The Antidote to AI's Soul-Sucking Trifecta

80% of workers no longer reported feeling engaged in Gallup's latest engagement survey. 80%!?!

And here we are in L&D, continuing to drag horses with their hooves dug in the ground to water and pushing their heads into the trough... and unsurprisingly, they're still not drinking.

The powers that be still don't value the L&D functions in their organizations, and employees still don't want to take extra time out for learning because they're being forced to operate as 10 people powered by AI at 100 miles per hour 24/7/365.

The pace of change is grueling. The return on skills investment is no longer obvious. People are scared and demotivated.

AI has done that (ok, yes, poor leadership, sociopathic understandings of what humans needs, and a lack of thought about AI adoption, but for simplicity, let's go with AI).

But there is an antidote to all this.

There are ways to reconnect, rekindle, and make meaning.

They are not expensive. They do not require subscriptions. They do not require specialized degrees. And yet, we resist them.

Why are we resisting them?

We're going to have to take a windy path to get where we're going on this one--which is 100% what AI would edit it out if I let it. Hope you're ready for the journey!

The Soul-Sucking Trifecta

Soul-Sucker 1: The impact on work

AI will take our jobs, and it's making us wonder why we work at all.

Listen, People are still saying "AI can't replace human judgment" and using it as evidence that AI won't take our jobs, but human performance isn't why they're cutting human employees.

The cost of AI is why. It's pay to play. Enterprise AI is expensive, and companies are gambling that an investment will AI pay off dividends that allow them to do better work more efficiently with fewer humans at some point--or at least to make enough from their investment that they can later hire the needed humans back.

So when we say AI won't take our jobs, that's not true. It will.

We're seeing it in real time. Layoffs are happening. AI is taking from budgets that would be allocated to other things (I know my friends in L&D are feeling it).

And while there may be other opportunities arising, most of us blocked by the blinders of our own bias (try saying that three times fast). We can't see possibility. We fret, feel lost, and wonder why we gave all our time (our most valuable asset) to a system that doesn't value us.

Soul-Sucker 2: The impact on learning

AI will pinpoint a learner's exact needs and deliver them the exact training they need to level up, making us feel as if our skills and abilities are in a constant state of deficit that need to be filled.

Scrap learning = wasted time, right? So what we're going to do is we're going to predict exactly what a person needs and deliver them only that. We're going to shoot them down a tunnel so they can't be distracted.

It's a step past personalized learning, now being called precision learning. And in this case, the medium is the message. Embedded in the technology that pushes recommendations and tailored coaching is the idea that learning should be neat, narrow, and linear.

What we risk is human curiosity, the ability to work in ambiguity, the ability to wade through complex ideas and confusion with others, and the joy that comes from finding yourself in a new destination after taking an unexpected detour.

Precision allies itself with perfectionism, which we know is a major contributor to anxiety, procrastination, and burnout. Since the inception of social media and surveillance culture, perfectionism has continued to rise, especially in the teen population. We become stuck trying to find the "right" next step and worrying about the inevitable chastising that comes if we don't pick "accurately." It's a mental health drain and one that also begs the question "who gets the power to decision what's the right next step?"

Soul-Sucker 3: The impact on relationships

AI will replace social connections by providing tailored on-demand "companionship," rewriting expectations for human interaction.

The top personal use of AI in 2025 was AI is companionship and therapy, which Qualtrics strangely rolls into one category. Let that sink in for a moment. People are overwhelming turning to AI for the support that humans were biologically and evolutionarily designed to provide.

Humans are often frustrating, and they can't be controlled, and in a society obsessed with perfectionism, control, and efficiency, well, it's no wonder we're tempted to make "friends" with the robots.

But the more we do that, the more we see the world only through the lens of our own beliefs, the more we lose touch with the real humans around us. We lose empathy. We lose patience.

And while it doesn't seem like anything is much different on the surface, the sense of longing aches deep in us. The loss of touch, of sense of community, of human expression hurts.

The Antidote

Leave it to chance.

If we want to be better than AI, and if we want to feel better, we need serendipitous learning. It's the clash of unexpected things that leads to meaningful learning and connection-making. It's what happens when you are driven by intention and purpose (o sometimes nothing at all) rather than perfectionism and efficiency.

Serendipitous learning starts with accepting the messiness of life, releasing a bit of control over our day to day (not our human rights, of course), and allowing for the inconvenience and wondrousness of community. It involves slowing down or sometimes rushing through the "proper" parts.

Because all of those things lead to serendipity, the kind you need to go outside yourself to stumble into.

The core the serendipitous learning philosophy is this:

You don't know what you don't know yet, and the best things in life emerge from the unpredictable.

You need to trip and fall down a rabbit hole you didn't expect to be there.

Or find a human you want to help so desperately it makes you shift your own patterns of behavior.

Or argue your point until you realize you were flat out wrong.

Or just sit with no knowing until one day, you're talking about Batman, and the answer to your problem falls into your lap.

Do not let AI "precision learn" you into a box or convince you that your way (or some tech CEO's way) of thinking is the way.

The best thing you can do right now is sprinkle more chance into your day. Tell stories. Run with wild ideas. Wrestle with differing perspectives. Ask someone in the Supermarket to tell you about their favorite item in their cart. Go to meetup you have absolutely no interest in.

The kernels of innovation hide in the intersection of seemingly unrelated things.

AI is predictive. It's guessing based on our typical patterns and the corpus of human work.

Be unpredictable. Accept chance. Trust people. Relinquish control.

And find the meaning you seek.

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When I spontaneously told my non-L&D spouse about serendipidous learning, he told me it's a hard thing to get people to buy into because "you can't make serendipity happen."

To which I say... FALSE. Yes, you can. Bet.

But if you're feeling that way to, then rest assured, the practical approach is coming.

Stay tuned for part 2, where we'll explore ways to spark serendipity.