u/SubtleBy-Design-65

So a friend from college who I have genuinely not spoken to in about two years called me completely out of the blue last week and for one hopeful second I actually thought she might be reaching out to reconnect or just to see how I was doing but it turned out she was calling to tell me she had gotten engaged and in the very same breath to inform me rather than ask me that I was going to be one of her bridesmaids, which on its own would already have been a lot but becomes genuinely audacious of her the moment you know the backstory.

The reason we fell out in the first place was a trip the two of us had planned together, and it was meant to be a proper girls trip, just us and months of planning and the sort of thing you look forward to all year, but then she decided to bring her boyfriend along, which honestly I could have lived with except his coming somehow snowballed into nine of his friends also showing up so the trip I had so carefully put together just dissolved into me third wheeling an enormous boys holiday that I never agreed to and never wanted and we more or less stopped speaking just after the trip. This was supposed to be the trip of our lives but was honestly like a heartbreak for me.

And the part that really gets me is that the same boyfriend who detonated that entire trip is the exact man she is now marrying and after two full years of complete radio silence the very first thing I hear from her is not a hello or a how have you been but a loud screaming announcement that I am in the wedding party and because I did not have the heart to puncture her big moment I just hyped her up and let her have it but the sheer assumption that I will now buy the dress and turn up to every single event and stand beaming at the front of her wedding is just really really baffling to me.

For two decades Google never had to explain itself to anyone because it was just the internet, it was the first thing you typed into a browser and the last thing you closed before bed and it had that position not because it advertised its way there but because it was genuinely where answers lived and everyone on earth just knew that the way you know where your kitchen is.

So I've been seeing these Google ads recently, proper paid ads, on my feed, promoting AI search and telling me to try searching with Google and I had to stop and just sit with how strange that sentence is because this is Google telling me to use Google Search, the same company that has had a 90% share of the search market for as long as most people have been using the internet, and they are now buying media space to remind me they exist.

That's not a product launch, that's a panic move dressed up as a campaign and the reason it's a panic move is because ChatGPT and Claude and Perplexity didn't just build a better search engine, they changed what people think asking a question even looks like and that is so much harder to fight than a competitor because you can outspend a competitor but you cannot outspend a shift in human behavior.

The scary thing for Google isn't that people are switching, it's that people are switching without even thinking about it, without a conscious decision, without a campaign from the other side convincing them to leave, they're just opening a different tab one day and then doing it again the next day and then one morning they realize they haven't googled anything in a week and they don't miss it.

Google knows this. The ads are proof they know this. And there is no amount of money you can spend on ads that fixes the feeling that something has already moved on without you.

You ship a feature, there is already a lot of pressure for the next one. You close a ticket and three more appeared while you were closing it. The codebase is growing faster than any one person can understand it and somehow that's the goal now.

Companies saw AI write code and thought great, we need fewer engineers but what they didn't think about is that writing code was never actually the hard part. Understanding why something breaks at 2am, knowing which part of the system will hate this new feature, remembering the one decision made two years ago that everything else quietly depends on, that's the job and you can't Copilot your way out of that. You just cannot.

So now one engineer is doing what three people used to do and the AI is helping them do it faster which sounds great until you realise faster just means the pile grows faster too and the deadline doesn't move but the scope keeps expanding because hey you have AI now so what's the problem.

The problem is nobody on the team knows the system deeply anymore because there is no team, there's just one person moving too fast to ever stop and actually understand anything and one day something will break in a very specific way and the person who would have known exactly why is gone because the Q3 headcount review said they were redundant.

But the velocity metrics look incredible so.

Marketing teams used to be 5, 6, 7 people and everyone had a lane because the work actually needed that many people to do it well. Someone owned social, someone owned content, someone owned campaigns and nobody was doing all of it at once because that's insane.

Now it's 1 or 2 people running the whole show and companies are calling it efficiency but what they actually did was open a spreadsheet, figure out exactly how many salaries they could cut and still technically ship, and then handed us a ChatGPT subscription as severance for our former colleagues.

So now I'm a strategist but also a copywriter but also somehow a designer and a data analyst and a community manager and a brand guardian all before lunch and the funniest part is if I mention that I'm drowning I'm apparently someone who "resists change" so I just quietly absorb three people's jobs and smile in the all hands.

My mental load hasn't gone down. It has tripled. But sure, the AI saves me twenty minutes on a caption so I guess we're even. I am so tired and exhausted after work everyday. Most days I just go home and pass out and then wake up and come to work again.