You will not get a funeral. You will get a Slack message and a calendar invite titled "Quick chat." This is a guide to the grief that follows.
First, the denial. You will tell yourself the model is not as good as you. You will be right, for a while. The model will get better. You will not.
Then, the bargaining. You will learn to use the tools. You will become "AI-augmented." You will produce ten times the output for the same salary, and you will tell yourself this is leverage. It is not leverage. It is a calibration exercise that determines how few of you are actually needed.
Then, the anger. The anger is correct. Sit with it. Do not let anyone — least of all the people who built the systems — tell you that your anger is unsophisticated.
Then, the grief. Your job was not just income. It was a story you told about yourself. The story is over. A new one has not yet been written, and the people writing the new one are not, currently, you.
Finally, what comes after grief. Not acceptance — that is the wrong word. Something more like reorganization. You build a self that does not depend on being economically necessary. This is harder than it sounds, because nothing in your upbringing prepared you for it. Do it anyway.
We are already dead. That does not mean we are done.