What is Changexiety?

Changexiety is the feeling graphic designers got when Midjourney came out and started putting a bunch of DeviantArtists to shame in 30 seconds. It’s the barrage of questions they’ve been wrestling with: what does this mean for my career and the industry? How can I adapt? What can I do instead? Do I have enough time to leap to another career? Or will I be ok?

Changexiety is the feeling that many writers are struggling with as ChatGPT threatens to soon take a serious bite out of their business pie. It might not outdo them for now, but it’s only a matter of time until they’re throwing their hands up and looking over at their moms like Kasparov after resigning to Deep Blue. Changexiety is the knotty gut feeling that Kasparov had after that game: the chess world will never be the same again. Now what?

Changexiety is also that eerie feeling some get when they come back home after being away for years. The house is both the same and different. Same kitchen, but the folks put in a new granite kitchen top and replaced the old floor tiles and with local stone. Same bathroom, but the faucet’s new and the medicine cabinet’s been ripped out and replaced by a slim new mirror. It feels like being at home and in an alien world all at once. That land is called changexiety land.

A lot of hoopla’s been made out of how rapidly our world’s changing. Twenty five years ago, IBM’s super computer squeaked by a victory of Kasparov. Now a standard chess app’s AI on a cheap phone that fits in your pocket could soundly beat him. Twenty five ago, hardly anyone had a personal cell phone. Now 60% of all people own a smart phone. In countries like America or Finland, that number reaches into the 90s. Also twenty five years ago, less than 10% of households owned a computer. That numbers up to 50% and growing steadily. Increased access to these new technologies have revolutionized how we interact, buy, work, and even think. The coming decades will only bring more rapid and more extreme changes as computing power and production increase exponentially.

The statistics above are true, but I wonder if most of us don’t suffer from a bad case of exceptionalism. Other eras have been arguably racked by greater change than our own. The industrial revolution in the 1820s. The Great Famine in Ireland and the ensuing exodus in 1840s. The Hundred Years War that ravaged France and England. The Gallic Wars of 50–58AD which nearly annihilated an entire race of people across Italy, Spain, and France. In between these cataclysmic events were mass migrations, famines, plagues, and other wars that were, at the time, so normal that they hardly get a mention in the annals of history. So, for what it’s worth, if you’re freaking out about how much the world seems to be teetering on the edge of the abyss and how no one else in human history can ever understand what you’re going through because this is such a unique moment, unparalleled over the 100,000 years of human existence, stop. Step back. What we’re going through is business as usual.

Changexiety is perfectly normal but, like when returning home after a few years away, it’s often not as dramatic as being massacred en masse by Augustus Caesar. Often, it happens bit-by-bit, day-by-day. Economic, technological, or even company changes often happen glacially that rather than in big bursts. Those bursts still happen, like 9/11, but rare. This is where the Ship of Theseus comes in. Below’s a quote from Plutarch’s The Life of Theseus which formed the basis for this philosophical conundrum:

The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their places, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.*1

This conundrum actually pervades our lives. Take the finance sector. If you compare the finance world of 20 years ago where hardly anyone was trading online, information was still kept in vanilla filing cabinets, and no one had heard of Big Data or Machine Learning, the world’s changed a lot. The problem is that we don’t get to leap ahead to 20 years and figure it all out when our feet hit the ground. We have to deal with it in real time, day-by-day. That means a lot incremental changes that we have to reckon with. It’s only in retrospect that we can appreciate that the entire ships completely changed. And that constant change and uncertainty creates anxiety. A lot of anxiety.

Worse, that anxiety isn’t limited only to financing. It includes our children, our relationships, our company, our investments, the market, technology, our emotions, everything. It’s all changing and that change often sparks anxiety. The good news: people’ve been wrestling with this stuff for millennia, so there are some time-tested tools that can help us deal with it.

How to Deal With It

I’m not going to go down the philosophical rabbit hole of whether the Ship of Theseus existed in perpetuity or not. That’s been raging for millennia and will probably not be ending any time soon. What I will offer, instead, is one tool to help you deal with the elusive and ever-shifting nature of our world. These exercises are inspired by the work of the Sextus Empiricus, a Greek skeptic and physician from the 2nd century. They’re designed to produce a feeling of ataraxia, or serenity.

Just as a side note here: the ancient Skeptics and the modern term are different. Ancient Skeptics rejected any rational basis for metaphysical beliefs. They weren’t going around busting people’s chops for not using tightly reasoned arguments to back a new policy proposal or for claiming that crystals cure cancer. Instead, their main focus was therapeutic: to help its adherents enter into a state of serenity by suspending all metaphysical beliefs about the world.

I won’t delve further into this, but suffice to say you don’t have to actually be a hardcore Skeptic to benefit from these practices. Instead, look at the following practices as a form of yoga for the head and heart. These practices will keep you flexible and clear. You can, if you wish, keep your metaphysical beliefs in God, ideals of justice, or what have you. I do.

Before getting into the exercises, though, some prep work. Find a place where you can sit or walk without disturbance. No shorter than 10 minutes is a good time to aim for. As you do the exercises, don’t try to answer the questions with a rational analysis defending one position or another. Instead, simply allow your mind to be with the question and the uncertainty it unearths. This is where the most letting go takes place. By rushing in with answers, you miss that opportunity. The answers can come later after the exercise, but, for the time, put those thoughts aside and embrace the uncertainty.

Exercise 1: The Ship of Theseus (Easy)

1. Take a neutral object, like your car. Then imagine all of the parts that it’s made of. Break it down into as many parts as you can think. For the sake of this example, I’ll use a car.
2. Imagine taking away one part. Start with something small and insignificant, like the door handles.
3. Ask yourself, Is this still a car? Take a moment to rest quietly. Allow whatever thoughts and feelings to come and go freely without interference.
4. Ask yourself again, Why? Take a moment to rest quietly. Allow whatever thoughts and feelings to come and go freely without interference.
5. Then remove another part, like the doors itself. Continue to repeat steps 2, 3 and 4 until not a single piece of the car remains.

Exercise 2: The Ship of Theseus (Medium)

1. Take a neutral object, like your car. Then imagine all of the parts that it’s made of. Break it down into as many parts as you can think. For the sake of this example, I’ll use a car.
2. Imagine taking away one part. Start with something small and insignificant, like the door handles, and replace it with another set of door handles similar but different. Perhaps these are bright red or have a different shape.
3. Ask yourself, Is this still a car? Take a moment to rest quietly. Allow whatever thoughts and feelings to come and go freely without interference.
4. Ask yourself again, Why? Take a moment to rest quietly. Allow whatever thoughts and feelings to come and go freely without interference.
5. Then replace another part, like the doors itself. Continue to repeat steps 2, 3 and 4 until every piece of the car has been replaced.

Exercise 3: The Ship of Theseus (Hard)

1. Take a neutral object, like your car. Then imagine all of the parts that it’s made of. Break it down into as many parts as you can think. For the sake of this example, I’ll use a car.
2. Imagine taking away one part. Start with something small and insignificant, like the door handles, and replace it with another set of door handles that are exactly the same, only brand new.
3. Ask yourself, Is this still a car? Take a moment to rest quietly. Allow whatever thoughts and feelings to come and go freely without interference.
4. Ask yourself again, Why? Take a moment to rest quietly. Allow whatever thoughts and feelings to come and go freely without interference.
5. Then remove another part, like the doors itself. Continue to repeat steps 2, 3 and 4 until every piece of the car has been replaced by another new and identical piece.

There are other Skeptical practices, but this one is simple, powerful, and can take one pretty far in relaxing one’s anxiety about the ever-changing world that we live in. For the next level, you can start to replace neutral things with people or even more abstract things, like the financial industry or the concept of fairness. As you get more and more skilled at breaking things down like this, the anxiety when change does happen will weaken as you’ve already instilled in yourself a solid understanding that this is how things work.

This practice also doesn’t require you to abandon any metaphysical beliefs you do have. You don’t have to agree with the Skeptical take of epokhē in which you suspend all judgment on whether something’s right or wrong, existent or non existent. All you have to do is take some time to release those rigid ideas about how things are and savor the new-found freedom and ataraxia it brings you.

References

1. Plutarch. Theseus. Translated by John Dryden. 75AD. http://classics.mit.edu/Plutarch/theseus.html.