We've Adapted Before. This Time Feels Different.

I grew up in a childhood with no screens.

Afternoons were spent catching tadpoles in drains, hunting insects, reading Archie comics and writing to pen pals whose replies took weeks to arrive. None of it felt unusual. It was simply childhood.

Then I entered the workforce, and technology began arriving. My first computer as a junior graphic designer had a black-and-white monitor. To see colour, I had to walk across the room to another machine.

Later, our entire office shared one internet-connected computer — complete with dial-up and a communal email address.

I learnt PageMaker, FreeHand, QuarkXPress and Photoshop. Within years, much of that knowledge was obsolete or replaced. I watched colour separation houses close and printers that once dominated our industry disappear.

So when people tell my generation we need to ‘adapt’ to AI, I sometimes smile.

We've been adapting our entire working lives.

But this time feels different. Not because the technology is more frightening.
Because of the speed. Previous changes gave us some kind of runway. One programme replaced another. One machine became a better one. We had time to adjust our footing as the ground moved.

AI feels as though someone removed the runway altogether. Suddenly, capable and experienced people are being told — again — to retrain, upskill and reinvent themselves before they're left behind.

And Gen X is doing what we tend to do. We're quietly getting on with it.
But privately, I sometimes feel a few steps behind. Not because I can't learn, but because this time the ground moved faster than my feet.

Perhaps that's something we need to acknowledge. Maybe we don't need to adapt immediately.

Of course we'll learn the tools. We've done it before. But perhaps before rushing into our next reinvention, we're allowed to feel what this transition is doing to us. We've spent decades watching hard-earned skills become obsolete and simply called our ability to move on ‘resilience’.

Nobody asked whether there was grief involved.

Nobody asked whether we were tired.

Maybe we're allowed to be tired now.

To feel displaced without immediately turning it into an action plan. To sit with the discomfort before trying to solve it.

That isn't giving up.

It's recognising that adapting constantly has a cost.

The learning will still be there when we're ready. And knowing Gen X, we'll probably figure this one out too.

But after a lifetime of keeping up, perhaps we've earned something surprisingly difficult to give ourselves: permission to catch our breath before we adapt again.