EROSION OF SELF: ONTOLOGICAL SECURITY AND SENSE OF AGENCY IN A TECHNOLOGY DRIVEN WORLD

Abstract

The proliferation of artificial intelligence tools in professional life has generated urgent questions about the psychological experience of those who use them daily. This study investigated how tech-literate adult professionals aged 27 to 47 construct and narrate experiences of ontological security and sense of agency within AI-mediated professional and personal environments. Ontological security, understood following Giddens (1991) as the tacit biographical continuity that underpins confident engagement with daily life, and sense of agency, theorised by Moore (2016) as the first person experience of authoring one's own actions, formed the two central theoretical constructs. A qualitative design grounded in Reflexive Thematic Analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006, 2019, 2022) was employed, informed by a constructionist epistemology. Eight adult professionals were recruited through purposive sampling across two generational cohorts, aged 27 to 37 and 37 to 47 respectively, reflecting different biographical relationships to the emergence of AI in professional practice. Data were generated through individual, semi-structured, in-depth interviews and analysed through comprehensive manual coding supported by ATLAS.ti for cross-case organisation and query. Analysis produced 55 codes organised into six thematic clusters: Embodied Temporality, The Boundary Question, Agency and Authorship, AI as Ontological Mirror, Functional Motivations, and Future Self. Findings indicate that AI integration does not produce a uniform erosion of ontological security or sense of agency but rather actively restructures both, generating a self that is rhythmically mobile around technology engagement, strategically narrated in defence of authorship, and existentially negotiated in relation to perceived cognitive atrophy, impostor experience, and professional obsolescence anxiety. A generational inflection was identified: the 27 to 37 cohort tended to narrate boundary blurring and AI collaboration as adaptive and normative, while the 37 to 47 cohort more frequently narrated the same experiences as confrontational and requiring active management. The study contributes an empirically grounded phenomenological account of AI-mediated selfhood to a literature that has remained largely theoretical, and identifies biographical timing of AI adoption as a theoretically significant moderator of ontological experience.