The Ashtavakra Gita is a strange, blunt little text: a sage tells a king, point blank, that the identity he's built his whole life around was never really his to begin with. It wasn't written about artificial intelligence (AI). It's arguably the sharpest thing available on the modern fear that a tool might be able to do your job better than you can.
The economic fear underneath that anxiety is real, and this isn't a case for ignoring it. It's what Ashtavakra says underneath it.
You were never the function you perform
Ashtavakra's opening move, to a literal king, is that he is not his kingdom, not his body, not his role — he is the awareness in which all of those appear. Your job title was always a role awareness was wearing, not the thing doing the awaring. That distinction sounds abstract right up until something threatens to take the role, and it turns out to matter enormously.
If a task can be automated, it was never the deepest thing about you
Everything replicable by a system was, by definition, a procedure — a set of steps. Ashtavakra's whole teaching is that what you actually are was never a procedure to begin with, which is exactly why it was never at risk from something that only replicates procedures.
The panic is real — check what it's actually made of
Fear about artificial intelligence (AI) is usually two fears wearing one coat: a practical fear about income, and an identity fear about worth. They deserve different responses. One is solved by a plan. The other was never going to be solved by a plan at all, and confusing the two just makes the practical fear feel bigger than it already is.
Ashtavakra isn't only in this article — talk the rest of it through with them directly.
Talk to Ashtavakra free →Steadiness isn't a bypass of the practical fear — it's what makes acting on it possible
“You are awareness itself — already free. Only see it,” Ashtavakra tells Janaka, not as a replacement for governing his kingdom well, but as the ground he governs from. A steady person still updates their skills, still makes the plan. They just don't do it from inside a state of panic, which tends to produce worse plans anyway.
He told a king his kingdom wasn't him — the same applies to a job title
Janaka wasn't a struggling worker; he was one of the most secure men in the story, and Ashtavakra still told him the throne wasn't his identity. If that instruction holds for a king's crown, it holds for a job title on a badge — the discomfort of that idea is the same size either way.
Awareness doesn't compete with a tool — competition only happens within a category
A calculator doesn't threaten your ability to feel awe at a number. A generator doesn't threaten your capacity to notice beauty in what it makes. Competition requires two things of the same kind, and Ashtavakra's entire argument is that what you are was never in that category to begin with — only the outputs were.
Chasing security is named directly as its own kind of bondage
The text doesn't treat security-seeking as neutral — it names the endless reaching for safety, status, and certainty as one of the very things keeping Janaka bound in the first place. Steadiness, in Ashtavakra's account, isn't what you get after the anxiety is fully resolved. It's available now, underneath it, whether or not the résumé is finished updating.
This doesn't argue against updating your skills, diversifying your income, or taking the threat seriously in practical terms — do all of that. It argues that the part of you doing the worrying was never actually the part with a job description, and that's worth knowing before the plan is finished, not after.