Grief has come to the office
Our co-founder and executive director Brad Wolfe has an op-ed in Fortune this month, and it is about a kind of loss most people would not think to call grief.
The piece is called "I run an organization dedicated to collective grieving. I recognize a familiar dynamic with AI in the workplace." Its argument, in one line: the rapid arrival of AI at work is producing a largely unspoken form of grief, over lost expertise, eroded trust and career paths that are vanishing overnight, and most leaders are handling it exactly the way people handle every other loss they would rather not look at. They turn away from it.
Why a grief organization is writing about AI
Reimagine has spent a decade helping people sit with loss, and one thing that decade has taught us is that death is not the only thing humans grieve. Our research with HarrisX on non-death loss found that when a major disruption goes unsupported, the distress it produces is comparable to grieving a death: isolation, anger, distrust of institutions, and physical symptoms like sleep problems, fatigue and pain.
Brad's point is that the AI transition is producing exactly that kind of disruption, at scale, in corporate America. The questions employees are quietly asking (What becomes of the skills I spent years mastering? Will my function become obsolete? Am I losing the muscle to think without this?) are grief questions. And the data he cites suggests the culture cost is already showing up: a Gallup study finding that heavy AI adoption correlates with a worsening workplace culture, and a Microsoft survey in which more than half of workers worried that relying on AI made them look replaceable.
What he asks leaders to do
Not to stop. The piece is careful about that. What it asks is that leaders drop the forced optimism and make room for people to name what they are afraid of losing, because what people grieve tells you what they value, and that is useful information.
Grief over lost mastery might argue for more mentorship and hands-on learning. Grief over eroded trust might argue for clearer norms around authorship and honesty. Grief over low-quality machine output might reveal how much a team actually values care and human judgment. In each case the loss points at a value, and the value points at a decision.
It ends where our work always ends, with grief as the thing that can, in his words, help us "shape what comes next."
If this is the kind of loss you or your organization is carrying, our Life Transitions page is a place to start, and we are always glad to hear from workplaces who want to bring this conversation inside. Reach out.
