AI became his mental lifeline

A former colleague, Anders, lost his job about two years ago. Not unusual in itself, though what he did afterward was.

He didn’t rush to apply for jobs. For a few weeks, he barely opened his laptop for anything professional. The combination of unemployment and everything else that tends to accumulate during such periods produces a kind of inertia that’s hard to explain to people who haven’t been there. You know you should be sending applications. You can’t quite make yourself do it.

What he did instead was start talking to an AI, not to produce anything, but to think. To test arguments, to work out what had actually happened in his last role before the account of events settled into something simpler than the truth. By the time he found his next job, he had logged over eight hundred conversations.

He showed me some of them later. The word “coach” appeared hundreds of times. Not as a command, just as a way of describing what he needed from the exchange: something that would push back on his thinking without the social weight that comes with asking a real person to do the same.

He told me that during the months without colleagues to think alongside, the AI was available in a way nothing else was. Without warmth, without actual understanding of his situation, but with a kind of structured patience that he said was exactly what he needed.

I’ve thought about that framing since. Most AI use I observe is oriented toward output: faster writing, cleaner code, summarized documents. What Anders was doing was closer to maintenance, keeping his thinking in motion during a period when professional momentum had stalled.

He found his footing eventually. He credits the conversations less for what they produced and more for keeping him thinking when thinking felt difficult. That’s a narrower claim than most AI testimonials, and for that reason more plausible. Not every tool fits every person. For Anders, at that particular time, this one did.