A tiny seed found its way into the crack of a rock.

No one planted it.

No one encouraged it.

Most people will never see it.

And yet, given the smallest opening, it took root.

That’s one of the great principles of life: growth is always happening.

Look around.

Ferns push through pavement.

Trees split concrete.

Moss softens stone.

Life is constantly reaching toward more life.

Maybe we’re meant to do the same.

Not because the conditions are perfect, but because growth has never waited for perfect conditions.

One of the hardest things about caregiving is that you don’t realize it’s changing you while you’re in it.

The changes happen so slowly they’re almost impossible to see.

Then one day you look in the mirror and realize you’ve been putting yourself last for a very long time.

I prided myself for decades on putting my health and fitness first, driven by the belief that an empty vessel can’t pour into anyone -- or anything -- else. I was toned and strong. I felt good in my body. I looked good in my body. I slept well each night. I managed my stress through movement, good nutrition, and down time. I was proud of how I took care of myself.

Then came five years of caregiving for my parents. Four months into that journey, my father died. I became my mother’s full-time caregiver as she lived with Parkinson’s.

To be honest, I had no idea what I was signing up for when I said yes to caring for my mom. How could I? How can anyone? All I knew was, it was the right thing to do. And even the right thing has consequences you can’t possibly imagine.

One of the big ones: you won’t realize how slowly and incrementally you surrender parts of yourself to another person.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re caring for a parent, grandparent, sibling, friend, or child. It happens without you noticing.

Chronic stress changes your body. You begin storing food differently. If you’re a woman, perimenopause and menopause add another layer to the changes that happen. If you’re a man, changing hormone levels affect you too as you get older. You don’t sleep as well. Your eating patterns change. Even if you’ve always been someone who puts yourself first, you simply... stop.

And it’s not just your body that changes.

One of the things caregiving teaches you is that much of what you once thought mattered... doesn’t.

Dying doesn’t care about your socioeconomic status. It doesn’t care about your followers, latest product launch, or personal brand.

You begin letting go of things that were never serving you in the first place. Your priorities shift. Your value system shifts. The person you thought you were slowly gives way to the person caregiving asks you to become.

You may not see any of this while you’re living it.

The work you’re doing probably won’t be recognized.

You’re not going to gain millions of followers, if that’s your thing. You’re not going to receive a trophy or a Medal of Honor. You’re probably not going to open your bank account one day and find seven or eight zeros waiting for you.

Caregiving is not a path to millions.

It is a path to developing your character.

Your value system.

Your humility.

I am now nearly three months on the other side of losing my mom. Three months on the other side of five years dedicated to her care, to managing the home she loved so she could age in place, and to helping care for our family’s property.

Only now am I beginning to see what those years asked of me.

I never imagined caring for my mom would become part of my future. I was just living my life, caught up in my own plans.

Five years of watching her slowly decline became, arguably, the greatest lesson of my life.

For those of you reading this who are actively caregiving right now, or have been a caregiver in the past, I don’t know you personally, but I see you on a universal level.

I see you.

You may not realize how much this experience is changing or changed you.

I hope one day, when you’re standing on the other side of it, you’ll look back and see not only everything you gave...

...but also who you became.

My parents loved

looking up at the trees

against the bright blue sky

and remarking on

the glorious color contrast

of the green with the blue

When the wind blows

It’s as if they’re speaking to me

from beyond, reminding me

to carry on their amazing legacy

Caring for this glorious world

and looking up,

remembering

to look up at the sky

against the trees

For more than fifteen years, the refrain about posting on social media has remained the same.

You don’t own your audience. You’re renting space on someone else’s platform.

I’ve understood that intellectually for years.

What I didn’t fully appreciate until this morning is that I’m apparently renting my own timeline, too.

I opened Instagram and noticed something strange on my grid.

My posts were no longer in chronological order, which has been the way of Instagram since I joined it in 2014.

A recent post had somehow slipped below one I’d published months earlier.

At first I thought I was imagining it.

I wasn’t.

Apparently Instagram is experimenting with treating your profile less like a historical archive and more like a layout it can rearrange.

Whether you like that change or not is almost beside the point.

The part that caught my attention wasn’t Instagram.

It was me.

My immediate reaction surprised me.

I felt less interested in posting anything at all.

That reaction sent me down a different path of inquiry.

Why?

The obvious answer would be to blame the platform.

The more interesting answer is that another assumption about how any of this works died without anyone noticing in a big internet-fanfare way.

For years, I’ve bought into the idea that when I post anything, I’m leaving breadcrumbs. A chronological trail documenting ideas, experiences, photographs, poems, and moments in time.

If you’ve been with me for a while here, you know the extent of my love-hate relationship with posting on social media. Most of the time I grind my teeth as I create and then publish content that adds to the breadcrumb trail.

Now I discover those breadcrumbs may not stay where I left them.

Someone else can rearrange the trail.

That’s when I realized the trap isn’t Instagram.

The trap is the breadcrumb itself.

For months now I’ve been asking myself a difficult question.

If I don’t see a meaningful cause-and-effect relationship between posting on Instagram (or any social platform for that matter) and people calling to work with me...

...why do I still feel compelled to keep posting?

Habit?

Hope?

Fear of disappearing?

Maybe all three.

It’s fascinating how habits can outlive the assumptions that created them.

Long after the original reason has faded, we continue behaving as though the old map still applies.

And every time we open the app, we unconsciously reach for that same map, expecting it to lead us somewhere new.

The current isn’t always out there.

Sometimes it’s inside us, pulling us to keep doing yesterday’s work for yesterday’s reasons.

Maybe that’s why this tiny change on Instagram caught my attention.

Not because my timeline moved, but because it exposed a current I hadn’t fully seen.

One that whispered:

Keep leaving breadcrumbs.

Without ever asking whether I still need to.

Over the weekend, my best friend took me into an estate jewelry store in Orange, California. She knows the owner and wanted to see his latest vintage Rolex acquisitions.

I had no intention of trying one on. In fact, I’ve never considered myself a Rolex person.

She pointed to a couple of watches in the case, and he carefully laid them on the green velvet pad jewelers use, complete with the little Rolex crown stamped into the fabric.

One was a vintage 1970s 18-karat gold piece with an aftermarket diamond bezel. The other was a much newer model with a smaller dial, a rose gold and steel two-tone band, an olive green face, and diamonds circling the bezel (pictured above).

Both were stunning.

After my friend tried them on, I asked if I could.

When I looked down at those watches on my wrist, I thought, Huh. I get it now.

I wasn’t suddenly calculating how to spend $20,000.

What I noticed was something much more interesting.

Somewhere between fastening the clasp and looking down at my wrist, an identity I had never considered suddenly felt possible.

That surprised me.

My dad loved watches.

After his death, I was tasked with cleaning out his study, sorting through the endless folders and notebooks he had assembled over the years. Among them were folders devoted entirely to watches he found beautiful.

My dad dreamed big when it came to a lot of things: sailboats, cars, tools, and watches.

Ironically, the watch he wore every day was a modest Omega with a brown leather band.

But tucked inside those folders were photographs of Patek Philippe, Breitling, and Rolex watches clipped from magazines and printed from the internet.

Standing there in that jewelry store, I found myself wondering how many of our desires actually belong to us and how many arrive through invisible currents we never think to question.

I certainly didn’t wake up on Saturday thinking about Rolex watches.

I wasn’t thinking about six-figure BMWs or designer handbags or luxury brands.

I’ve never been particularly drawn to signaling status through labels.

So what, exactly, was happening?

It wasn’t about the watch.

It was about me.

Could I be a Rolex woman?

More importantly, why had I assumed I wasn’t?

That question reaches far beyond luxury watches.

There are countless assumptions quietly directing our lives.

I’m not wealthy.

I’m not artistic.

I’m not athletic.

I’m not the kind of woman...

I’m not the kind of man...

I’m not someone who...

Every single day those assumptions influence our choices, often without our awareness.

Sometimes all it takes is one unexpected experience to expose them.

As I stood there looking at a secondary-market Rolex on my wrist, I caught a glimpse of someone I hadn’t previously imagined.

Not because of the watch.

Because of the possibility.

Later my friend told me about her real estate manager, a Rolex enthusiast who seems to drive to Beverly Hills every other week to add another watch to his collection.

Then the owner shared the stories behind some of the watches in the cases.

That’s what makes estate jewelry so fascinating.

Every watch has already lived another life.

Every owner believed different things about themselves.

Some dreamed.

Some achieved.

Some inherited.

Some sold.

One of the watches I admired had belonged to a famous Mexican singer. After he was killed, the watch passed to his son. Years later, his son was also shot outside a nightclub in Tijuana, and eventually the watch found its way into that small estate jewelry store in Orange, California.

As someone who loves Jungian archetypes and the humanities, where stories are threaded through history, myth, and symbol, I found that collection of watches almost mythical.

Each one carried more than time.

Each one carried a story.

And that’s the thing about invisible currents.

They rarely announce themselves.

They quietly shape what feels imaginable long before we realize they’re there.

Over the weekend I walked into a jewelry store thinking I was going to watch my best friend try on watches.

Looking back, I think I was trying on a possibility.

Sometimes all it takes to expose one of those invisible currents is fastening the clasp on a watch you never imagined wearing.

I will never forget the day when someone in my life, who I will not name, accused me in front of a bunch of people of scamming her friend.

At the time, I was building an independent business with a direct selling company, a legitimate direct selling company based out of Seattle, Washington. The product line consisted of high-end genomic-based nutraceuticals. For the mid-2000s, the quality and efficacy were beyond just about anything else on the market.

What bothered me most about that incident was this person’s reaction to learning that I had met with their friend and that their friend was interested in buying the product because the product helped.

Side note: I still take those products today.

I’m long gone from that business model because it changed, but at the time I believed in what I was doing. I had a dream. For several years, that dream worked.

What I didn’t understand then was that the attack wasn’t really about me.

In the moment, I reacted. I felt ashamed and I felt wrong for believing that being an independent business owner could create opportunities for my life.

Years later, I can see the situation differently.

Their words had everything to do with their situation in life, their fears, the things they felt threatened by, and the possibilities they could no longer see because of choices they had made.

I grew up in a home that approached life differently.

My parents encouraged my brother and me in our interests and pursuits. They encouraged lots of people. My mother was a Girl Scout troop leader. My father was a Boy Scout leader. Both were educators. Both modeled the essence of servant leadership.

They believed in possibility.

That doesn’t mean they ignored reality. Every generation faces challenges. My generation did. My parents’ generation did. Today’s Gen Z and Gen Alpha are facing challenges their parents and grandparents never faced: economic challenges, climate challenges, technological challenges, relationship challenges.

If my parents were alive today, they would absolutely have concerns about the way certain things are going. Nothing new there. They expressed concerns throughout their lifetime.

But they would also rise above the fray.

They would find the light.

They would find a way to be encouraging and supportive.

One of the most important lessons they taught me was that you don’t have to share someone’s dream to support it.

You can simply say:

“That’s your dream, and I believe in you.”

I don’t put down other people’s dreams.

It’s not my place.

We’re each living our own lives. We make decisions and choices. Sometimes things work out and sometimes they don’t. Oftentimes, it’s the things that don’t work out that teach us the most.

Not everybody who enters your life will stay for the whole run.

That’s a difficult reality to accept.

I’ve watched people shut down parts of themselves in order to survive less-than-ideal situations. I’ve watched people abandon dreams because someone they cared about made those dreams feel foolish, unrealistic, or wrong.

The person who attacked me that day gave me an unexpected gift.

They showed me that not everyone will celebrate your vision.

And that’s okay.

Because your dream does not require unanimous approval.

I don’t know who’s reading this today, but if no one has told you lately that they believe in your dream, whatever that dream may be, let me be that person.

A real person behind these words.

Your dream matters.

And so does your life.

Long ago I adopted my parents’ philosophy of encouraging others to be the best version of themselves and to dream big. Even if it doesn’t appeal to me, someone else’s dream or life is never wrong because my dream and my life are not wrong.

You never know how far a little encouragement might travel.

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Lately I’ve noticed that almost every post in my feed is about AI.

People’s opinions about AI.

People celebrating it.

People warning about it.

People accusing each other of using it.

People building businesses around teaching people how to use it.

People building businesses around teaching people how not to use it.

After a while, it all started to feel annoyingly repetitive.

Which got me wondering if we’re all staring at the wrong thing.

For the last couple of years, I’ve spent a lot of time writing and thinking about algorithms, artificial intelligence, meaning, attention, and the increasingly bizarre corners of the internet where people now argue about whether a comment, a post, or even a simple idea was created by a human being or a machine.

At some point, I hit saturation.

Not because I stopped caring. Quite the opposite.

I care deeply about the ways these forces are reshaping daily life. I care about the effects they’re having on relationships, creativity, work, identity, and the stories people tell themselves about who they are and where they fit in the world.

What I don’t care much about anymore is the endless debate.

It’s tired. I’m tired. Time for a different question.

For years, whenever I felt uncertain or restless, I would ask myself where I was going. This is how most people are trained to move forward. I’d get out my journal and jot down these questions:

Where am I headed?

What’s next?

What’s the plan?

The older I get, the more convinced I become that those aren’t the right questions.

The more useful question is this:

How do you navigate when the old map no longer describes the terrain?

Because that’s where a lot of people find themselves.

The terrain changed while everyone was busy living.

Careers changed. Relationships changed. Technology changed. Entire industries changed. The ways people meet, communicate, learn, create, shop, date, build businesses, form opinions, and spend their attention changed.

Think about a typical day in your life. How often are you using your phone for something? Driving somewhere new. Banking. Checking email. Texting. Scrolling Instagram or YouTube. Taking photos. Editing photos. Posting photos.

The list is endless.

This alone is a huge change in human behavior. And to be clear, change itself isn’t the problem. Change is inevitable. Sometimes it’s even welcome.

And yet there have been countless moments when I’ve continued to show up with an old map in my hands, staring at the landscape in front of me and wondering why none of it makes sense.

On that old map are a number of assumptions I and millions of others absorbed over the years:

-Work hard and you’ll get ahead.

-More information leads to better decisions.

-Expertise is scarce and therefore valuable.

-Credentials matter.

-Loyalty is rewarded.

-Stability is possible.

-Relationships follow recognizable scripts.

-Careers unfold in relatively predictable ways.

-Institutions can be trusted to remain intact.

-The future will look broadly similar to the past.

So much of what’s on that list is gone now. Yet I’m still asking:

Why isn’t this working?

Why does this feel harder than it used to?

Why can’t I seem to get traction?

The instinct is almost always to blame myself.

Work harder.

Get smarter.

Take another course.

Read another book.

Find the missing piece.

In other words, go back to the old map.

But lately I’ve been wondering if the issue isn’t effort.

What if the issue is orientation?

What if the challenge isn’t that I’m failing to navigate the terrain, but that I haven’t fully acknowledged that the terrain itself has changed?

That distinction feels important.

The phone is part of it.

The algorithm is part of it.

AI is part of it.

But those are features of the landscape. They aren’t the landscape itself.

The deeper challenge is environmental.

It’s learning to recognize that the conditions surrounding daily life are fundamentally different from the conditions many people were raised to expect.

Used to be information was scarce. Most people lived inside relatively similar realities because they watched the same news, read the same newspapers, and participated in the same local communities. Attention was assumed.

Today, a person can wake up in the morning, check their phone, absorb the opinions of hundreds of strangers, compare themselves to people they will never meet, encounter breaking news from three continents, receive marketing messages designed by teams of behavioral psychologists, consume more information than previous generations encountered in weeks, and still arrive at lunch feeling as though they don’t know enough.

Sometimes this makes me feel like I’ve been dropped into one of those sprawling science fiction worlds where everything feels vaguely familiar and completely foreign at the same time. Red dust blowing across a horizon that never seems to end. Strange colors. Strange weather. Strange rules. Matt Damon or Timothée Chalamet wandering around with purpose in their step but don’t know much about the terrain either.

A person standing there with an old map wouldn’t be stupid.

The map simply wouldn’t match reality anymore.

And that realization can be difficult to accept.

It’s much easier to keep unfolding the map and insisting the mountain should be over there.

It’s much easier to get angry.

To blame and complain and demand that the landscape return to what it was because what it was is familiar, comfortable, and doesn’t require much of us.

I’ve done all of those things.

Most people have.

Change has a way of forcing questions that would otherwise remain hidden.

Some people ask those questions.

Others spend years walking in circles, wiping dust from their eyes, returning again and again to the same frustrations, the same disappointments, the same explanations for why things aren’t working.

Not because they’re incapable, but because they’re trying to solve a navigation problem with an outdated understanding of the territory.

That’s the part nobody talks about.

Navigating new terrain requires letting go of things that once worked beautifully.

Assumptions.

Expectations.

Identities.

Certainties.

Sometimes even parts of yourself.

I’ve never experienced a tornado tearing through my home. I’ve never stood in the aftermath of a flood and watched people sift through the remains of what was once familiar.

I’ve only seen those moments from a distance.

And yet something about that experience feels oddly recognizable.

Over the last twenty years, entire sections of the cultural shoreline have been reshaped.

Not overnight.

Slowly enough that many people never noticed it happening.

One day the road is there.

Then one day it isn’t.

One day the old assumptions make sense.

Then one day they don’t.

The world keeps moving and suddenly you’re standing in a place you don’t entirely recognize.

When that happens, reaching for familiar tools isn’t always enough.

Sometimes the smartest thing a person can do is stop moving.

Look around.

Pay attention.

Take stock of what is actually here instead of what used to be here.

That’s uncomfortable work, and it’s the only work that leads anywhere.

It requires patience, humility, and a willingness to admit uncertainty.

It requires sitting with questions that don’t have immediate answers, which is perhaps why so much of it happens away from the screen.

While walking.

While writing.

While staring out a window.

While having conversations that don’t produce neat conclusions.

The longer I sit with this idea, the less interested I become in certainty.

What interests me now is awareness.

The ability to stand in unfamiliar territory and say:

I don’t know this place yet.

I don’t understand all of its rules.

I don’t know exactly where this road leads.

And still trust myself enough to take the next step.

For years I thought my work was about helping people see the forces shaping them.

Now I’m becoming interested in something else.

What happens after you see them?

During a particularly dark time in my life, not that long ago, I needed help processing a broken heart.

Since I can remember, writing, journaling, and creativity have been my go-to means of working through hard emotions like heartbreak and grief and anger.

I owe my beautiful late mother credit for pointing me toward pen and paper for those purposes.

I was 10 years old, standing next to her at the kitchen sink. She was washing dishes and I was drying them when she randomly said, “You know, MaryLou, you might like journaling.”

And just like that, a lifelong habit was born.

That very afternoon, I walked downtown to the mom and pop variety store on Main Street, and purchased for myself, with my allowance money, a hard-covered lined journal that had gold edging around all the pages and a tiny lock and a set of two tiny keys.

I wrote my first entry on the first page that same afternoon.

I still have that journal.

Fast forward all these years later and I’m still writing as a means of processing my thoughts and emotions. Old fashioned pen to paper still works wonders.

But, like any other method, pen to paper alone is limited.

What happens when a creator needs more?

Before I answer that question, enter stage left the suite of generative AI tools, carrying its enormous baggage behind it and the millions of people who are using it as their favorite punching bag.

These days, AI in every form is taking the blame for everything from climate change to why your toast burned this morning. Pick a problem and somebody is blaming AI as the cause of that problem.

I’ve made it clear throughout my tenure here on Substack and in other writings that I like using AI tools for specific strategic tasks. I’m not ashamed to admit that. I’m also clear that what I write is mine, not some product of a prompt.

I do not outsource my thinking to it. I do not copy and paste the AI slop that is initially generated. And in all fairness, because I have been using ChatGPT daily for almost four years, it knows me, my style, my preferences, my voice. It doesn’t always get it right. I have learned through trial and error how to intelligently interact with it. I also cross-reference information that it gives back to me if the context warrants it.

In short, generative AI can be an incredibly useful tool.

So when I needed to do something more with my writing as part of healing my broken heart that I can’t do on my own, I found a generative AI tool that could help me create songs out of lyrics I compose.

Music along with words has helped me get through some rough times. The fact that an AI tool could help me make music was revolutionary.

Using AI to make music is a super controversial topic in the creative space. And I get it. I do.

I have written extensively about how tech companies have scraped my work as a writer without compensation or acknowledgment. Certainly not a thank you. The ethics of what they did to train their models are at the center of countless posts, memes, and videos.

But that’s rear-view mirror stuff. I can’t change the past or what they did.

What I can do is look at my life and ask questions about ways of solving problems I’m experiencing, including working through a broken heart.

Writing original lyrics on paper with my pen was the first step.

Next came an AI tool to turn those lyrics into songs that I then worked with to shape and mix and produce.

Not copy and paste and say “Ta-da!” but actually do the work of creating something original the way artists have been creating since the dawn of time.

I didn’t just prompt AI with something as lazy and unimaginative as, “Write me a song about getting over heartbreak.”

Ugh.

No, I immersed myself in a process that included using AI tools alongside my brain to bring to life songs I needed to help me heal.

Science says that making art is one of the most powerful means of healing.

And maybe that’s why this matters beyond my own story.

When I heard my words, my experiences, my feelings for the first time in songs with a voice and instrumentation that I can hear in my head but have absolutely zero ability to produce on my own, I was blown away. My alter ego in the music scene is a male progressive rock lead singer with a prog rock band behind me putting out songs that touch hearts and souls and uplift people and make them feel less alone.

As a woman, I will never be able to do that. But AI helps me do that. And it’s incredibly cool.

My songs have not only made me feel less alone, but they’ve also helped me see there is life beyond a shattered heart. Beyond loss and grief and disappointment.

And Lord knows, we all could use more of a way through the chaos of modern life.

I don’t know about you, but when I’m out and about in the world, I see a lot of people in pain. I definitely see it on the socials.

In the real world, they may not be as forthcoming as in the comment sections, but I sense the cartoon bubbles floating above their heads filled with the heaviness of being human today aren’t getting any smaller.

The heaviness of economic uncertainty.

The heaviness of massive change that we can’t stop.

The questions about the meaning of life.

I recently met a woman who, after I mentioned having lost my mom a few weeks ago, brought me into her thought bubble when she said to me, “I’m losing my brother right now. I thought I had already grieved that loss because he succumbed to addiction years ago. But now he’s dying. Literally. In a hospital room.”

And she’s meeting grief face on again.

It’s easy to get caught up in the minutia of life and forget that we are all carrying a broken heart in one form or another. It’s easy to think no one else understands how much you’re suffering, how much everything hurts.

Some people walk around with the shattered pieces of their heart rattling around inside them, not knowing how to put those pieces back together.

Other people, like me, have chosen a path through art to forge a stronger heart with gold in the crucible of sorrow and grief and loss and pain.

And if AI can help a person do that, how can that be wrong?

A few mornings ago, I was reading The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday when I came across a question from Marcus Aurelius that gave me pause:

What influences the ruling reason that guides your life?

I read the sentence a few times, then wrote about it in my journal.

As I reflected on the question, I discovered that’s the question underneath almost everything I’ve been writing about lately.

What influences the ruling reason that guides your life?

This goes beyond what influences your actions, habits, and productivity.

What influences the thing that influences everything else?

Marcus Aurelius was wrestling with this question nearly 2,000 years ago. Today, I think the question may be more important than ever.

I find myself asking it constantly.

Sometimes it shows up in obvious ways.

I’ll catch myself browsing online for something I don’t actually need and have to stop and ask: Where did this desire come from?

Do I genuinely need a new jacket? Or a pair of shoes? Or another dress like ones I already own but in a different color or pattern?

Or did I spend fifteen minutes on Instagram looking at women my age who seem to have better clothes, better vacations, better homes, and more put-together lives than I do?

Did I arrive at this desire on my own?

Or was it planted there?

That’s not always an easy question to answer.

The same thing happens with personal development books, courses, technology, and ideas.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m pursuing something because it genuinely interests me or because I have absorbed the ambient anxiety of the internet and now feel behind.

The whole notion of “being behind” is a powerful marketing message. More content shows up every day that overtly suggests I am behind on AI, business, fitness, finances, or whatever the algorithm is serving this week.

The older I get, the less interested I am in judging myself for these moments.

What interests me is noticing them.

Because awareness creates a tiny bit of space.

And in that space lives choice.

Ryan Holiday references the famous question from the Roman satirist Juvenal:

Who watches the watchmen?

In other words, who is keeping an eye on the thing that’s supposed to be keeping an eye on everything else?

It’s a fascinating question.

Especially now.

For most of human history, our ruling reason was shaped by family, religion, culture, geography, survival, and the people around us.

Today, those influences still exist.

But many of us spend hours every day inside systems specifically designed to influence what we pay attention to, what we desire, what we fear, and what we believe is normal. Every one of those influences is tied to us parting with what’s in our bank accounts or still available on our credit cards in one way or another.

I’m not suggesting there’s a conspiracy or that we’re helpless to defend ourselves against these forces. .

I’m simply suggesting that Marcus Aurelius’s question deserves another look.

Because if attention shapes thought, and thought shapes action, then it might be worth asking what is shaping our attention.

Sometimes people ask me if the only answer at this point is to throw your phone into a ravine or smash it into tiny smithereens. To walk away completely from the device tethering us to these forces.

That’s not the answer. Too much of modern life now transpires through the phone.

Rather, it’s to become a little more aware of the forces acting on you before they become your forces.

Which brings me back to the question that stopped me in my tracks that morning:

What influences the ruling reason that guides your life?

And perhaps even more importantly:

How often do you stop long enough to find out?

I have a confession.

Every time I write something I genuinely care about and prepare to publish it online, a small part of me panics.

Not about criticism. Haters gonna hate and the bots are serving up disagreement faster than another outrage cycle can load in the feed.

It’s not even about being misunderstood. Wasn’t it Emerson who said, “To be a genius is to be misunderstood?”

No, I panic about being absorbed, flattened, and instantly taken by an AI agent on the prowl for fresh content prey.

I’ll finish an essay and think:

“This is good. This says something real.”

And almost immediately another voice appears:

“You just fed the machine.”

I know I’m not the only person wrestling with this.

Especially people trying to create thoughtful work online without becoming full-time performers inside the algorithmic circus.

We are living through a strange moment where visibility itself has become psychologically complicated.

To publish something online now is to place it into systems specifically designed to circulate, replicate, flatten, distort, reward, suppress, incentivize, and monetize attention.

Which creates a very weird emotional paradox for creators.

You want people to find your work.

But you don’t want to become algorithmically shaped in the process of making it discoverable.

You want influence.

But not manipulation.

You want resonance.

But not performance addiction.

You want readers.

But not the strange internal erosion that can happen when metrics slowly become mirrors.

And then there’s the fear almost nobody says out loud.

The fear that someone will take your ideas and repackage them as their own.

In fairness, this does happen.

We all see it.

Language gets recycled instantly now. Ideas become trends overnight (and often flame out as quickly as they flamed in). Nuance collapses into templates and frameworks. Human insight becomes “content strategy.”

Sometimes I’ll publish something deeply personal only to watch versions of the same language begin appearing elsewhere weeks later in shinier packaging with better lighting and stronger hooks.

Old me would have called that paranoia.

Current me thinks it’s probably just pattern recognition.

Still, I’ve noticed something unsettling underneath all of this.

The fear itself changes how I think.

If I’m not careful, I begin withholding before I’ve even spoken.

I begin negotiating with the algorithm before publishing a single sentence.

Should I say this?

Should I save this?

Am I giving too much away?

Will someone bigger take this and run with it?

Am I helping build my own invisibility?

And suddenly I’m no longer writing from clarity.

I’m writing from defense.

That shift matters.

A lot.

Especially for people trying to create meaningful work in public while still remaining psychologically intact.

What fascinates me most is how quickly this environment trains us into scarcity thinking.

There’s never enough attention or visibility.

Fears about audience size and loyalty manifest.

Questions about certainty come up: will your work remain attached to you once released into the digital wild?

Does that even matter?

The internet simultaneously demands originality while structurally rewarding sameness.

No wonder so many people feel creatively disoriented.

And yet…

I still publish. Right alongside millions of other people.

Not constantly. (Been there, done that and it’s beyond exhausting.)

Not strategically enough according to the internet. (The insatiable beast can never get enough.)

Not with the cadence the platforms prefer. (I honestly never understood what this meant.)

But I publish anyway.

Maybe that’s its own form of resistance now.

Refusing to disappear or become a machine. Choosing personal integrity over optimizing every thought for engagement. Being willing to share meaningful ideas instead of holding back out of fear someone else may echo it later.

Maybe the deeper work is learning how to participate without surrendering yourself entirely to the terrain.

Learning how to remain sovereign while still entering the public square.

I don’t have a neat answer for this yet.

And here’s a newsflash. No one does.

I just know the conflict feels real.

And based on the conversations I keep having lately, I suspect a lot more people are wrestling with it than we realize.

Bumpy is an orphan baby hippo currently in the care of a rescue operation called Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Nairobi, Kenya.

Bumpy’s mother (it is presumed) was killed by rival male hippos while trying to shelter her newborn from attack.

Bumpy is unbelievably cute. And thankfully, he is being cared for accordingly. He even has an adoption page on the Sheldrick webiste for softees like me who favor cute baby animals.

I learned about Bumpy this morning from Instagram’s algorithm which suggested I might like the story.

It was right.

Given the work I now do around developing skills for navigating algorithmic terrain none of us designed but are expected to succeed in wildly, seeing this story the algorithm served up to me gave me pause. Questions came to mind.

Is it possible the algorithm can occasionally deliver useful information?

Does knowing about Bumpy and his story add (yes) or take away (no) value from my life?

If much of life is simply a series of random events, coincidences, and collisions, could algorithmic influence on our lives be little more than the next evolution of that?

I decided as I drank my morning tea that the answer to each of these questions is yes.

For now.

The reality is, most of us are now engaging with algorithmic content all day every day. While most of it continues to be vapid and distracting and an utter waste of time, every now and then it gets it right.

My paternal grandmother was a lifelong Boston Red Sox fan. Every year starting in the mid 1930s until April 1985, ten months before cancer claimed her life, she attended opening day at Fenway Park.

To those who aren’t baseball fans, the season is long. To those who love the sport, it’s not long enough.

The anticipation sports fans feel each year as opening day approaches is exciting to witness in its own right. The beginning of anything is rife with possibility. No one has gotten hurt yet. Plans haven’t been tested and thus feel secure and smart. All bets are on.

Everything and anything is possible.

Starting is easy.

In a culture such as ours obsessed with makeovers and transformation and second, third, fourth chances, we have created an enormous economy around beginnings.

New love.

New job.

New you.

The internet is choking with information about how to start something new. Not so much about finishing and certainly even less about the slog, the middle, the grind.

Platitudes about the hustle and getting shit done abound. But they are superficial and discouraging. How am I supposed to #GSD when I’ve never gotten shit done before?

I simply don’t have the skills.

Which leads me to my less than scientifically proven conclusion that almost everything on the internet is bs. Positioning, posturing, blowing smoke…

And these days, so much outrage about everything.

Maybe the problem isn’t that starting is easy.

Maybe it’s that we’ve mistaken starting for progress.

Opening day comes whether you’re ready or not. The crowd shows up. The field is perfect. Everyone believes.

And then the season begins.

Not the highlight reel. Not the montage. The long stretch of ordinary days where nothing feels certain and no one is watching.

That’s where it counts.

Somewhere, a well-meaning person decided the average professional needs to understand 99 AI terms in order to remain employable.

Ninety-nine.

As if Carol in accounting woke up this morning thinking, “If I could just get a handle on diffusion models and tokenization, not only will my job be safe, I’ll finally be able to buy my dream home.”

Right.

We have officially entered the phase of technological change where the glossary is longer than the actual usefulness.

There’s a familiar assumption baked into graphics showing this, that more vocabulary equals more competence.

It doesn’t.

It usually equals more anxiety. And confusion. And a sudden desire to learn log hewing.

These days, instead of asking:

“What do I actually need to do my job better?”

People are asking:

“What am I supposed to memorize so I don’t fall behind?”

Those are two very different questions.

Most people do not need to understand 99 AI terms.

They need to understand three things:

What matters.

What helps.

What to ignore.

The rest is a very sophisticated way of making intelligent people feel late to something that changes its mind about what it is every five minutes.

You don’t need a glossary to move forward.

You need orientation.

And maybe permission to stop pretending you’re supposed to care about all of it.

You’ve probably never heard of Brandon Carmody.

I hadn’t either until I read a post on Instagram about him and the controversy surrounding his music which he created with the help of AI.

Brandon Carmody was scheduled to do a listening party for his new album at an OG record store called Music Millenium in Portland, Oregon. The backlash against him and his music was almost instant, reaching a point where management chose to cancel the party, much to the protesters’ delight.

A small victory for “real” artists.

Or at least, that’s how it seems.

Brandon Carmody has 87 followers on Spotify. Each of his songs >1000 listens.

We are not talking about someone who is “killing it” with royalties or attention.

Yet the vitriol in the comments and the grandstanding about what constitutes art vs what doesn’t was profound.

I listened to one of his songs titled “AI.” As someone who has created my own songs using an AI tool, I recognized the sound immediately. Polished, smooth. I like the lyrics. They sound like a human wrote them vs being the results of a prompt. I could be wrong. AI generated stuff is becoming harder to distinguish from human-generated.

And that’s where things start to get interesting, at least for me, not at the level of one artist or one record store, but at the level of what people are reacting to when something like this crosses their feed.

A handful of comments I saw are below. You’ve probably seen your version of these on posts as they are now as ubiquitous as the content that sparks them:

Zoom out and the comments aren’t really about Brandon Carmody.

They are about something else entirely: ownership and legitimacy, identity and who gets to call themselves an artist and who doesn’t.

The speed at which people arrived at their conclusions was almost more telling than the conclusions themselves, as if there’s a growing urgency to define the boundaries before they disappear altogether.

I understand the instinct.

When the ground starts to shift, when it feels like everything is changing all at once, people look for something solid to stand on, something that tells them they’re still on the right side of whatever line they believe matters.

Music has always had those lines. So has writing. So has art in general.

They’ve just never been this… fluid.

In my book, I write about using AI tools to bring my lyrics to life, and I ask a question that I haven’t been able to neatly answer, even after spending a lot of time sitting with it.

Does this make me a musician now?

A real question that lands a little differently depending on the day.

I can write lyrics. I’ve always been able to do that.

What I couldn’t do, at least not without years of practice and a completely different set of skills, was turn those lyrics into songs I could actually hear.

Until now.

Not by picking up a guitar or sitting at a piano, but by working with a system that translates what’s in my head into something audible, something structured, something that resembles the music I’ve spent my whole life listening to.

The first few times it happened, I wasn’t thinking about definitions or labels.

I was thinking about how strange and exciting it felt to hear my own words come back to me in a form I had never been able to create on my own.

There was a moment recently where that experience took on a different weight.

I was moving through a heartbreak that didn’t have a clean ending, the kind that lingers longer than you expect it to, the kind that doesn’t respond to logic or distraction or any of the usual strategies we reach for when we want to feel better faster.

I had pages of writing. Fragments. Half-finished thoughts.

And then I started turning them into songs.

Not to prove anything or become the next big thing on the streaming platforms.

Just to hear what I was actually feeling.

There’s something that happens when your own words come back to you through melody and rhythm, something that shifts them out of your head and into your body, something that makes them harder to avoid and, at the same time, easier to move through. (It’s one of the reasons why Taylor Swift is a gazillionaire.)

I found myself listening to those songs late at night, not evaluating them, not wondering if they qualified as anything other than what they were, which was an honest expression of something I had lived through.

It helped make a difficult experience feel less stuck inside me.

That matters.

It matters more than whether someone in a comment section thinks the tool I used disqualifies the outcome.

It matters more than whether a record store decides to host a listening party or cave to their constituents.

It matters more than whether someone with a strong opinion decides that what I made doesn’t meet their criteria for art.

None of those people were in the room when I wrote those words. None of them were there when I put headphones on and heard them sung for the first time. None of them get to define what that experience was or what it did for me.

There’s another layer to this that came up a lot in the comments.

The question of how these tools were trained.

Whose work was used? What was scraped? What was taken without permission?

People are not staying silent about this, and they shouldn’t.

There are real artists behind the data. Real bodies of work that didn’t opt in to becoming part of a system that can now generate something adjacent to what they spent years developing.

That’s not a small detail.

At the same time, most of what I saw in the comments wasn’t really a conversation. Most comments aren’t about conversation.

It was more like people stating their position and reinforcing it, which makes sense given how charged the topic is, but it doesn’t leave a lot of room for what I think many people are actually experiencing underneath it.

Which is something closer to conflict. In some cases, despair.

I feel that conflict.

I can care about how these systems were trained, and question the ethics of it, and still find myself using the tools.

Something meaningful came out of that process for me when I turned my lyrics into songs. I can also sit with the fact that the system itself raises questions I don’t have clean answers to.

Those two things don’t cancel each other out. They sit next to each other.

And they’re probably going to for a while.

Which brings me back to the reaction around Brandon Carmody.

It’s easy to look at a situation like that and reduce it to a simple narrative about protecting artists or pushing back against something new.

It’s harder to sit with the reality that we’re in a moment where the definitions themselves are in flux, and where the tools available to create are expanding faster than the language we have to describe what we’re doing with them.

Some people will lean into that. Some will resist it. Most will move between those positions depending on what’s at stake for them.

Meanwhile, the work continues.

People are still writing songs. Some with instruments. Some with software. Some with systems that didn’t exist a few years ago.

And some of those songs are doing exactly what songs have always done, which is help people process something they couldn’t quite access any other way.

That part doesn’t disappear just because the method changes.

It just gets harder to see if you’re only looking at the tool.

If this stirred something for you, I’m thinking about hosting a small live session where I walk through how I’ve been doing what I write about in this piece.

Not as a performance or a class; more like a guided experiment.

If you’d want to be part of it, you can raise your hand here.

[Concept = human. Image generated with AI.]

The first time I experienced a hairpin turn, I was 11.

My family was on our semi-cross-country road trip, driving through the Blue Ridge Mountains somewhere in North Carolina. My dad announced to my brother and me that the road ahead would be quite twisty and turny and we might want to pay attention to the road signs.

[Side note, I am so grateful every day that I grew up in an era before screens. Yes, I was exposed to television and consumed way too much Gilligan’s Island and The Brady Bunch, but that’s beside the point. I can’t imagine how much I would have missed had I had my face buried in a screen the way so many do these days.]

Dad announced when the hairpin turn was coming. It was the first one of the trip. The first one of my life.

And I was mesmerized.

That yellow warning sign—hairpin turn ahead—anchored something in me I couldn’t name as an 11-year-old. And all these decades later, I still can’t quite name it.

Recognition of forces beyond me, maybe.

The splendor of geography. The understanding that human beings built that road through the mountains and designed that turn so that people like me and my family could move through that terrain.

The work I’m doing now is predicated on reading terrain. On building maps. On being the cartographer of your life.

And because I think in visuals, I wanted to create a handful of road signs for algorithmic terrain.

Here are some of those signs.

WARNING: HIGHLIGHT REEL AHEAD

This one is arguably the most important.

I’m not sure there’s anything in the last 15 years that has done more background damage to our collective mental health than the highlight reel.

I’m guilty of posting highlight reels. I posted one just the other day on Instagram.

I didn’t do it to brag. I did it as a way of communicating an idea about my work and my life.

Because one of the navigation skills of living in an algorithmic world is breadcrumbing—leaving marks along the way that add up to who you are, how you serve, what problems you solve.

It took me a little longer to catch on to this.

So yes, there’s an irony here.

I play the algorithm game while also writing a book that, in some ways, critiques the algorithmic environment. Not in a destructive way. More in a way of saying:

You didn’t design this system.
You didn’t ask to live with a smartphone in your pocket.
You didn’t ask for highlight reels.

And yet here we are.

What makes the highlight reel especially tricky is that it doesn’t look dangerous.

Research continues to show that constant exposure to curated, idealized content is associated with increased social comparison, lower self-esteem, and higher levels of anxiety and depressive symptoms, especially when people are passively scrolling and comparing themselves to what they see. The effect isn’t universal, and it’s not purely causal, but it’s consistent enough to matter.

In plain terms: when you repeatedly consume a filtered version of other people’s lives and treat it as a fair comparison set, something in you starts to shift.

For some people, it barely registers.

For others, it erodes their sense of self one scroll at a time.

DETOUR: YOUR TIME IS BEING REDIRECTED

You opened your phone for one thing.

One.

Now you’re ten-twenty-thirty minutes deep in something you didn’t choose, headed somewhere you didn’t intend to go.

No alarm. No friction. Just a whisper of a reroute.

You aren’t flawed and nothing is wrong with your character.

This is design at work the way it was intended.

And again, you didn’t ask for it.

MERGING TRAFFIC: EXTERNAL OPINIONS ENTERING YOUR THINKING

You had a thought. A feeling. A direction.

Then you scroll.

And suddenly, without realizing it, you’re adjusting mid-thought.

Not because you examined your idea, but because you absorbed someone else’s.

SLIPPERY WHEN VALIDATED

This is the one almost no one talks about.

You get a hit—likes, comments, traction—and your footing feels stronger. Who doesn’t like seeing the little hearts floating up over your latest reel?

But it’s actually easier to lose yourself here because now you’re not just expressing, you’re calibrating.

And the road bends without you realizing it.

BLIND SPOT: YOU CAN’T SEE WHAT’S SHAPING YOU

Not everything influencing you is visible.

What you don’t see—what isn’t shown, what’s filtered out—matters just as much as what is.

A recent New York Times article focuses on some young people—Gen Z and below—who are consciously choosing not to use smartphones. My son is among that group, although he was not featured in the article.

These are the kids who were raised on them.

I predicted a while back—take that for what it’s worth—that an entire generation would wake up one day and say, what the f#ck just happened to my childhood?

We’re beginning to see rumblings of that now.

Young people are angry. And they have a right to be.

Because they didn’t ask for this.

It was handed to them.

And who handed it to them?

We did.

We did.

This is on all of us.

Whether you like to hear that or not, that is the truth.

We are all participating in a system we did not design.

And the only way forward—the first step—is awareness.

A deeper awareness of how enmeshed our lives are with these systems.

Because the signs are there.

They’re just not posted on the side of the road the way they were in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

This requires a new way of seeing.

A new way of thinking.

And eventually, a new set of navigation skills.

It’s one of the reasons I created my Algorithmic Drift Diagnostic.

You can learn more about that here.

And I encourage you to consider doing it. Not just for yourself, but for your children, your grandchildren, future generations, the people you care about.

So many people say they want a better world.

But the better world begins here. Today.

Inside this terrain.

The one that isn’t going away.

And if you’re reading this, you’re in it.

Because people who have actively removed themselves from digital terrain—they’re not here. They’re not reading essays like this. They’re not asking these questions.

They’ve already made a decision.

I respect that.

I respect people who make conscious, intentional decisions about their lives versus being carried by a current, shrugging their shoulders, saying, “This is just how it is now.”

It’s not only possible to steer your raft in these currents.

It’s possible to navigate them well.

To use them.

To make something meaningful for your life and for others.

Back in the Blue Ridge Mountains, my dad told us when the turn was coming.

Now no one does.

You either learn to read the road…or you feel it when it’s too late.

Take a look at the Algorithmic Drift Diagnostic.

If it’s right for you, I look forward to serving you in that way.

It’s made a difference in my life.

I think it can in yours too.

Not really.

Not the kind that spans an entire dining room wall, weighs as much as a small car, and requires a team of people and a strategic plan just to move it six inches to the left, not the buffet that has lived in the same spot for decades, quietly holding plates that only came out on holidays no one quite celebrates the same way anymore.

And yet, here it is.

Waiting. Not just as furniture, but as a decision that hasn’t been made yet.

I’ve been thinking about this more than I expected to, about what happens when a life ends and everything that literally and physically held it together remains behind, still in place as if nothing has changed.

The house. The drawers. The shelves. The objects that outlived the people who chose them and, in some quiet way, still speak for them.

In some families, these things are called antiques, and if the Antique Road Show is any kind of cultural barometer, they even have value, something measurable and agreed upon.

But for most of us—Gen X, millennials, the generations now inheriting not just property but the contents of entire lives—the value is murkier, more emotional than practical, more symbolic than usable, harder to define and even harder to translate into the life we’re actually living now.

My parents have these things, a house full of them, and my brother and I will be the ones standing in the middle of it someday, deciding what stays, what goes, and what quietly disappears without ceremony.

I can feel that moment coming, even though it hasn’t arrived yet, and it puts me in a strange in-between place, somewhere between pre-gaming and pre-grieving, where the decisions are still theoretical but the weight of them is already real.

As I walk through the house now, I notice what pulls me in, what lingers a little longer in my attention than everything else.

A glass cabinet I might want. Two or three paintings. The large buffet, maybe—not because I need it, but because there’s something about its presence, its history, the way it has held things for so long and seems to expect to keep doing so.

But even as I consider these pieces, another instinct runs just as strong, just as steady beneath the surface.

I don’t want to carry everything forward, and more importantly, I don’t want to inherit a life by default.

These objects hold stories—that much is undeniable—and they reflect what mattered to the people who chose them, who saved for them, who made space for them in their homes and in their identities.

My grandparents, who lived through the Great Depression, saved everything because everything had value, because waste wasn’t just impractical—it was unthinkable.

My parents carried that mindset forward, building a life where possessions were both practical and symbolic, where what you owned said something about who you were and what you had built.

The Wedgwood china. The Waterford crystal. The red glassware from Japan. The lead crystal vases passed down through generations, each transfer quietly reinforcing their importance, their place in the story.

At one time, these things meant something very specific—stability, success, arrival, a kind of visible proof that life had worked out the way it was supposed to.

But meaning doesn’t travel cleanly across generations, and what once felt essential can start to feel optional, or even burdensome, when it lands in a different context.

And this is where the tension lives.

Because while these objects are heavy in the literal sense, they are also heavy in a way that is harder to name but impossible to ignore.

They ask something of you.

They ask you to keep carrying the story, to maintain the signal, to preserve what once mattered even if it no longer aligns with how you want to live, how you want your space—and your life—to feel.

And at the same time we’re inheriting all of this weight, we’ve spent the last twenty years being trained to move faster, lighter, more flexibly, to expect change as the baseline rather than the exception.

Everything updates. Everything shifts. Everything can be replaced, optimized, improved.

You’re not supposed to stay; you’re supposed to adapt, to keep moving, to keep up.

And somewhere along the way, that conditioning starts to shape how we see permanence itself, so that a massive piece of furniture begins to feel less like an heirloom and more like a liability, anchoring you in place when everything else is pushing you to stay in motion.

This is where it gets interesting. This isn’t just about furniture, even though furniture is where we can see it most clearly.

It’s about orientation, specifically about how we decide what to carry forward in a world that is constantly pushing us to let go, upgrade, move on, often before we’ve even had a chance to notice what we’re leaving behind.

I can feel that tension in myself, sometimes in the same moment.

On one hand, there’s a deep respect for what these objects represent, the lives they’ve lived alongside, the care that went into choosing and keeping them, the continuity they offer. When I see the stack of gold rimmed dessert plates, I am transported to the round dining table at my grandparent’s house on Thanksgiving day. I see my grandmother carrying the pies from the kitchen and my uncle having a slice of each kind with ice cream on one of those plates.

On the other hand, there’s a very clear instinct, one that feels increasingly non-negotiable: lighten the load, be discerning, choose what actually belongs in the life I’m building now, not the one I’m inheriting by default.

I can bring the memories forward without the things that trigger them.

When I think about where I’ll land after all of this—after my mom is gone, after the house is sold, after everything is sorted and decisions have been made—I don’t see myself in a large home filled with rooms designed to hold the past.

I see space, not empty but intentional.

A handful of things that matter, objects that carry meaning because I chose them, not because I felt obligated to keep them, not because they were simply there.

Room for my own life to take shape in a way that reflects where I am now, not just where I came from.

And maybe that’s the real shift happening here.

Not that these objects have lost their value, but that we’re learning to define value differently, in a way that requires more awareness and more choice.

By what we consciously decide to keep.

Because the truth is, everything is asking for your attention.

Not just the apps and the feeds and the endless stream of inputs designed to pull you in and keep you there, but also the quiet, physical world around you—the things you own, the things you inherit, the things that sit patiently, waiting for you to decide what they mean and whether they still belong.

And if you’re not paying attention, those decisions get made for you by habit, by guilt, by inertia, by the invisible weight of “this is just what you do,” which can be just as powerful as any algorithm.

I don’t think most people realize how much of life works this way, how often we carry things out of habit or default vs. intention.

How often does anyone stop long enough to ask if we should carry those things?

What do we trade for not thinking through what carrying anything forward actually means?

The china hutch isn’t the problem.

It’s just the most obvious version of it.

“Mother needs something today to calm her down…” -- The Rolling Stones, 1966

That line has been stuck in my head since the weekend, which is funny because I wasn’t listening to the Rolling Stones, I was watching March Madness. Elite 8, close games, the kind where you half watch, half check your phone, half think about something else, and somewhere in there I started noticing the ads.

Not one AI ad. Not two. Almost all of them.

And not abstract, futuristic AI either. Not robots or sci-fi or anything like that. These were very domestic ads, very practical ads, very calm, reassuring ads. The kind that show a kitchen counter with stacks of paper and a woman taking screenshots of emails, schedules, sign-up sheets, practice times, school announcements, and dropping all of it into an AI tool that would organize everything into one clean document and automatically connect it to her calendar.

And I remember thinking, honestly, that’s kind of brilliant.

Because if you’ve ever run a household or been close to someone who does, you know that the logistics alone can feel like managing a small company with terrible communication systems.

I see all you moms out there!

Things come at you from every direction, often crumpled at the bottom of backpacks. Nothing is in the same format. Everything is urgent. Everything overlaps. Anything that reduces that chaos is going to look like a miracle.

So this is not a piece about how that’s bad.

It’s a piece about how that’s persuasive.

This is almost always how big shifts enter our lives. Not as threats, not as mandates, not as something we would resist, but as something that helps us get through the day a little more easily. Something that smooths an edge, gives us a little more time, a little less friction, a little less to hold in our heads.

In the 20-teens it was memes touting “rose all day.”

Now it’s “upload your entire life into the AI and we’ll handle the rest.”

And once something genuinely helps you, you don’t treat it like an experiment anymore. You treat it like infrastructure. You start to rely on it without really noticing when the reliance began.

That’s the part that interests me.

Not the technology itself, but the moment when a tool invisibly becomes part of the structure of your life, and then later, part of the structure of your thinking.

What really struck me wasn’t just the ad, though. It was where the ad was running.

Sports is a terrain people enter willingly and pay attention inside of. People don’t casually watch March Madness; they sit down for it. They plan around it. With multiple screens. They care who wins. And companies know that. They know exactly who is watching, what stage of life they’re in, what they worry about, what they spend money on, what stresses them out, and what they would happily pay to make life easier.

Ad placement is never random. It’s one of the clearest signals of where companies believe the money is and where they believe behavior can be shaped.

And over the last year, watching live sports, I’ve noticed a shift. For a long time it was mostly beer, trucks, insurance, and pharmaceuticals. Now, more and more, it’s technology companies, and specifically AI tools, being introduced not as revolutionary technology but as low-key assistants that will help you manage your life.

That’s a very smart way to enter a culture.

Not as disruption, but as relief.

We are living through a transition that is very hard to see while you are inside of it, because from the inside it just feels like normal life with better tools. That’s how every major shift feels while it’s happening. Honestly, outside of being impressed with my first iPhone back in the day, I have no big memories of how quickly it infiltrated my life.

No one wakes up and says, “Ah yes, today we enter a new era.” You just adopt one new thing, and then another, and then another, and then ten years later you realize you live differently, think differently, communicate differently, and spend your time differently than you used to.

I sometimes think about my own life over the last fifteen years and how many small decisions I made to digitize things, streamline things, move things online, automate things, optimize things, because each individual decision made sense at the time. None of them felt dramatic. None of them felt like I was handing anything over. But when you look at the landscape of your life over a long enough period, you start to see that small decisions accumulate into environments, and environments shape behavior whether you notice it or not.

That realization is essentially what led me to write It’s Not You, It’s the Algorithm.

Not because technology is evil or because we should reject all of this, but because it is very difficult to live inside systems that are shaping you if you don’t even realize the shaping is happening.

AI in schools is a good example of this. The conversation people keep having is whether using AI is cheating, but that feels like the wrong question, or at least a very small question inside a much bigger one. The tools are here and they are not going away, so the more interesting question is what learning looks like when information, structure, and even first drafts of thinking are always available instantly. That doesn’t automatically make students less intelligent or less capable, but it does change the relationship between effort, understanding, and output, and we probably don’t fully understand those consequences yet because we are still early in the experiment.

And that’s really what this moment is.

One big, global experiment.

I use AI every day. I find it incredibly useful. It helps me think through scenarios, organize ideas, test arguments, learn faster, and see connections I might not have seen as quickly on my own. But I can also feel, very clearly, how easy it would be to let it do more and more and more until I was no longer sure where my thinking ended and the machine’s suggestions began.

That line is not bright and obvious. It’s soft. It moves slowly. You don’t cross it on purpose. You drift across it because the machine is fast and helpful and available and never tired and never annoyed and never too busy to respond.

And humans are tired.

Especially moms.

Especially people running households and careers and families and aging parents and school systems and sports schedules and grocery lists and social lives and finances and everything else that modern life asks one person to hold together.

Of course help is appealing.

Of course it is.

I suspect that over time, some parts of AI will become like the dishwasher — just built into life, not something we debate or even think about anymore. It will handle certain categories of tasks so reliably and so efficiently that we will stop seeing it as technology and start seeing it as part of the environment.

But right now, we are still in the phase where the environment is being built, and when environments are being built, it matters who is building them, what their incentives are, and how they get people to enter and stay.

The way people enter is almost always through convenience.
The way people stay is almost always through dependence.
And dependence rarely feels like dependence while it is forming.

It just feels like life is getting a little easier.

So when I saw those ads, I didn’t feel alarmed. I felt observant.

It felt like watching something begin, or maybe not begin, but accelerate.

And that Rolling Stones line kept floating back into my head — “Mother needs something today to calm her down” — because every era seems to have its own version of the thing that helps people cope with the pressure of the moment.

In 1966 it was a pill.

In 2026, it might be a system that runs your life so you don’t have to think about it quite as much.

And maybe that will be wonderful in many ways.

But it’s still worth noticing when the thing that helps you also starts to shape you, because those two things often arrive together, and they rarely announce themselves when they do.

I saw an article not long ago about a Silicon Valley company developing robots trained on actual human movement. The data comes from willing participants (gig workers) who get paid to strap their phones to their foreheads or bodies, basically like body cams, and record short bursts of themselves doing household chores like laundry or loading and unloading the dishwasher.

Their data is then sent back to the company and fed into a giant dataset that will be used to train actual robots to do these chores.

Once the purview of sci-fi, things like this are happening every single day.

Companies are developing ways to offload chores that, for many people, are a nuisance. I’m not going to claim I love housework. When it comes to housekeeping, I definitely don’t tip the scales at the top of the five-star reviews. I’d much rather pay somebody who likes to vacuum, dust, and get into the deeper crevices with a toothbrush to make my house sparkle.

I am, however, one of the weirdos who actually enjoys folding laundry.

It’s meditative. It gives me space to think, or not think at all, while doing something tactile. I also happen to enjoy the smell of fresh laundry right out of the dryer and the feel of the fabrics as I put them into neatly folded piles and carry them to their respective destinations in the house.

For many people, a robot that does laundry will be a godsend. So I’m not knocking it.

My bigger question is this: if we remove more and more things from our day using automation, what exactly are we using that time for?

This is a question I’ve been thinking about for a while now, especially as someone who works in the creative space. There are a lot of tasks AI can do much faster, and sometimes much better, than I can. That frees me up to do heavier lifting like thinking, writing, and connecting ideas.

In fact, the origin of this essay was me standing in my kitchen dictating thoughts into the voice app on my iPhone so I could capture the raw material from my brain and later shape it into something cohesive and meaningful.

I am not anti-tech.

I make that clear over and over again because it matters. I love technology. I invest in technology. I benefit greatly from technology. But I am cautious about handing everything that makes us human over to machines.

And even more than that, it isn’t only the machine that concerns me. It’s who controls it, and how quietly our behavior can start to change when convenience becomes the default setting for everything.

When we willingly surrender our personal data, including the way we move through ordinary life, the way we interact with dishwashers and washing machines and dryers, we are giving up more than convenience may be worth. Not immediately. Not dramatically. But slowly, in small increments, over time.

That’s usually how big changes actually happen.

I look outside at the bird feeder across the driveway from the window where I stand and wash dishes by hand. I see the cardinals and sparrows and blue jays and doves and nuthatches and red-bellied woodpeckers and squirrels showing up to the feeder at intervals throughout the day.

They aren’t sitting there gorging themselves all day long, even though they could. The food is there. It would be easy.

But they don’t.

That is not how they are programmed. They still fly, search, watch, leave, return. They still move through their day with patterns that require effort and awareness of their environment.

It makes me wonder about us.

If more and more of life becomes frictionless, automated, optimized, and handled for us, what happens to our awareness? What happens to our decision-making? What happens to our ability to sit with our own thoughts, or do something slowly, or even be bored for a few minutes?

Automation doesn’t just remove tasks. It removes moments.

And many of those moments used to be where thinking happened, where reflection happened, where ideas formed, where we processed our lives without even realizing we were doing it.

There is intrinsic value in each of these “invisible” activities.

So when I hear about robots learning to do laundry, I don’t really think about laundry.

I think about attention and time. I think about awareness. I think about what we are slowly training ourselves not to do anymore.

There will be incredible gains from these technologies. There is no question about that. But there will also be consequences, and we rarely understand those until much later. (Hello social media.)

So before we blindly allow another wave of technology to roll over us, it is worth asking a few simple questions:

What is this giving me?
What is this taking away from me?
And what am I doing with the time and attention it gives back?

That last question is probably the most important. Because the future probably won’t be decided by whether robots can do our laundry.

It will be decided by what humans choose to do with the time when they no longer have to.

I got a message from Facebook saying someone was trying to access my account.

There was a reset code and a link. I clicked it just to see where it went.

I deleted Facebook from my phone years ago, so I opened the app on my iPad, the only place I still have it installed.

Before doing anything else, I checked with Perplexity. I took a screenshot of the email and asked if it looked legitimate. It did. I also got instructions on how to review activity on my account. Everything appeared normal.

But since I was already there…

I started scrolling my feed.

I rarely go into Facebook anymore. The last time was on my birthday over a month ago, mostly because I knew people would send messages. That’s honestly one of the few reasons I keep the account. Once a year I hear from people who, at one time in my life, were much more present.

Within minutes of scrolling I saw that a woman I knew from a women’s business networking circle had died three days ago from cancer.

I knew she had been battling it. The last updates I had seen from her sounded hopeful. Treatment seemed to be helping. But her husband had posted that she was gone.

I visited her home studio several years ago. She was an extraordinary artist. I own a piece of her work. More importantly, she was a genuinely good human being.

Scrolling further, I saw other familiar fragments of life:

Birthdays.
Parents dying.
Dogs dying.
Trips skiing.
Photos from Florida and other warm places.

Mixed in were the same political memes—mean, cruel, and not remotely funny—shared by people I’ve been connected with since I first joined the platform seventeen years ago.

Old Facebook groups I’d forgotten I even joined were suddenly back in my feed. And for about fifteen minutes…

I was pulled into the scroll.

Then it all started to blur together.

That familiar digital haze.

Thankfully I recognized what was happening and pulled myself out. Outside of learning about the death of someone I respected and admired, the experience wasn’t serving me.

Still, it made me think.

Facebook does have a role in our hyper-connected world. It functions as a broadcast system for major life events—births, deaths, illnesses, marriages, milestones.

Maybe that’s what it’s best for now.

For people who want to stay constantly in touch with their networks, it probably still works. For others, maybe it provides those little dopamine hits of connection.

To each their own.

It’s just not my scene anymore.

I no longer feel the urge to post photos of my food, or pictures from my private life. Not photos of my grown children. Not photos of trips. Not photos of flowers I happen to notice while walking around.

I don’t feel compelled to share images that subtly say:

Look where I am. Look what I’m doing. Look how great my life is.

I’m simply not interested in performing that version of life anymore.

The whole experience turned into a small exercise in self-awareness.

And it also pushed me into a deeper reflection about something far more fundamental.

No matter how sophisticated our technology becomes, we cannot outsmart biology.

We age. We change. And every one of us is moving toward the same inevitable end.

Recently I saw an AI-generated video showing several Hollywood actresses now in their nineties holding photographs of themselves when they were young.

Dame Judi Dench.
Sophia Loren.
Carol Burnett.
Rita Moreno.
Ellen Burstyn.

They stood there holding these photos of their younger selves while the AI animation blended past and present.

It was striking.

My guess is none of them were asked whether it was okay to create that video.

Still, it caught my attention. I shared it with a women’s mastermind group I’m part of because it moved me.

And as I look at my own mother—who continues to decline every day—there’s a part of me that wishes she could stand next to those women.

Women who still have agency.

Women who still look vibrant and alive.

Women who are not, at least to my knowledge, suffering from Parkinson’s or other degenerative diseases.

Watching my mom fade reminds me of something simple and uncomfortable.

Life is not fair.

It never has been, and it never will be.

Good people are taken far too soon. And some truly terrible people seem to get more time than they deserve.

None of us gets to control that equation.

All we can do is make the best decisions we can today.

Practice gratitude for what we have.

Imagine a better future for the generations coming after us.

And try, in whatever ways we can, to be good stewards of this beautiful, fragile planet we’re lucky enough to inhabit.

And maybe that’s the real work now.

Not documenting every moment of our lives for the scroll.

But actually living them.

Gary V posted a meme of a tombstone the other day.

“Social Media
2005–2026.”

A neat little gravestone with the logos we’ve all lived inside for twenty years. Instagram. Twitter. Facebook. YouTube. LinkedIn. Reddit. The whole cemetery.

His caption said the era of “interest media” has arrived. The implication being that the old model—build followers, speak to your audience—is finished. Now the algorithm decides who sees what. Discovery flows through recommendation engines instead of social graphs. Post everywhere. Post often. Let the system test your content and see what sticks.

This is not exactly wrong. But it also isn’t new.

The internet has been moving in this direction for years. TikTok accelerated it. Instagram copied it. LinkedIn re-wired its feed behind the scenes to behave the same way. YouTube perfected it long ago. The follower count still exists, but it doesn’t function the way it used to. Reach now belongs to whatever the machine believes will hold attention.

That part of the story is already familiar.

What feels different this year is something else entirely. I’m overhearing conversations about the change. Seeing more content on social platforms talking / complaining about it.

For most of the past twenty years, the supply of content was limited by human time and human energy. People had to write the posts, record the videos, design the graphics, edit the clips, and upload the files themselves. Even during the peak of the creator boom, the bottleneck remained human labor.

That constraint just disappeared.

AI systems can now generate text, images, video, voices, scripts, captions, podcasts, and entire social accounts in minutes. The cost of producing content has dropped close to zero. Not just for companies with big teams, but for anyone with a laptop and curiosity.

Which means the internet has entered a different phase of its evolution.

It’s not the end of social media.

It is the end of content scarcity.

If you scroll long enough now, you start to notice the texture of it. Posts that look human but feel oddly interchangeable. Advice delivered with confidence but little friction. Videos stitched together from templates that appear everywhere at once. The system keeps feeding you things it predicts you might like, and the predictions grow increasingly similar.

This is the environment Gary’s post is reacting to, whether he names it directly or not.

The discovery layer of the internet has shifted from who you know to what performs. Algorithms test content on small groups of people, measure how long they watch or read or hover, and decide whether to expand distribution. In theory, this opens the door for anyone with a good idea. In practice, it means the system is constantly experimenting with attention.

The advice that follows from this is predictable.

Post more.
Post everywhere.
Let the algorithm figure it out.

It’s a portfolio strategy for content. Make enough bets and eventually something breaks through.

Some creators thrive under this model. The ones with teams, editors, clip farms, distribution pipelines can move quickly and treat content production like a trading desk. A lot of what you see online now is built exactly this way.

But the same shift that enables this strategy also produces its opposite.

When content becomes abundant, signal becomes scarce.

People begin looking for voices they trust. Not just accounts that show up in the feed, but people whose thinking feels grounded in lived experience. Writers who have something to say beyond the moment. Teachers who are not chasing the algorithm’s mood on any given afternoon.

The internet has been oscillating between these two forces for a while now. Discovery systems expand reach. Human beings search for orientation.

The tools are extraordinary. The map is less clear.

If you’re building something online—a business, a body of work, a set of ideas—this matters more than the daily tactics.

The discovery layer of the internet is now largely algorithmic. That is unlikely to reverse. Content can reach people who have never heard of you before. Your writing or your video or your thinking can travel far outside your immediate circle.

At the same time, the system generating that reach is not designed for depth. It is designed to predict attention.

That tension defines the moment we’re in.

One layer of the internet is optimized for discovery. Another layer is where real relationships form.

Most durable businesses online now live at the intersection of those two layers.

The algorithm introduces people to your work. Your ideas give them a reason to stay.

This was already true in 2005, though the mechanics were slower and easier to see. Blogs connected readers to writers. Podcasts connected listeners to hosts. Email newsletters became small ports in a chaotic sea of information.

Life online was much slower, and in hindsight, feels more deliberate. For one thing, it took a lot of time and effort to get your ideas “out there.” Systems were clunky, and in many cases, still in the imagination of visionaries who have since built the internet as we know it today.

What’s changed in 2026 is the velocity.

The system tests everything faster. Distributes faster. Replaces yesterday’s signals faster. Content moves through the network like weather. Storms of attention appear and disappear before anyone fully understands what just happened.

Which leaves anyone trying to build something online with a choice.

You can treat the internet as a casino and place as many bets as possible.

Or you can treat it as terrain.

Terrain requires different skills. You watch the currents. You notice where people are gathering and why. You study how information moves through the system and what happens to it along the way. Instead of assuming the map will stay the same, you learn to navigate the conditions you’re in.

Gary’s gravestone is dramatic, but maybe it’s pointing toward something simpler.

The internet didn’t die.

The map did.

And for anyone building a business, a brand, or a body of work online, the real task now isn’t just creating content.

It’s learning how to read the terrain.

So what does this mean for the average person scrolling through all of this?

Not the influencer. Not the aspiring content machine.

The educated, intelligent person trying to survive the chaos.

The first thing to understand is that the feed is not neutral.

What you see each day is not a balanced picture of the world. It’s a constantly shifting set of predictions about what might hold your attention for a few more seconds. The system is testing ideas on you, just as it tests content on everyone else.

Which means part of the work now is simply noticing.

Noticing when something appears everywhere all at once.
Noticing when outrage spreads faster than explanation.
Noticing when you start feeling certain about something you only learned about fifteen minutes ago.

You don’t need to become a media theorist to navigate this environment. But you do need a small amount of distance from the stream.

A few questions go a long way.

Who benefits if I believe this?
Where did this information originate?
Is this signal or simply noise moving quickly?

The internet is not getting quieter anytime soon. If anything, the volume will continue to rise as more machines join the conversation.

Which means the advantage may belong to people who develop an older skill.

The ability to slow down.

To pause long enough to decide what deserves attention and what does not. To step outside the current for a moment and look around.

Not everything that appears in the feed deserves a reaction.

Sometimes the most strategic move in an algorithmic environment is simply choosing where not to look.