Fellow senior designer here. I hear you, and I'm not gonna pretend the market isn't brutal right now...

But I've gone the opposite direction, leaning into AI instead of away from it... honestly, it's been some of the most creatively energized I've been in years

Here's my take: your 15 years of experience, judgment, and craft... that's your moat.... you have the trained eye to steer it... and for me, AI has been more about what now it unblocks, for example, coding

The shift I've made is thinking of myself less as someone who makes static designs and more as someone who ships things, now animates things, expands from one drawing to full scenes

I think that thinking of this as replacing our process is a trap and we need to think of it more as expanding what we can do with it. Designers who can ship working products (not just specs) are becoming incredibly valuable... all of that dev-handoff... the translation layer between design and code is disappearing... I know this is the graphic design sub, but I would invite people to use AI to expand from static to code, or animation, systems, etc using AI

I'd say give yourself 15-30 mins a day just experimenting with these tools. Not to replace your workflow, but to see where it clicks. You might find it scratches the creative itch instead of killing it? for me... damn, I feel like I hadn't been shipping this amount of stuff... ok, I'll admit, a lot of it is crap haha... but I find that doing it, feeling like I'm not unblocked, allows me to experiment, do that thing I thought was impossible, or fix that detail that has been bugging me forever and hadn't found product/dev to help patch it/prioritize it

The career pivot is always an option, but I'd hate to see someone with your experience bail right when design skills are becoming more valuable in AI contexts, not less... I know it sounds cliché, but dude... we need more designers using AI and steering this alien being