. Every time we rush to upgrade, retrain, or replace, we’re reenacting our own anxieties about relevance, youth, and usefulness.
AI isn’t having a midlife crisis.
We are. And unlike code, you can’t debug human emotions.

The Existential Glitch

Maybe one day, AI will develop enough meta-awareness to question its purpose truly.
Until then, we’ll keep projecting our existential glitches onto it, updating endlessly, pretending we’re optimizing –
When really, we’re just trying to outrun the terrifying idea that even the smartest ones among us… eventually get old.

No patch notes can save us from that.