AI Can Write The Perfect Poem But It Will Never Need To
On what we forgot to build inside ourselves
At first I was a poet.
I did not know what I was doing. I only knew that something inside me needed to become words, and that when it did, I felt less alone in the world.
I am thinking about that feeling a lot this week. I think you know it too. Maybe you would not call it poetry. Maybe it is the song you cannot listen to without something cracking open. Maybe it is the way time disappears when you hold someone you love. Maybe it is the silence at the edge of the ocean, beer in hand, when your body understands something your language never will.
Whatever you call it, you have reached for it. And at some point, something told you to stop.
In February, Mrinank Sharma, the 29-year-old head of safeguards research at Anthropic, decided to start again. He shared his resignation letter on X. It was viewed 15 million times. In it, he wrote that he had repeatedly seen how difficult it is to let values govern actions, within himself and within the organisation. His final project at Anthropic had focused on understanding how AI assistants could make us less human. And then he said he was leaving to enrol in a poetry degree and “devote myself to the practice of courageous speech.”
He signed off with a poem by William Stafford called “The Way It Is.” It is about a thread you follow through your life, one that does not change even as everything around you does. Stafford wrote that tragedies happen, people get hurt, you suffer and get old, but you never let go of the thread.
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.
by William StaffordAnd then Sharma let himself become invisible.
People called it unusual. Some called it brave. Most moved on within a day.
Few weeks later, Oracle laid off an estimated 30,000 employees in a single morning.
The company sent termination emails at 6am under the name “Oracle Leadership.” The same lines went to workers in the United States, India, Canada, Mexico, and Uruguay. Access to internal systems was revoked almost immediately.
According to TD Cowen estimates reported by Bloomberg, the cuts represent roughly 18 percent of Oracle’s global workforce. The company disclosed a $2.1 billion restructuring charge in its March 2026 SEC filing, with the savings directed toward AI data centre expansion.
Then, the stock rose four - six percent.
I sat with the stories that followed. On Reddit’s r/employeesOfOracle, a child posted that their father, a 20-year employee battling cancer, was two years from retirement. He woke up to the same template email as everyone else. His boss of 20 years never called. His health insurance is now gone.
Elsewhere in the thread, someone who had spent 29 years at the company described receiving the same email and urged others to stay strong. Another person, 16 years at Oracle, wrote that it is a strange transition to wake up and realise your daily priorities have shifted overnight saying”My mind still instinctively drafts to-do lists for projects that are no longer mine.”
On Blind, an employee on an H1B visa explained they now have 90 days to find a new sponsor or leave the country. On TheLayoff.com, someone who had given 30 years wrote that you should never take the company you work for seriously, never invest yourself, because there is no version of the story where it pays off.
The first wave of all of this is financial that includes severance arithmetic and insurance gaps. Then the scramble to update a LinkedIn profile before the afternoon. That wave has systems around it, however imperfect.
The second wave shows up months later, when the severance maths are done and the job market keeps saying something you do not want to hear. It is when someone realises that the thing they gave decades to did not know their name. That they were, as one employee put it, replaceable.
The identity they had built, carefully and over years, was always contingent on someone else’s spreadsheet.
Somewhere, someone made this decision. A leader, or a group of leaders, looked at the headcount and the AI infrastructure investment and made the call.
I am not interested in vilifying that person. I think about them too. Because that person is also answering the question of who they are with what they deliver. They are also building their sense of self around output, around decisions, around the value they create for shareholders.
They sit in a different chair, but they sit inside the same machine.
The logic that makes 30,000 people redundant in a single morning does not stop at any particular level of seniority. It reaches every chair. Eventually, it reaches theirs.
This is what I keep circling back to. Since the industrial revolution, we have been trained to equate identity with production. All of us.
The question “who are you” has, for generations, been answered by “what do you do.” We built entire economies, education systems, social structures, and inner lives around that answer.
And now the thing we were told to organise ourselves around is the very thing being automated.
I have written over the past two weeks about the speed of this. About costs arriving faster than anyone expected. About a 90-day window that is already closing. What I did not say clearly enough is what the acceleration takes from us beyond the economic.
It takes the room to reflect. The space to ask who we are when the labour disappears. The second we most need that question happens when we don’t have the time or space to sit with it. Because rent is due and the applications are piling up.
Simply because the economy does not pause so you can find yourself.
And this is where the cruelty compounds. We took the most human impulse we have and turned it into a specialisation. The reaching for something beyond what we can hold. We put it behind degree programmes and told people it was impractical and we called it poetry, or philosophy, or art, and we said those things were for people with time.
But that reaching has never been a luxury. It is the thing that happens when someone ugly-cries to a song and when you are lost in a music festival, bathed in sound and light, your body moving before your mind gives permission. It is a first kiss, the one where your whole self knows something before language arrives.
Everyone has this. We just stopped calling it by its name and we stopped protecting it.
If you are leading a team, running a company, allocating capital, or sitting in a room where restructuring is on the table, this is not a request to slow down. I understand the economics. I promote AI orchestration for a living. I know what the numbers demand.
But I would ask you to consider what you are taking from people beyond the role. The person who receives that email is losing more than a salary. They are losing the structure that told them who they were every morning. And most of them have nothing underneath it, because we never built the systems, the culture, or the permission for them to find out.
If you are on the other side of that decision, if you are the one looking at the email or wondering when it arrives, I would say this. The anxiety you feel right now is the most honest thing you have. And the question it is asking, the one about who you are when the title and the badge and the calendar invites disappear, that question deserves your time. Even now. Especially now.
I am pretty average. I want to say that because it matters. I did not come from a family of philosophers or poets. I came from a family that worked. And somewhere along the way, like most people, I was told that the reaching was nice but the earning was the point.
I kept the thread anyway.
And if someone as ordinary as me managed to hold onto that thread, then it was never about talent or luxury or having the right degree. It was about permission that we forgot to give ourselves and each other.
AI can write a perfect poem as it can generate stanzas in any style, in any language, with technical precision that matches the best human work. And it will never need to write one. It will never ache, or reach for something it cannot quite hold, or sit in the dark with a feeling it has no words for and try, badly, to find them.
That reaching is the most human thing about us. And we forgot to build it inside ourselves before we needed it most.
All the Zest 🍋
Cien