Enthusiastic Fear

A lawyer and writer reflects on the fear of obsolescence in classical music and the legal profession amid AI advancements, drawing parallels between counterphobic reactions in both fields and arguing that the core human craft remains valuable despite technological upheaval.

Enthusiastic Fear Originally written in German „Enthusiastische Angst" . While writing this, I listened to one piece, over and over: Mendelssohn's Concerto for Violin, Piano and Strings in D minor, the second movement, the Adagio Apple Music · Spotify . Take a moment, a small pause - if you feel like it: listen to it once before you read this, and then once more while you read. I had actually meant to write about Claude for Legal. About legal AI, about large language models, and about what they are doing to our craft. But the longer I looked, the clearer it became: most of this picture is not technical. My wife, a psychologist and psychotherapist, pointed out to me that psychology has long had names for what I was seeing everywhere - a fear that flees forward into enthusiasm: counterphobia, the manic defense. And that this makes it deeply human. Human, all too human. This is less about models and benchmarks than about that fear - and about the confidence we should allow ourselves anyway, or precisely because of it. So it turned into a different piece. One about technological upheavals, about the fear they drag along behind them, and about what remains once you finally set that fear down. It does not begin at the screen where I work today. It begins on the lower level of my childhood home. "Are There Any Ralph Laurens Left?" My father often called these words down to the lower level, to where the wardrobe with his work clothes stood. My father is an orchestral musician. "Ralph Lauren" meant the shirts - the white, immaculate, starched ones he wore under his tailcoat. And next to the shirts hung that very tailcoat: the musician's costume, the uniform of the concert evening. As a child, that call always raised the same question in me: What for? Why does music need these clothes? Today I have plenty of answers ready. Tradition. The whole experience. The dignity of the occasion. And yet the childlike question remains more justified than I would like. Because none of it is necessary - at least not once it becomes an end in itself. Of course a concert hall is also about entertainment, and of course all the senses are in play. But they should be engaged, or left out, deliberately. The focus belongs elsewhere: on the core. On the touching of inner feeling through sound. Everything else is frame. A beautiful frame, sometimes. But frame. I am not telling this out of nostalgia. I am telling it because that wardrobe downstairs taught me something early on that I only recognized again much later - this time not in the concert hall, but in my own profession, in the middle of all the excitement about artificial intelligence. An Industry That Fears Its Own Death The world of classical music has long been shaped by a fear that today, in the age of AI, is pushing into almost every line of work more broadly than ever before: Will what I produce become obsolete? Will there come a day when no one needs me to make classical music, to draft a document, to drive a taxi, to write a legal complaint? In classical music this fear is, in a sense, built in - and it has a measurable core. The audience is aging, and markedly so. In the United States, the average age of concertgoers was 40 in 1982, 45 in 1992, and 49 in 2002. In France, the median age of classical concert audiences has climbed from 36 in 1981 to around 61 today; in 2022, nearly 60 percent of the audience there was older than 65. Anyone sitting inside those numbers hears the same quiet refrain running along for decades: It is dying out. Soon my work will no longer be needed. And yet the numbers tell something else, something consoling that tends to get lost in the noise of fear. Overall attendance has stayed remarkably stable for decades - from 1979 to 2022, a fairly constant 15 to 20 percent of those surveyed attended such concerts. So the audience is not aging because it is dying out, but in good part because one particular generation is especially loyal to the music. It is change, not collapse. But fear does not hear that. Fear does not do the math. Fear extrapolates the worst line and calls it realism. Fleeing Into Exuberance What does an industry do when it fears its own death? More often than not, it flees into an almost embarrassing over-enthusiasm. The worry of being overlooked turns into hard selling. You get manufactured starlets and talent-show storylines, an endless machinery of competitions, crossover covers, the turning of everything into an event. The concert hall becomes a stage for anything and everything - only the core, the music itself, slips further and further out of view. Don't get me wrong. Commerce is not a bad thing. We need beautiful covers, smart marketing, and sometimes it is precisely the crossover piece that becomes the door through which someone first walks in. The tailcoat can be the perfect garment. The point is not purity, not asceticism. The point is simply that the core must not be lost beneath the exuberance. Because that is the real mechanism: fear of the supposedly inevitable leads to a tense, forced enthusiasm. And forced enthusiasm sounds, from the outside, like passion - but is, honestly, just well-dressed fear. The Same Fear, Now Everywhere When I listen around today - in phone calls with friends, in work conversations, and worst of all when I open LinkedIn - I meet exactly this enthusiastic fear again. Only this time not in a niche market, but everywhere, amplified beyond all measure. All the freshly minted AI experts, all the threads that explain to you in five points why your profession will vanish in eighteen months - and in the sixth point sell you a webinar. I say this without arrogance; on the contrary, with a cynical sideways glance at myself: I am one of them. I, too, play along, more often than I would like. I won't belabor the parallels to industrialization and the internet here - they are obvious, and that is exactly why they make the point. Every great technological wave brings forth two things at once: real shifts that upend livelihoods, and a backdrop of noise made of fear, so loud that it blocks the view of those very shifts. We talk so much about the wave that we forget to swim. "Honey, I Need an Upgrade " These were the words I called out to my wife after my first real session with coding agents - four projects at once, running in parallel, all in motion. I was excited, fascinated, drained, overwhelmed, and deeply euphoric, all at the same time. I can't remember the last time it was made so immediately clear to me that the productivity hung entirely on me - on my thinking, my attention, my ability to hold several threads at once. Yes: the bread-and-butter business of programming, the plain writing-out of code, is, in its old form, doomed. That became just as clear to me in that session, and the consequences are far-reaching and, for me and for many others, deeply unpleasant; I don't want to play that down. But then, as once on the lower level, the real question arises - the shirt question: What is actually the core here? My core was never the coding. My core was process optimization through technology - translating problems into structures, casting structures into software. And that is exactly what I can now do far more productively than ever before. It demands an adjustment of thinking, of acting, a profound restructuring of how I work - more than I would like; more, it feels, than I am able to handle. But the core has not vanished. It has been laid bare. And here a kind of honesty pays off that no sales brochure offers: these models achieve remarkable things in programming - though, in fairness, code is also the most obvious field, because it is comparatively the simplest. Code is unambiguous. Code is verifiable. Code compiles or it doesn't; the test runs green or red. If the law were as unambiguous and as verifiable as a program, what a beautiful, clear world that would be. It is not. And it is precisely in that ambiguity that the real story lies. Legal and IP: The Burning Glass It is precisely where language, judgment, and responsibility come together - in the law, and for me above all in the field of intellectual property - that the enthusiastic fear is loudest. Here the fear becomes tangible, because here the substance is at stake: if law becomes partly automatable, what does that mean for those who have done it by hand until now? Take the concrete example I had originally set out to write about. In May 2026, Anthropic unveiled "Claude for Legal" - a suite of practice-area-specific plug-ins, dozens of workflow agents, and connections to the industry's established platforms. It is Anthropic's most decisive step into the legal market so far. And I admit it: I admire the company behind it. Claude was long a frontrunner in capability without being equally present in people's minds - often ahead technically, behind in public perception. That has just reversed, visible in about as clear a metric as one could ask for. In late May 2026, Anthropic reached a valuation of around 965 billion dollars in a funding round, surpassing OpenAI for the first time; shortly afterward came the confidential filing for an IPO. The capability had been there for a long time. Now perception - and value - is finally catching up. And at exactly this moment I catch myself being drawn to the wrong question - the same one that was debated everywhere in the weeks after the launch. Is there real, long-term ambition behind Claude for Legal? Or is it, cynically asked, more of a well-timed move ahead of the IPO - barely a month old and already half-forgotten as soon as the next headline arrives? It is a seductive question. It is also a sideshow. It is, honestly, already quite meta - and it catches on only because that fear is there, looking for an outlet. Whoever is afraid searches for the catch, for the proof that it is all just show. I don't want to play that game. Because the real, more beautiful question lies underneath: How can we change the legal system - the concrete application and enforcement of law - for the better with these new capabilities? Not more reliable - these tools hallucinate, and that remains a real limit. But broader: more sources, more jurisdictions, more patents reviewed than a single person could ever manage alone. Better at finding what is relevant, where decisive hits used to drown in the noise. Drafting first versions for genuine judgment to push against. Faster in the connections that, across vast amounts of material, only reveal themselves on a second look. More thorough where routine used to eat up all the attention. And precisely thereby free again for what only human judgment can do: examine, weigh, take responsibility. This is not naive optimism. It is the decision to turn one's gaze away from the sideshow and back to the core. And what that core is remains deeply individual. Whether my father even sees the core of his music-making the way I described it above - as the touching of inner feeling through sound - I do not know. Perhaps for him it is something entirely different. And for every lawyer, every judge, different again. No one can name it for you. But everyone can find it for themselves - and that is the real work. Leave the Ralph Laurens in the Wardrobe Hence my almost pleading request - to the industry, no, to the whole world: Can we, for once, leave the Ralph Laurens in the wardrobe? Can we stop constantly proving that we are playing the AI game, and instead put the focus on the core of what we make? Honestly acknowledge the changes - the painful ones included - and at the same time actively look for the new opportunities, instead of only mourning the old losses? A passing thought that brushed me as I wrote: the tailcoat in my father's wardrobe is not only tradition - it is also armor. You put on flawlessness before exposing yourself to the audience's judgment. But the armor is not the music. And all the overwrought AI enthusiasm, all the slop we produce day after day just to belong, is nothing else: we dress our fear in excitement and call it strategy. So, perhaps: take a breath. Set down the armor - can't we? Listen to a Bach partita instead of churning out the next bit of slop. And use the quiet to develop that new self - the one that gets the chance, the real, rare chance, to become substantially better. More productive, more thorough, braver in what only we can contribute at the core. Because that is the true gain the fear keeps from us: whoever sets it down does not lose less, but gains more. Namely the freedom to finally turn one's focus to where it belongs - to building something great. Not despite these tools, but with them. My father's shirt now hangs permanently in the wardrobe. He is retired, and has devoted himself to music research. In his seat in the orchestra sits a talented young successor today. No one has become obsolete; the music plays on. Sources: Data on the aging of classical-music audiences via Population Europe , Classic FM , and Audience Answers . On Claude for Legal: ABA Journal , Artificial Lawyer . On Anthropic's valuation: CNBC , Bloomberg , Fortune IPO .