Relative deprivation

Psychology has a concept called relative deprivation.

It means your situation itself may not be bad, but after comparing yourself to a reference group, you find that others have something you lack, creating a feeling of being “deprived.”

In the AI context, it looks like this:

Your life may not have gotten worse because of AI, but you see friends posting about using AI to boost efficiency by 50%, see media reporting daily that “AI is disrupting industries,” see peers discussing new tools, and then you realize you seem to have missed the train.

You have not fallen behind in absolute terms. You feel behind relative to where you think you should be.

The cunning thing about this feeling is: it does not need factual support. You do not actually need to be eliminated by AI; just feeling that you are on the edge of being eliminated is enough to make you anxious.

The gap between expectations and reality

Another mechanism sits on top of this: the gap between expectations and reality.

Some people (like myself) realize their abilities are limited and know that becoming “first tier” is unrealistic. But the problem is, knowing is one thing, feeling is another. Rationally, I accept that “I am not a genius,” but emotionally I cannot let go of the thought “if only I had tried a little harder.”

This is a very tangled state:

• Reason tells me: there is no need to fight for first place, just keep up.
• Emotion keeps saying: you clearly could have gone further.

This tug-of-war drains energy. Looking at it through economics and history makes the pattern easier to see.

Consider the Industrial Revolution. After the steam engine appeared, machines replaced some manual textile work and many hand spinners lost their jobs. Accounts written from their perspective often stop there. The other side is that machines also created new jobs, including mechanical engineers, train drivers, and coal miners.

Electricians are a smaller example from the electrical revolution. As electricity spread, working with it became a specialized skill and a new profession emerged.

The internet revolution brought portals, e-commerce, and social media, all of which were new twenty years ago. Was traditional retail, supposedly destined to disappear, actually eliminated? Partly. But delivery drivers, food couriers, and livestream shopping hosts also appeared, and no history book had predicted those jobs.

There is a pattern here: Technological revolutions do eliminate some jobs, but they also create new employment. Structural unemployment is real, but new opportunities are also real.

Work intensity and production relations

However, another dimension of history is easy to overlook.

We usually assume that better tools reduce work intensity: a task that once took a full day now takes half a day.

But the reality is: Labor intensity has never changed in sync with production tools.

Twenty people use machines to do the work of twenty people, so efficiency improves. Then the boss realizes those same twenty people can do the work of two hundred. The machines keep running, and the people remain on the clock.

This follows a central idea in political economy: work intensity is determined not by technology, but by production relations. Who decides your hours? Who defines “good enough”? The market, capital, and competitive pressure do, not your own needs.

That is why every “efficiency revolution” is often followed by more work. Technology does not make you tired by itself. Once efficiency rises, expectations rise with it. Demand is not satisfied; its ceiling moves higher.

What actually matters?

I have been turning this question over for a while. I still do not have a firm answer, but I have reached one tentative conclusion: tools alone will not make us stronger.

No matter how powerful Copilot is, it only completes code. No matter how smart Claude Code is, it only executes instructions. Tools are evolving, but tools are still tools in the end.

What is harder to replace are the things humans have that AI does not:

• An intuitive sense of beauty. There is no universal standard for what looks good; it varies across cultures, places, and time.
• The ability to make decisions in ambiguous situations.
• The feeling of building real connections with others.
• Subjective experience: that private sense of being alive, like hearing a clear birdsong while half lost in thought.

These are not things tools can give you, nor are they things you can gain just by learning to use some framework.

But the question is, if these are the answers, then why do we still push ourselves to learn and keep up with trends?

Technology has advanced and efficiency has improved, yet no one seems to have become more relaxed because of it. Growth is for more growth, and effort is for living with even more effort.

I don’t have an answer to this question yet.

Perhaps the essence of FOMO isn’t anxiety, but a fundamental confusion about “what am I pursuing.”

If I don’t follow this trend, what am I pursuing? If I do, what will I actually gain?

Writing this far, I still haven’t reached a conclusion that satisfies me. I just feel that when drowning in information, occasionally pausing to think about this question might be slightly better than blindly chasing or blindly giving up.