Token Anxiety
What unused credits are really telling you
It’s Thursday. My Claude Max usage resets tomorrow morning, and I’m staring at the weekly dashboard.
Sixty-eight percent. I start running the math on what those remaining credits could have built. Not because I need anything built. Because leaving them on the table feels like waste.
I have a gaming laptop sitting on my desk. I bought it during COVID for exactly the reason you’d expect. It hasn’t run a game in months. Now I look at it and think: that GPU should be running local models. It should be doing something. It should be working while I sleep.
As I review this draft, I pause every few minutes. A coding agent working on a bug fix in a project chimes in, requesting feedback. I switch contexts, review its output, give it another task, and come back to writing. The irony isn’t lost on me. I’m writing about the pressure to always have something running while I literally have something running.
One name I’ve been using for this feeling is token anxiety. The persistent, low-grade pressure that you should be doing more with AI tools. Not because you have a specific need, but because the capacity is there and you’re not using it. The term is still settling out, but the feeling is precise.
If this sounds familiar, you’re not imagining it. And you’re not alone.
