How do I cope when machines can now do the animation craft I mastered?

You can make a character carry real emotion, a skill you built over years of patient work. Now a machine approximates in seconds something that cost you so much to learn, and you grieve that. The grief is real and it is fair. You are watching a craft you loved get cheapened in the eyes of a world that only sees the output. But look closely at what the machine does and does not do. It approximates. It copies the surface of feeling by having seen a million examples, yours likely among them. What it does not have is the thing you have: the reason behind a choice, the taste to know which small movement tells the truth. The machine makes something that looks like emotion. You know what emotion is. The craft is changing, not vanishing, and that is genuinely hard to sit with. Give yourself room to mourn what is passing. Then ask where your particular eye still matters, guiding these tools, catching what they get wrong, telling stories only a person who has felt things can tell. Your years were not wasted. They became judgment, and judgment is the one thing the machine cannot download.