CONCEPT
Jonah Complex
Maslow's name for the fear of one's own greatness — the flight from the full expression of one's highest capacities, visible now in the engineer who retreats from AI rather than grow into what it makes possible.
The Jonah Complex is Maslow's term, drawn from the Biblical prophet who fled his calling, for the human tendency to shy away from the full expression of one's highest capacities. We are, Maslow wrote, generally afraid to become what we can glimpse in our most perfect moments. The AI tool confronts people with the Jonah Complex in a new and acute form: when the barriers between imagination and production collapse, the question of whether you will actually step into the fullness of your creative capacity becomes unavoidable. The book reads the flight response documented in the AI discourse — the engineers who move to the woods, the developers who refuse to engage — as the Jonah Complex in contemporary form.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Maslow observed that people routinely stop short of their fullest capacities, not from laziness or lack of ability, but from something closer to existential anxiety. To become what you could