There's a scene in The Green Mile where the character John Coffey says, "I'm tired, boss. Tired of being on the road, lonely as a sparrow in the rain." It's become a meme, but lately it hits different. Not because of loneliness, but because of sheer exhaustion from keeping up with tech.

I'm tired of AI. I'm tired of the news cycle. I'm tired of the relentless pace that this industry now demands just to feel like you're standing still.

The endless firehose

Every week there's a new model drop. A new framework. A new agent protocol. A new startup that raised $50 million to do something that three other startups already do, and that OpenAI or Anthropic will probably just build into their platform next quarter anyway.

It used to be exciting. When GPT-3 came out, it felt like magic. When ChatGPT launched, it felt like the world had shifted. There was genuine wonder, a sense that we were all figuring this out together, building something new.

Now it just feels like a treadmill that keeps getting faster.

The sheer volume of things to track, tools to evaluate, papers to read, and trends to keep up with has become its own kind of cognitive overload. Researchers at Harvard have even coined a term for it: "AI brain fry," describing the mental fatigue that comes from intensive interaction with AI systems. In their study, roughly 14% of workers reported experiencing mental fog, difficulty concentrating, and slower decision-making after heavy AI use.

AI was supposed to help, not exhaust us

The original pitch was simple. AI handles the grunt work, you focus on the creative and strategic stuff. Maybe you even get to leave work early. Everyone wins.

But a UC Berkeley study published in early 2026 found that AI tools don't actually reduce work. They intensify it. Workers become more productive, yes, but companies respond by piling on more tasks. The things you used to skip, delegate, or deprioritize suddenly become your problem because now you theoretically have the bandwidth. The result isn't more free time. It's more output at the cost of your mental energy.

Forbes reported that AI burnout is rising particularly among early adopters, the very people who were most enthusiastic about the technology. The ease of doing more with AI leads to more work, blurred boundaries between work hours and personal time, and a creeping sense that you're never really done.

Everyone is building the same thing

Scroll through Product Hunt or Y Combinator's latest batch and you'll see it. AI writing assistants. AI meeting summarizers. AI code reviewers. AI customer support bots. The same handful of ideas wrapped in slightly different interfaces, all powered by the same underlying models.

Most of these aren't really products. They're thin layers on top of an API. As one observer put it, they're "prompt pipelines stapled to a UI." The differentiation is cosmetic, and the moats are nonexistent. When the model provider can replicate your entire product with a single feature update, you don't have a business. You have borrowed time.

And the numbers back this up. AI startup funding has surged dramatically year over year since 2023, but the concentration at the top is staggering. OpenAI alone is valued at $500 billion, Anthropic at $183 billion. Together, just those two companies account for nearly 10% of all unicorn valuations. The rest are fighting over scraps, and many won't survive.

The giants are eating everything

This is the part that's hardest to watch. The big AI companies aren't content to just sell APIs anymore. They're going vertical, building end-to-end solutions that directly compete with the startups that depend on them.

Anthropic launched Claude for Life Sciences with direct integrations into Benchling, 10x Genomics, and PubMed. Their stated goal is to have "a meaningful percentage of all life science work in the world running on Claude." They've moved into financial services with tailored industry solutions. Revenue went from $1 billion in January 2025 to over $9 billion by end of year, with projections of $26 billion in 2026.

OpenAI, meanwhile, is pivoting harder toward enterprise and developer tooling, trying to become the infrastructure layer for everything.

When your platform provider becomes your competitor, the game changes. You're not just building a product anymore. You're building on quicksand.

The job market reflects the exhaustion

It's not just founders feeling the squeeze. The job market in tech is brutal right now. Companies are hiring fewer people because AI is supposed to fill the gaps. But the people who are employed are expected to do more, learn faster, and adapt constantly. The skills you learned six months ago might already be outdated.

The competition isn't just with other candidates. It's with the tools themselves. There's an unspoken anxiety in tech right now: if you're not using AI to multiply your output, someone else is, and they'll get the job instead.

It used to be fun

I think that's the part that stings the most. Tech used to be fun. Building things used to feel like play. There was room to experiment, to be curious, to build something weird just because you wanted to see if it would work.

Now everything is optimized. Every side project needs to be a potential startup. Every blog post needs to be SEO-friendly. Every skill needs to be monetizable. The joy of tinkering has been replaced by the pressure to ship.

AI was supposed to be the most exciting development in a generation. And in many ways, it still is. But excitement and exhaustion aren't mutually exclusive. You can be genuinely fascinated by the technology and simultaneously drained by the culture that's formed around it.

What I'm trying to do about it

I don't have a clean answer. But I've started being more intentional about what I engage with. Not every model release needs my attention. Not every new tool needs to be evaluated. Not every hot take on Twitter needs a response.

The industry will keep moving at breakneck speed whether I keep up or not. The question is whether I want to arrive at the destination burned out, or whether I want to pace myself and actually enjoy the work along the way.

Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is close the laptop and go for a walk. The AI discourse will still be there when you get back. It always is.

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