Hi Reader,
Like many of you, I've been sitting with a lot lately: the AI doomsday headlines, the affordability crisis, and our current political situation. The general sense I keep hearing from people I love is that the world just feels like a hard place to be in right now. A while back a conversation with friends turned to resilience, how you build it and whether it's even the right thing to be telling people at a moment like this, but I couldn't stop thinking about it. So, I took a stab at writing about it.
This is the result. It's about fear, and courage, and what I've learned about resilience from three very different vantage points: a fourth-grade classroom in Baltimore, a business school classroom at UNC, and a decade of sitting with founders (plus my own turn in that seat). It's also about what I think we're all getting wrong about how to survive this moment, and what actually keeps me grounded.
Fair warning: this is long. I tried to cut it and kept deciding different sections were worth keeping. If you make it to the end, I'd love to hear your thoughts and reflections.
Best,
Shruti
The Water We’re In
On resilience and courage in an anxious age
Like a lot of people, I’ve been following the AI doomsday narrative for a while now. A few weeks ago it came to a head when Jacob Coxon, a researcher who spent a few years working at Anthropic and OpenAI, quit publicly, warning that the labs are more focused on beating each other than on safety, and that the people building this technology believe it could end us within the decade. I invest in startups, a lot of them built on these foundational models, so none of what he said was really new to me. But it gave shape to something: a kind of low, growing dread about the future that I think a lot of us are already carrying around.
I’ve been hearing that sentiment everywhere lately, from friends, family, colleagues, and my students. Different words, but same thing: the world feels like a hard place right now, and so many people I love are straining under some version of it.
I’ve felt versions of this before, though, and it’s worth remembering that. I’m old enough to remember Y2K, when the people who understood the systems best warned us that the clocks rolling over could take down the power grid and the banks. Governments and companies spent years and hundreds of billions of dollars combing through code to make sure it wouldn’t. And then the date came, and mostly nothing happened. Was the threat overblown? Or did people actually put the right mechanisms in place to avert disaster? People still argue about it. But to me that’s exactly the point. Some fear is just noise, and some fear is a siren telling us to listen and respond. And we rarely get to run the experiment both ways, so the question is never only how scared to be, but what we're going to do about it.
What everyone I know is feeling
The existential piece of what so many people are feeling is rooted in the AI narrative that seems to be everywhere. It’s on earnings calls, on podcasts, in layoff memos, in commencement speeches and group chats and team meetings. It tells us daily, and with a lot of confidence, that everything is about to change, that no job is safe, that the future has already been decided somewhere else, by bots and machines. You don’t have to believe all of it for it to start to affect you. It seeps. And, it starts to take ordinary questions, like what should I study, or should I take this job, or what do I tell my kids about the future, and turn them into existential ones.
And part of this dread isn't existential at all. It's playing out inside the K-shaped economy we're living in, where the same news cycle reports record markets and record hardship, where a handful of billionaires seem to reap all the gains while everyone else does the worrying. It's a political environment where we're succumbing to misinformation, turning on each other, and dismantling the very institutions that were built to protect us. It's watching us divest from science itself, the thing that gave us vaccines and clean water and a way to understand the world, right when we need it most. It's the changing climate, the hotter summers and the longer list of disasters, and the quiet sense that this is the new normal and no one is coming to fix it. On top of all that, the math of an ordinary life, housing, childcare, healthcare, has stopped working for an enormous number of people. Finding work takes longer and pays less. Even pursuing an advanced degree costs more and promises much less than it used to. And underneath everything are the things people have always dealt with: aging parents, illness, lost jobs, the struggle to find new work. For a lot of people, life just feels hard right now, and it's hard to see a way out.
The people I spend my days with are, by most measures, doing fine. They are highly educated and employable. Many of them have real resources. These are the people the system was supposed to work for, or who found a way to make it work for them. And still, at dinners and on zoom calls and walks with friends, the same themes keep surfacing. What has struck me most is that the weight isn’t generational. I've heard this from the twenty-year-old terrified of a B-plus and from the sixty-year-old who thought this part of life was supposed to feel settled by now. The same dread, felt across decades.
All of this has had me thinking a lot about resilience. What is it? Can you actually build it? What do history and research tell us about our ability to navigate hard things? I have a different story about this moment than the one we’re being sold, and I want to try to tell it.
Fear is the water
There’s a commencement speech I go back to all the time, particularly when things feel tough. It’s by the writer David Foster Wallace. It’s called This Is Water, and it opens with a parable: an older fish swims past two young fish and asks how the water is, and after he’s gone one of them turns to the other and goes, what’s water? Wallace’s point was never that the young fish are stupid. It was that the most important realities are the hardest to see, precisely because we’re swimming in them.
I think fear is our water.
It’s a combination of things: AI dread, affordability math, climate change, a diagnosis waiting in a parent’s chart, being able to pay bills when you've lost a job. These fears aren’t irrational. They’re reasonable responses to real conditions, and some of these are data points we can and should act on. But fear has become ambient, unchosen and automatic. It is the default setting of the moment. It’s no longer something that happens on bad days. It’s the medium we think in. And like the young fish, we’ve mostly stopped noticing, which means it’s choosing for us.
I should be honest about where I sit in this water. I'm not just swimming in it, I helped stir some of it up. I invest in AI startups for a living. I fund the technology the discourse says is coming for everyone’s livelihood, and I get asked about it constantly, with this mix of curiosity and accusation that I’ve come to recognize as the sound of the water itself. So I’m not writing this from the shore. I’m not above the fear. I’m in it, feeling plenty of it, trying, like so many people, to figure out how to make good decisions and live well inside it.
What I’ve learned from three groups of people
What I do have is a strange vantage point. My whole working life, it turns out, has been a study in how people meet hard things. I just didn’t realize it until recently. And I’ve watched it from three pretty different angles.
I started my career as a public school teacher in Baltimore, and I’ll be the first to tell you I was not the world’s greatest teacher. My first year I taught a split classroom, thirty-two kids across fourth and fifth grade, which meant planning something like eight lessons a day. Teaching is a job made of failure. You are trying your hardest to relay concepts, constantly making a hundred adjustments, and still not always getting it right. A lot of my students grew up in Dundalk, a neighborhood in southeast Baltimore that used to be the hub of the city’s shipping industry, until the industry changed and the jobs left and a lot of families left with them. My students were brilliant. And at nine and ten they were dealing with things I had never once been asked to deal with, inside systems that didn’t serve them. They had almost none of the opportunities I’d been handed. And they were incredibly resilient. Whatever resilience is, I saw it first not in a boardroom but in my classroom.
Now I’m teaching again, this time undergraduate business students at UNC Chapel Hill, in a course where they make real early-stage investment decisions. They’re extraordinary too: sharp, hardworking, and thoughtful. But I noticed that in office hours, many of them seem quietly terrified. Last spring, I received an email from a student who asked if I’d re-evaluate a grade. This was not a failing grade. It was an A-minus. When I asked why it mattered so much, the answer was simple and tough to hear: I’ve never gotten anything below an A-minus before, and if I don’t get an A, it’ll hurt my GPA and maybe my job prospects. While it may seem like entitlement, what I'm hearing instead is fear. And it’s a pretty rational fear, for a kid who grew up during a global pandemic watching the K-shaped economy sort people into branches, who’s been told the ladder is being pulled up and the robots are coming, and who decided, reasonably, that the safest thing to do is eliminate all variance. If you never let a single data point suggest you’re anything less than perfect, then you’re safe.
The two classrooms stay with me together, because they fail in opposite directions. Resilience was never optional for my kids in Baltimore. It was assigned, because the system wasn’t built to serve them. My UNC students have the opposite problem. A number of them have been protected from ever having to build it. One group got hard things without enough support. The other got support without enough hard things. And neither one makes a person who can handle what’s coming.
The third angle is where I spend most of my working life. I invest in startups led by remarkable founders. Founders volunteer for variance. They take the fear everyone else is trying to insure against, failure, rejection, being publicly wrong, losing everything, and they walk straight into it on purpose, because they believe in a problem worth solving. They’ll be the first to tell you they’re not fearless. And I know this one from the inside, because I’ve sat on the founder side of the table. In my twenties I co-founded a startup, scaled it across the U.S., and lived the whole arc of that journey, including shutting it down.
It turns out resilience is ordinary
The same water, seen from three vantage points: children who had resilience forced on them by circumstance, young adults shielded from building it, and founders who volunteer for it daily. Three angles on the same water. And here’s the thing: the research on resilience explains all three at once, and what it says is hopeful, and pretty much the opposite of the story we’re being sold.
Resilience is ordinary. Ann Masten, a developmental psychologist at the University of Minnesota, spent fifty years studying kids who grew up in poverty, war, homelessness, disaster. Kids not so different from the ones I taught. The ones who did well, she found, weren’t somehow wired differently. Their resilience, in her words, “didn’t depend on special qualities.” It came from the ordinary stuff around a kid: a stable relationship, or a sense of belonging, a sense that your life matters. She calls it ordinary magic. You might expect that kind of adaptability to be a feature of childhood, something we harden out of as we age. But it isn't. George Bonanno, a professor of clinical psychology at Columbia, found the same thing in adults. He tracked people through loss and disaster and life-threatening events and showed, in a book called The End of Trauma, that the most common response to something terrible isn’t to break. It’s to wobble, and then recover. We’ve spent decades treating resilience like it’s heroic, when it’s actually closer to a birthright.
But none of this is automatic. Resilience is built, and it’s built only by doing hard things. That’s the part we seem to have gotten backwards, and not just with our kids. A person who’s never been allowed to fail hasn’t been protected. They’ve been robbed of the practice. This is why I think Eleanor Roosevelt was right when she wrote: “Courage is more exhilarating than fear and in the long run it is easier.” She knew this well. Her husband said his own version of it during the Great Depression, when he told a terrified country the only thing it had to fear was fear itself. That was another moment that felt like the end of the world, and people found a way through it. Avoidance keeps fear alive. Every time you dodge the hard thing, you teach yourself it really was too dangerous to face, and the fear gets bigger. Facing it, in doses you can survive, is the only thing that ever makes it smaller. The defensive crouch feels safe, but it really isn’t.
What AI can’t do for us
This brings me back to the technology I help fund, because AI is where this becomes a bit more urgent and a little strange. I’ve noticed the conversation tends to sort people into two camps that actually have a lot in common. On one side are the refusers. The people who won’t touch it, because it’s bad for the environment or because it’s hollowing out how we think and work. On the other are the true-believer power users, who run their whole lives through it and are also, very often, the loudest voices predicting it will end the world. What both camps share is a kind of fatalism, a sense that the future is something happening to us and there isn’t much we can do about it. I don’t sit comfortably in either one.
Both camps, underneath, are running the same defensive move. The refusers try to stay safe by opting out, pulling back from the thing that scares them. The power users try to stay safe by getting so far ahead that the change can’t touch them: mastering every tool so that they are ahead of the game and can see what's coming. One keeps the scary thing at arm’s length; the other tries to out-run it. Opt out or armor up. They look like opposites, but both are really just trying to make the fear go away instead of learning to live and adapt inside it. And I think both instincts have us preparing for exactly the wrong future. AI is great at giving you the optimized, already-known answer, quickly, and with no struggle. It can take your feedback and revise until the answer is excellent. But, it can't sit inside an ambiguous situation that has no known answer, decide what matters, act, be wrong, and figure out what to do next. It can iterate toward a target. It can’t tell you which target is worth choosing. It does not have judgement.
That kind of judgment, deciding what's worth wanting when you don't yet know, is at the center of what it means to be human. And it is not something you can be handed. We learn from experience. Being wrong is how we develop discernment. We build wisdom out of a long accumulation of mistakes. There is no shortcut to judgment that skips trying something only to realize it doesn't work.
This isn't the first time a technology has made people fear their own obsolescence. The printing press, the power loom, the automobile, the computer, each one felt, to someone, like the end of something essential. But look at what actually happened. None of them made human judgment obsolete. Every one of them raised the premium on it, because the more a machine can do, the more it matters that a person decides what is worth doing, and whether the machine got it right. What carried people through those upheavals was the ability to adapt in real time, to exercise judgment as the ground moved under them. That is a muscle, and it gets built the only way muscles do: through use and strain. A whole generation trained to avoid strain or potential failure at all costs is training for exactly the kind of work that is easiest to automate, and neglecting the kind that isn't.
Which is where I think the refusers have a real point, and then draw the wrong conclusion from it. Because AI now gives you a frictionless way to never struggle. It can write you a clean draft or hand you the right answer with no effort at all. And the struggle, it turns out, is actually the point. The discomfort of being stuck, of making something clumsy and fixing it, of not knowing and slowly working your way to knowing, is how a person becomes someone with judgment. Used a certain way, these tools can quietly rob us of the very practice that makes us human by removing the friction that teaches us how to decide.
But the answer to that isn't to refuse them. You can't opt out of change any more than anyone opted out of electricity or the internet. Turning away from the tool doesn't protect your judgment. It just means you build it later, from behind while the institutions around you begin to adopt it. The people who kept their footing through every past upheaval were the ones who figured out how to use it without handing it the wheel. That is the task in front of us. Not opting out, not surrendering, but staying in the driver's seat: letting these tools take the parts of our lives that really are just friction, and guarding the parts that are the practice. I use them often. I just try hard never to let them do the struggling that is supposed to be mine.
What keeps me steady
So that’s my diagnosis. Judgment built through hard experience, is something no machine and no amount of perfectionism can hand you. Which leaves a very personal question, the one I’ve wrestled with for a while now: how do we stay steady enough to keep going, when the water is rising and dread is the default setting? For me it comes down to two things.
The first is to do the things that make me feel grounded and human. I think about this AI stuff more or less constantly. It consumes my work, and I don't get to log off from it. Add in a steady diet of news about markets and politics, and some days it's hard not to spiral. So I have to find ways to keep the fear from swallowing me and the way I do that is by leaving all of it, on purpose, whenever I can. I cook. I get outside. I paint. I spend as much time as I can near water. I put myself in places that could not care less about the discourse. The internet has a dismissive little phrase for this, touch grass, what you tell someone who's been online too much and needs to go remember the physical world exists. But the joke hides something real. Fear is mostly anticipatory. It's your mind running simulations of futures that haven't happened yet. The Stoics knew this two thousand years ago; Seneca wrote that we suffer more often in imagination than in reality. The body, though, is stubbornly and usefully stuck in the present. When my hands are in dough, or my brush is in paint, or I'm out on the water, the existential questions are still there, but they shrink back to their actual size.
The second thing I learned years ago, in my therapist’s office. I was building my first company then, working long hours and 6-7 days a week. On paper the company was worth millions. At twenty-six, on paper, for a short time, I was a success. One afternoon I asked my therapist, why I didn't feel like one. I’d spent years believing that if I was successful financially and professionally, I’d feel whole. And I didn’t. I felt tired and scared and overwhelmed, and the gap between the paper version of my life and the actual lived one had become wide enough to fall into. She didn’t answer my question. She turned it around and asked me when I had felt whole. And those moments, it turns out, had nothing to do with work. They came from friendships, family, from being outside, from exploring and trying new things, from having fun, and from being reminded that my worth wasn’t the same as what I did or what I’d built.
I think about that afternoon a lot right now, because the AI moment we are living through seems to run on the same confusion, just at a civilizational scale. There is staggering paper value and opportunity for efficiency and a widening gap between it and how people actually feel inside their lives. I suspect the fix is the same, too. Friendships. Family. Time outside, joy, and fun, which is not frivolous in a scary or overwhelming season. These are the things that keep us steady. They are the things that have kept and keep me steady. None of this is a break from taking this moment seriously. But it’s the ground that lets us take it seriously without drowning in it.
Notes between swimmers
The hard things haven't gone away, and they aren't going to. The headlines are still bleak, the labs are still racing, and we're all still carrying the weight of ordinary life. We can't make the fear disappear. But we can stay capable of choosing inside it. Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor and the author of one of my favorite books, Man's Search for Meaning, wrote that even in the worst circumstances a person can endure, the one freedom no one could take from him was the freedom to choose his own response. That is the freedom I try so hard to remember in the midst of this moment. In the world we're living in, it means keeping some authorship over our own attention, our own risks, and our own sense of what matters, even when the default setting is dread.
I haven't charted this water. No one has. But we've been in rising water before, and we survived not always knowing what was next. We had to do the human work of adapting, of exercising judgment, of doing the next hard thing and learning from it. Resilience is ordinary. It's built only by doing hard things. We don't get to choose the water. We only get to choose how we swim in it, and whether we do it with our eyes open. That's the choice in front of us: awareness, adaptation and discernment over fear. We can't pretend the water isn't rising. But we can't let the fear of what's in it keep us out either. We just stay aware of where we are, and choose, again and again, to keep moving through it. So consider all of this a note from one swimmer to another. I don't have it figured out. But I'd rather be in the water with you, learning to swim, than standing on the shore pretending it isn't there.
Shruti Shah is a General Partner at Symphonic Capital, an early-stage venture fund investing in AI as infrastructure across health, wealth, and climate resilience. She started her career as a public school teacher in Baltimore, went on to co-found a used furniture marketplace, and has spent the last few years helping founders through the hardest parts of building. She also teaches early-stage impact investing at UNC's Kenan-Flagler Business School and writes about tech, venture capital, entrepreneurship, marketplaces, and more.