June 06, 2026
am i using this or is this using me
real talk
okay so real talk.
i've been thinking about this AI thing and i genuinely cannot stop.
like everyone around me is acting like this is the best thing that's ever happened and i'm sitting here thinking, has anyone actually thought this through?
someone asked me whose life AI made easier and i just. couldn't answer it cleanly. because yeah it writes your emails and summarizes stuff but like. my phone was supposed to connect me to people and i've never felt more alone at a party in my life so.
the pattern is the same every time. they sell you the thing by telling you what it gives you. they don't tell you what it takes.
the economy thing actually keeps me up at night and i don't think i'm being dramatic.
if AI replaces the entry level jobs, the ones people actually start their lives with, where does the money come from. like who's buying things. who's paying rent. who's building up the experience to eventually run things without breaking them.
coinbase laid off fourteen percent of their staff because AI can do it cheaper. their CEO sent a company wide email about it. called it being "AI-native" like that's something to aspire to. the same week their whole system went down because chillers failed in an AWS data center. nothing to do with AI actually. but the timing was something.
there's this thoreau quote and i know that sounds like something an english major puts in their instagram bio but stay with me.
"men have become the tools of their tools."
he wrote that in the 1800s living in a cabin with no wifi and somehow understood what we still can't figure out with all of our computing power and oat milk.
the train didn't free the guy who gave up walking to afford the ticket. he gave the railroad his money and his time and his legs going soft and his ability to just go somewhere without paying someone first. the railroad called him a passenger. he thought that meant something.
your phone promised connection. check how you feel after an hour on it and tell me what it actually delivered.
AI is promising to give you your thinking back by doing your thinking for you. i need you to sit with how insane that sentence is.
and can we talk about how everything looks the same now.
every linkedin post. every instagram caption. every brand email. same cadence. same little punchy sentences. same "here's what i learned." same fake vulnerability pivot to insight. you can feel it before you've read a word.
writing has a voice. like a real one. and voice isn't grammar or structure or even ideas. it's the specific weird way a specific person who has lived a specific life puts words in a specific order. it can't be averaged. you can't train a model on it. you have to earn it by writing badly for years until something true comes out.
AI doesn't have that. it has the average of everyone else's voice. and we keep feeding it more.
AI isn't curing cancer either. people keep implying it might be close. it isn't. it can spot patterns in scans which is real and useful and nowhere near a cure. the distance between those two things is the distance between recognizing a fire and knowing how to stop one.
the only question that matters is the one thoreau asked a different way.
am i using this or is this using me.
what are you willing to stay bad at a little longer. what discomfort are you keeping because that's where the actual thing lives. the not knowing yet is the condition under which knowing becomes possible.
we are building something to take that away and calling it progress.
the person i talked to today figured all of this out themselves. pushed back, caught their own wrong examples, changed their mind when they should have, ended up somewhere true.
no tool did that.
just a person thinking, which is still the most interesting thing anyone can do.
don't outsource it.