TL;DR

😰 Lately, every conversation I have about AI circles back to the same feeling. People feel behind, and a little fearful of what AI might bring.

📱 A lot of that FOMO is manufactured. The LinkedIn AI guru economy runs on your insecurity, and it is working exactly as designed.

🤔 Strip the noise away though. AI is genuinely changing how we work, and ignoring that does not make it go away.

🚀 The trick is to stop treating that signal as a threat and start treating it as an opportunity. A friend of mine running a sportswear Shopify shop is the proof.

🤝 Embrace the tension. Be scrappy. You do not need the perfect plan to start. There's never gonna be 'enough' podcasts, articles or resources to allow you to start.

The feeling in the air

Lately, every conversation I have about AI seems to circle back to the same feeling. At work. With friends over a beer. In passing chats with people I meet at random. The words are different, but the underlying thing is always the same.

People feel behind. And a little fearful of what AI might bring.

It is not that we are not using AI. Most people I talk to are, in some form. ChatGPT for emails, Claude for brainstorms, Copilot in their editor. The tools have made it into people's days, mine included.

The issue is that it never quite feels like enough. There is always more going on. New models every few weeks. New "you have to try this" posts every time you open a feed. Mechanisms in those feeds that are specifically designed to keep that feeling alive (more on those in a minute). And underneath all of it, the slow background worry that maybe, at some point, this thing replaces what you actually do for a living.

These things compound. You use AI, but you feel guilty for not using it more. You read about it, but you feel like you are still falling behind. And the more you scroll, the worse it gets.

That feeling is worth pulling apart, because once you do, you realize there are actually two very different things going on. And they deserve very different responses.

Manufactured FOMO: the LinkedIn AI guru economy

Let's start with the part I personally find more controversial.

Open LinkedIn on any given day and you will find a steady stream of "AI experts" posting variations of the same five posts. "10 prompts that will replace your job." "I built a SaaS in 4 hours with AI, here is how." "If you are not using these 7 tools, you are already obsolete." Cue the carousel, the screenshot, the bait hook in the first line.

Most of this content is not really designed to inform you. It is designed to make you feel behind, because someone who feels behind clicks. Someone who feels behind reads. Someone who feels behind follows, subscribes to the newsletter, signs up for the cohort, books the call.

The loop is fairly simple. They post something that triggers your insecurity. You feel guilty for not doing enough. You compensate by giving them your attention, your follow, and sometimes your money. They cash in on that attention and use it to make the next, slightly more anxious post. You scroll on, slightly more anxious yourself, ready to be hooked again tomorrow.

The reason it works is not because the gurus are particularly clever. It works because they are tapping into something very human. We do not really want to have to do the work. Our attention spans are short, our patience is shorter, and we will gladly pay someone who promises the magic recipe that fixes everything in a weekend.

But as the old saying goes, there is no such thing as a free lunch. There is none in business, none in knowledge, none in learning. AI does not change that. It makes a lot of things easier and faster, sure. But it does not let you skip the part where you actually have to understand what you are doing. The promise of a shortcut to expertise is not new. It just has a new wrapper now.

Once you see the pattern, it is hard to unsee. Most of those people are not really building anything serious with AI. They are building an audience around the idea of AI. The actual work, if it exists at all, is a side product of the content machine, not the other way around.

So you should be aware of this, and then mostly scroll past it. It is not really a signal about where the world is going. It is more a signal about how attention works on these platforms.

Real FOMO: the part you cannot dismiss

Now strip all of that away. Mute the gurus, close the carousels, ignore the threads. What is left?

Something that, unfortunately, you cannot dismiss.

AI is genuinely changing how we work. Not in the "everything will be different by Tuesday" way the gurus claim, but in the slower, more structural way that actually matters. The way work gets done is shifting. The expectations of what one person can produce in a day are shifting. The skills that get rewarded are shifting. None of that is hype. You can see it inside any company that takes itself seriously.

This is the part of FOMO that is not manufactured. It is not coming from a guy with a ring light. It is coming from the technology itself.

And here is the uncomfortable thing. AI is not just another tool you can take or leave. If you are not making it part of your workflow, you are not just "missing out" in some vague sense. You are slowly drifting toward irrelevance. Quietly, without anyone announcing it, while you keep doing things the old way.

That is the FOMO you should take seriously. Not because some LinkedIn personality told you to, but because it is just true.

The good news is that taking it seriously does not mean panicking.

Change always wins

Change scaring people is not new. It is one of the oldest stories out there.

Take the dot com era. When computers showed up in offices in the 90s, the people most at risk were not engineers or executives. They were accounting clerks. Data entry folks. The kind of people whose entire job was to move numbers from one piece of paper into another piece of paper. Their fear was very rational. The machine was about to eat their lunch.

And it did. Manual data entry, as a job, basically disappeared.

But here is the part that often gets lost. Most of those clerks did not disappear with it. They became data analysts. Same chairs, same companies, often literally the same desks. The boring 80% of their job got automated, and what was left was the 20% that actually required a human: judgment, interpretation, telling a story with the numbers. Their job got harder, more interesting, and more valuable.

That is what technology has done, again and again, for a very long time. Automation does not just kill jobs. It eats the boring part and leaves the human part exposed. The people who adapted to the new tools came out on top. The people who refused, did not.

I have no idea how AI will play out in the long run. Nobody does, and anyone telling you they do is selling something. But the historical pattern is hard to ignore.

So yes, change is uncomfortable. It costs energy. It exposes you. It asks you to be a beginner again at something, which is brutal when you have spent years getting good at the old thing. All of that is real. But change is also opportunity, and that is the part most people forget when the fear takes over.

I did not really get this until I watched a friend of mine prove it.

What my friend's Shopify shop taught me about AI

A friend of mine runs a small sportswear shop. He sells through Shopify, mostly to people in his city and the surrounding area. Until recently, his daily life was the kind of small business grind anyone running an online store will recognize. Wrestling with inventory in spreadsheets. Tweaking product pages. Writing his own ad copy at 11pm because nobody else was going to do it.

He is not a developer. He had never opened VS Code in his life. He had no clue what an API token was.

A few weeks ago, he watched a 10 minute YouTube video. Set up VS Code, configured Claude Code, plugged in a couple of API tokens. And just like that, he had something close to a senior consultant sitting in his terminal, available whenever he wanted, for cents on the dollar of what an actual consultant would cost.

What is he doing with it? Roughly everything.

• Writing scripts for things that used to take him hours, like cleaning up product catalogs or restructuring his inventory.
• Forecasting demand based on past sales, so he can buy smarter and not get stuck with dead stock.
• Generating ad copy and product descriptions in his brand voice (after some back and forth on what that voice actually is).
• Improving the website itself, making it faster and more focused on conversion, the kind of work he would have had to hire a freelancer for.

Now, am I saying that everything Claude produces for him is brilliant? Absolutely not. When he asks it to think about strategy, it cheerfully offers him expansion plans across Europe that would require a team of ten and a few million euros. Useful as a thought experiment, useless as a plan for a guy with a small shop and one assistant.

That is fine. That is not the point.

The point is that someone who, six months ago, could not have written a single Python script, is now shipping work that previously would have required a marketing agency, a freelance developer, and a part time analyst. He did not become a developer. He just got the tools, and he was brave enough to try them.

That is what I mean by opportunity. Not "AI will solve everything." Something more like: the floor for what one motivated person can do has just gone way up. And the people who realize that, and act on it, will produce more value. For themselves, for their customers, for the market.

I genuinely believe that is good for society. Not because AI is magic, but because more competition and lower barriers tend to mean better products in the end.

He is not posting about any of this on LinkedIn either. He is just running his shop, slightly better than before.

So what?

So here is where I land, after the conversations, the LinkedIn doomscrolling, and watching my friend hack his way into a tool he had no business using a year ago.

There are two kinds of FOMO out there, and they need very different responses.

The manufactured kind, the one being pushed at you by people whose job is to make you feel small, you should learn to recognize and walk away from. That feeling when you close the app smaller than when you opened it is not really a useful signal. It is more a side effect of how those feeds are designed.

The real kind, the slow structural shift in how work gets done, you cannot dismiss. But you also do not need to panic about it. You need to reframe it. Stop treating it as a threat that something is being taken from you, and start treating it as an opening. Because that is what it actually is.

AI is not perfect. The strategic advice is often mediocre, the hallucinations are real, and you cannot trust it blindly with anything that matters. Anyone shipping AI output without a human in the loop is going to find out the hard way.

But also, the tools are right there. They are cheap. They are accessible. You do not need a CS degree, or a special title, or permission from anyone, to start using them. You just need to be a little bit scrappy, and willing to look stupid while you figure things out.

This article does not have a clean ending because the story does not have a clean ending. Nobody knows how this plays out. Not me, not my friend with the Shopify shop, and certainly not the guy on LinkedIn telling you that you have 30 days to save your career.

What I do know is that sitting it out is not a strategy. It never has been.

So pick something small. A workflow that bores you. A task you keep putting off. A prototype you have been thinking about for weeks. Open a chat. Open VS Code. Open whatever you have. Just try.

Worst case, you waste an afternoon. Best case, you find your version of my friend's Shopify shop.