Sacred Grief: What Millennials Are Mourning in the Age of AI

A love letter to everyone quietly grieving a life they haven't technically lost, in a world AI is rewriting faster than we can grieve it.

I'm sitting at my desk between sessions as I write this, and I keep coming back to the math. Rent has climbed to a place where saving for a home while renting one feels like a math problem with no solution. Not because I'm not trying, but because the numbers were never built to work that way. Health insurance and the cost of running a private practice have quietly climbed right alongside it. This isn't a personal failure of budgeting or ambition. It's inflation, our economy, and it's happening at the exact moment none of us know what AI is about to do to the ground we're standing on. No amount of experience or training insulates you from timing like this.

At home, there are boxes. For the second time in under a year, I'm moving my belongings into a home that I don't own. I’m moving in with my mom, not because I stopped trying, but because trying stopped being enough. I am endlessly grateful she's willing to catch me. And I am grieving anyway, because those two things are not mutually exclusive. Years of success. Multiple degrees. Certifications I worked myself ragged for. And somehow none of it has been enough to keep my own front door mine. I'm telling you this because it isn't unusual. It's achingly, quietly ordinary.

There's a grief moving through millennials right now that doesn't have a funeral or a name most of us would recognize. No one died. And yet something did. Grief researchers call this ambiguous loss: loss without a clear ending, without a body to bury. It's often harder to metabolize than a death because there's no ritual for it. When the scaffolding of what you expected your life to look like gives way, that's not a mood you can snap out of. That's grief, and it deserves the same tenderness you'd offer someone standing at a graveside.

It's the version of your thirties or forties you thought you'd be living by now: the house, the promotion, the kids or the freedom, whichever one you wanted. And underneath it all, quietly reshaping the ground you stand on, is a job market and an economy being rewritten by AI faster than any of us can plan around.

AI is not the villain of this story, but it's not the whole story either

Here's where I'll push back on the two loudest narratives out there. One says AI is coming to destroy everything you built your identity around, so panic accordingly. The other says AI will fix everything, so adapt and stop complaining. Both are lazy, and both are lying to you a little.

Let's name the real parts plainly. AI is displacing jobs, not hypothetically, but right now, in hiring, in support roles, in exactly the kind of work many of us trained for. The data centers powering all of this pull essential resources from communities. That cost is worth taking seriously, not waving away. There are ways data centers can be constructed that are smaller in scale, environmentally friendly, and equally if not more powerful than the massive centers being carved into acres of land. However, the powers that be do not want to spend the money on making these adjustments to their visions. 

It's also true that AI has created work that didn't exist five years ago: people whose entire job is prompting, training, auditing, and building the guardrails around these systems. AI is allowing for medical advancements beyond our wildest dreams, such as protein modeling. This technology will help those plagued by Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Incurable diseases could be eradicated if not reversed. The miracle of this can save countless lives and keep families intact. I am very excited to see how AI can benefit the mental health field. If there can be ways to target neurotransmitter connections that cause debilitating PTSD and allow people to live life out of the dark capital-T Trauma that plagues them, I am all here for it. Both things are true at once. That's the nuance nobody wants to sit in, because it's easier to pick a side.

AI has genuinely opened doors. It helps people find new career paths when the old ones dead-end, prototype ideas that once needed a team and a year to test, and move through grief-adjacent logistics like estate planning and career pivots with less friction and less shame than doing it alone. AI has helped my practice in ways I wasn't expecting. One person shared that they used ChatGPT to find a therapist that fit certain criteria, and I came up! One of my new colleagues also found me using AI when she was looking to connect with specific types of providers. These connections themselves are gifts, and I am thankful AI allowed IRL experiences. I've been taking the time I have to learn how to effectively use AI (ChatGPT and Claude) to my advantage by attending workshops, learning from YouTube, and having conversations with AI experts. The people I've been able to connect with, I would not have met without AI. See, again, the duality of AI providing resources and connections but also reducing the number of people who are seeing therapists because they're utilizing AI as therapeutic substitutes.

This is the part that matters most. AI cannot sit with you. It cannot hold your hand at your father's oncology appointment. It cannot replace a friend showing up at your door with soup because she heard your voice crack on the phone. The nervous system does not regulate through a chat window. It regulates through touch, through eye contact, through the felt sense of not being alone in a room with another human heart beating nearby.

AI can reflect your grief to you, organize it, name it accurately. What it will never do is understand it, because it isn't the one standing in the mourning. It's a tool. A genuinely useful one. The humanness underneath all of this stays entirely, only, ours.

We're at an evolve-or-die moment with this technology, and I've decided to evolve, but as ethically as I can. That means staying curious about something that isn't leaving, rather than turning away from it. It means going to the workshops, learning to write a decent prompt, understanding what these systems actually do instead of only fearing what they might do. Curiosity, here, is itself a form of hope.

It also means paying attention to how this industry spends its money and who it answers to, and choosing, where you can, to support companies trying to build this responsibly. Do your own research. Compare how a company like Anthropic operates against a company like OpenAI, and decide for yourself which one's values actually line up with your own. That's not a small thing. Voting with your attention and your dollars is one of the few levers any of us still has, and using it is its own quiet antidote to grief, because it means you still get to shape some part of what happens next.

None of us are ready, and hope gets to come anyway

I'm not going to pretend anyone has this figured out, because that would be coddling you, and you didn't ask for that. Nobody, not economists, not therapists, not the people building these AI systems, actually knows what the next few years look like. That uncertainty is not a personal failing. It's the honest condition we're all living in.

Grief and hope aren't opposites, and they aren't sequential either. It's not first you grieve, then someday you hope. They move together, slowly, side by side, and the pace matters. You are not alone in this as we navigate territory none of us have a map for. When fear shows up to talk you out of applying for something you never would have considered a year ago, it's worth remembering: all it takes is one yes to change the entire game.

A small proof that hope shows up anyway

The inspiration to dive deeper into grief in the age of AI came from one of those yesses. Through real-life connections at my gym, I was graciously introduced to Jason Michael Perry, who owns Perry Labs here in Baltimore. We met for coffee, which turned into prosecco, as we dove deep into the topic of AI, technology, mental health, and what it means to be human. I got the unexpected chance to talk about the complexities of grief in the age of AI on Jason's podcast Thoughts on Tech & Things with Jason Michael Perry at the WYPR studio. Even mid-grief, even mid-boxes, something good and unplanned can still find you. It was nourishing to sit in that conversation and say all of this to someone else who thinks intensely about what AI means for how we live, work, and grieve.

I highly recommend you take the time to listen to our two-part conversation:

Is It Grief If Nobody Died?

Can A Machine Bring Back The Dead?

Honoring the nervous system

Grief that gets bypassed doesn't disappear. It relocates into your shoulders, your sleep, your relationships. So the work isn't to think your way out of this. It's to let your body catch up to what your life has become.

That means real time away from technology, spent in nature, as a place of sacred grounding. Not a wellness aesthetic, but because sunlight and moving your body are how your nervous system remembers it's safe. Nature has witnessed the rise and fall of civilizations and will keep standing guard over whatever comes next. It means actually eating, sleeping, and drinking water before you optimize anything else. It means finding a human therapist, not as a backup plan but as a front-line one; a good therapist offers something AI structurally cannot, another nervous system in the room co-regulating with yours. It means investing real time in friendships and family, even when everything in you wants to isolate and figure it out alone.

And it means learning to use AI on purpose rather than by accident: as a tool for clarity and staying employable, not as a replacement for the people who make life worth existing.

Let the tears do their job

You're allowed to be angry. You're allowed to grieve a future you can't picture anymore. That anger and those tears aren't a detour from moving forward. They're the road itself.

This is sacred grief. It's disorienting, it's collective, and it is deeply, unmistakably human. You are not falling behind. You are not broken for feeling this. You are one of millions of people standing at the same threshold, trying to figure out how to walk forward without a map. You are not doing it alone.

So despite it all, we adapt, and we keep going. Rest when you need to. Pause as often as it takes. But don't give up.

In a few minutes, I'll close this document and go back to taping boxes, still not sure what tomorrow brings, but a little less alone in not knowing.

If you need support navigating this particular chapter of millennial grief, I'm here. I'm on this path right alongside you, and I'd be glad to help you stay afloat through this season of grief and technological advancement.