Have you noticed that in recent years, almost every few months a "super impressive" AI product pops up: first ChatGPT, then Gemini, Grok, Claude, Midjourney, Sora, and various new tools like Agents and Clawdbots. Every time one appears, the community immediately erupts; discussions flood X, Bilibili, Zhihu, and various chat groups. Everyone dives into research, reproduction, parameter comparisons, and demos, afraid of missing out on something. Soon, tutorials on "From Zero to Mastery" start appearing on second-hand marketplaces, knowledge platforms, and course sites—priced affordably and seeming highly cost-effective; meanwhile, cloud service providers also launch one-click deployment and invocation products, making it seem like just a few clicks can put you at the forefront of the AI wave. So I also invested a lot of time: setting up environments, watching tutorials, testing models, tinkering with configurations. After tinkering for a while, I suddenly encountered a problem: I actually don’t know why I need to use this AI. It’s indeed powerful, but it doesn’t seem to solve a clear problem for me; my interest in it is more because "everyone is researching it," and if I don’t, I feel like I’ll be left behind by the times. In the end, I learn a bunch of tool names and operation steps, but what remains is an inexplicable fatigue and a sense of stagnation: technology is evolving rapidly, participation feels intense, but the sense of meaning is weak. Why is that? This mainly reflects a collective anxiety and confusion driven by the technological tide.

The first layer: the core psychology is that I’m afraid of missing out, but I don’t even know what I want. It’s not driven by needs but by trends. You’re not pulled in by a "problem," but pushed by the "hype."

The second layer: herd mentality and technological worship—seeing many people researching, so I do too. Over time, "usefulness" is replaced by "popularity."

The third layer: the false sense of progress brought by low-cost participation creates a psychological illusion: I seem to be improving, I seem to be at the forefront, I seem not to be eliminated. But in reality: without real business scenarios, long-term motivation, or internalized skills, this is called "instrumental busyness": busy but directionless.

The fourth layer: mild technological nihilism—realizing I don’t know why I need to use this AI. I’ve been chasing new things, but these things haven’t truly entered my life. This approaches a mild form of technological nihilism. I’m trying not to be left behind by the times, but I don’t know where I’m heading. It’s not a denial of technology, but that technology is advancing too fast for human value systems to keep up.