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.

I saw a LinkedIn post recently asking, “Women in AI, where are they?”

The comments filled fast. Names. Tags. Helpful people doing unpaid directory work. The labor drifted downward, as it usually does.

Let’s be clear: this isn’t about visibility. Women in AI are visible. They’re building, publishing, leading, teaching. The internet is not lacking signal.

What we’re looking at is search behavior inside algorithmic terrain.

When leaders treat their feed like it’s the whole map, scarcity shows up where curiosity should have.

I wrote a longer piece unpacking what this reveals about execution, representation, and how to actually read the digital terrain we’re operating in.

Read it here

I watched a lot of the Winter Olympics over the last two weeks.

The competition. The gorgeous scenery punctuated with bluebird skies in northern Italy, the Alps backdropping breathtaking contests among athletes from multiple countries around the world.

The United States did well, and it was thrilling to see the joy, enthusiasm, and sheer excitement the athletes demonstrated — standing on the podium, completing a trick, finishing a run.

Yes, the competition was incredible.

And let’s not forget: the USA men’s and women’s hockey teams both won gold.

I remember the Miracle on Ice game in 1980. I watched it with my family on a small color television — not HD, definitely not 4K. I don’t even know what it technically was back then. An actual tube inside a box, I suppose.

To see the men’s hockey team win again 46 years later, and then to witness the celebration honoring the player they lost a year ago in a tragic bicycling accident — it was powerful. It was beautiful.

But what I’m really taking away from the Winter Games 2026 is something else.

It’s the exhibition of love and support I witnessed among the athletes, especially the American athletes, though I saw it in others as well.

After skating, several skaters made heart signs with their hands as they left the ice.

That moment stayed with me.

To me, it defines the younger generations — Gen Z and Gen Alpha — who get so much flack (unfairly, in my opinion). The outpouring of support and visible community was undeniable.

So was the collective message of “Yes we are athletes and we are individuals, too.”

In a world increasingly defined by algorithms, how encouraging to witness the generations shaped most by digital life embracing their messy, not always perfect, sometimes heartbreaking analog existence in a steady “We ain’t playin’” way.

And it felt good.

It felt good at a time when the news cycle does not feel good. Not that it ever has, but lately it just feels… heavy. I’ve even heard the term “horizonless” tossed around, something I’ll explore in an upcoming essay.

For now, what the Olympics stand for, for me, is the purity of the human spirit going after a dream. The hard work, the dedication, the sacrifices, the disappointments. It goes beyond winning medals and representing your country.

Yes, the games exist in the modern reality of the internet and social media. But as the closing ceremony unfolded in that most ancient structure where gladiators once showed up and I reflected on the accomplishments of every athlete — and coach, parent, sibling, spouse, child — all the men and women who helped broadcast these incredible games, the host country of Italy, and again the stunning backdrop of Cortina, Milan, and the Alps...

How can you not believe in humanity after watching the Winter Olympic Games?

My cup is full.

I’m optimistic about the changes we are experiencing.

And I have a sense that good things are not only coming —

they are already here.

In the span of a week, three separate emails arrived in my inbox.

None of them were about anything I’ve written recently.

They were about blog posts I wrote in 2010 and 2013, respectively.

One message urged me to delete a “glowing article” I wrote thirteen years ago about a man I encountered at a state fair. I had described what I saw that day: a performer with bears, warm smile, small-town fair energy. It wasn’t investigative journalism. It wasn’t an endorsement of a worldview. I wrote about something I observed and believed was true at the time. In 2013, I was a younger version of me, writing in a different digital moment.

The email insisted I erase it.

Another message followed, more detailed, referencing current controversies and videos about the way the man treats his bears. I hadn’t seen the video or knew about the controversy surrounding the man. The through-line of this message wasn’t dialogue. It was removal.

Delete the post.

Then, in the same batch of messages, a completely different tone. A formal notice from a copyright enforcement firm referencing a blog post I wrote in 2010 and an image I had used to accompany the post. Case number included. Statute cited. Portal link provided.

That image wasn’t anything remarkable, by the way.

I deleted it and left the copy.

Three emails. Sixteen years of distance. Two completely different domains — ethics and law — converging on artifacts of my former self.

I didn’t argue. I didn’t defend. I didn’t panic. I made the 2013 article private. I removed the 2010 image. I closed the laptop.

What struck me wasn’t the content of the complaints. It was the mechanism.

The internet doesn’t forget. But more importantly, it doesn’t contextualize.

In 2013, the cultural conversation around performing animals was not what it is today. In 2010, blogging norms around sourcing images were far looser than today’s automated enforcement systems. Attribution often felt like sufficient effort. Reverse-image scanning at scale was not something most individual bloggers thought or knew about.

None of that erases responsibility. It describes terrain.

And terrain shifts.

What we’re living in now — what I’ve been writing about in It’s Not You, It’s the Algorithm — is not simply outrage culture or copyright enforcement. It’s retrieval culture.

Old writing resurfaces. Old images are scanned. Old versions of you are indexed and measured against current standards.

Not by someone who remembers the moment, but by systems that don’t experience time the way we do.

AI-driven retrospectives flooding Instagram of celebrities showing them aging either forward or reverse showcase this perfectly. The internet doesn’t let anyone escape themselves.

The email messages weren’t especially hateful. Two were emotional. One was bureaucratic. They all shared an assumption: the past is immediately available for evaluation, and action should follow quickly.

“Delete it! Produce proof! Respond by February 11!”

The speed is familiar.

What’s less discussed is how quietly this alters the relationship we have with our own history.

If you’ve published consistently for over a decade, you have sediment. Language that would change now. Observations framed differently today. Cultural snapshots preserved without annotation. Because you are not the same person you were then. Not necessarily malicious. Not necessarily pristine. Just reflective of a moment.

The algorithm collapses those moments into a continuous present. It serves the artifact without the original climate and allows the current environment to interpret it at full intensity.

Seeing this happen in your own inbox is clarifying. And I will confess: a tad unnerving. Even though I didn’t do anything wrong, the fact that strangers wrote to me about something that bothered them triggered my “uh oh” bell.

Thankfully, I have perspective. I don’t need to be defensive or self-exonerating, but instead, attentive. Asking myself, What’s the right next move here?

I decided to make the bear article private and delete the image that wasn’t mine. Those two decisions weren’t surrendering; they were quiet decisions to respect the owner of the image and the recent revelations about humans using wild animals as entertainment for their own gain.

The tension here isn’t whether we’re accountable for the past. Of course we are accountable for what we’ve done.

If harm was done, repair matters. If a right was violated, correction matters. If something no longer reflects our values, updating it matters.

Accountability is not the issue.

Proportionality is.

There’s a meaningful difference between concealed wrongdoing and ordinary participation in a culture that has since evolved. Between evasion and adjustment, erasure and curation.

The current climate flattens those distinctions. Everything retrieved feels urgent. Everything resurfaced feels indicting. Systems deliver the artifact without the climate that produced it, and the temperature rises instantly because people see things through their lens now, not through the lens of a different culture or climate.

That’s human.

Leadership requires resisting that flattening.

Not by dismissing the past, hiding from it, or dramatizing it.

But by assessing it through some thoughtful questions:

Does this reflect who we are now?
Does this require repair?
Does this require context?
Does this simply require removal?

Those are governance questions, not panic questions.

The internet will continue to excavate. Retrieval systems will continue to scan. Old sediment will continue to surface without warning. AI will grab hold of it all and twist it into some dysmorphic artifact it will then train itself on.

That reality isn’t going away.

What’s still ours is how we respond.

We can collapse into apology theater. We can harden into defiance. Or we can operate with measured stewardship over our own archives.

The future of publishing isn’t about pretending the past didn’t happen. It’s about building mature protocols for when it resurfaces.

That, more than deletion or defiance, feels like the work.

For years, the Super Bowl ads were the main event.

The game itself was almost secondary, an excuse to gather, gorge on devilled eggs, miniature cocktail hotdogs, seven layer bean dip, chips, and guac, all while watching million-dollar mini-movies that tried to be funny, strange, brave, or at least memorable between plays. The ads weren’t just commercials. They were cultural snapshots. Sometimes ridiculous. Sometimes subversive. Occasionally brilliant.

This year, for the first time in a long while, I found myself genuinely enjoying the game more than the ads.

And that surprised me.

A parade of technology—and reassurance

The dominant theme of this year’s Super Bowl ads wasn’t humor or creativity.

It was technology. A lot of technology.

AI assistants. AI search. AI research. AI productivity. AI summaries. AI automation. Platforms promising to remove friction. Apps promising control. Tools designed to make life easier, faster, smoother, lighter.

The list was long. By halftime I was practically numb to them all. But they kept on coming, all the way to the last play when the Seahawks confidently walked off the field with a 29-13 win over the Patriots.

And layered on top of it all was a consistent emotional message:

Don’t worry. We’ve got this. Everything is okay.

Not one ad challenged or provoked or asked us to pause. Not one ad disrupted the forward march toward a future many of the companies are working very hard to define and control for us.

If anything, the ads whispered:

Let’s make life easier. Let’s reduce effort. Let’s keep moving.

Given our current VUCA climate, that feels… about right.

From persuasion to inevitability

Some ads promised relief.

Others skipped the anesthesia and went straight to destiny.

AI.com, for example, didn’t tell a story or crack a joke. Their message was blunt:

Get your handle now. AGI is coming.

I wonder how many viewers even understand what AGI stands for, let alone why they should pay attention to it — or not — when digging deeper into their bag of Lays potato chips delivered seamlessly by tapping an app on their phone is far more satisfying?

These weren’t ads so much as land grabs, quiet reminders that the future is assumed to be arriving with or without you. Better position yourself now.

When ads stop trying to persuade and start assuming compliance, something has shifted.

Creativity doesn’t disappear in moments like these. It simply becomes unnecessary.

Ferris Bueller, automation, and opting out

One ad tied the whole mood together perfectly.

“Let Genspark automate your work and take the day off” the confident voice over said as a mature Matthew Broderick channeled Ferris Bueller in a modern office setting with people sitting in front of computers toiling to generate spreadsheets and slide decks.

It was clever, nostalgic, and deeply telling. Ferris Bueller symbolizes the aspirations of Gen X as it existed back in a pre-internet world: fight the power, disregard authority, live your best life on your terms, even if it means not doing a whole lot of anything productive to achieve that state.

But while it looks like Ferris Bueller is a hero of effort or mastery, he’s actually the avatar of opting out—of clever avoidance, consequence-free rebellion, and beating the system without changing it.

The promise wasn’t empowerment; it was permission to disengage, which many of us did while continuing to (reluctantly) strive toward the future laid out on a well-worn path before us.

This ad did not ask us to think better or choose more wisely. Rather, it encouraged us to clock out because someone else (e.g. Big Tech) will handle it.

That fantasy lands right now because people are not just overstimulated, but flat out exhausted, afraid at a deep level they’re trapped in systems they no longer understand and can’t do anything about.

Which is why the ad didn’t sell productivity; it sold a form of numbing agent to an audience who is overloaded and will do (just about) anything to lighten that load.

Even care is being optimized now

Hims & Hers added another layer to the night’s story.

Their message sounded hopeful, borderline altruistic.

The health gap, they said, is finally within reach. You don’t have to be ultra-rich anymore to access personalized health information tailored to you.

On the surface, that’s a genuinely good thing.

But it also fits the broader pattern perfectly.

Health, like work and finance before it, is being reframed as a data problem, something solvable through access, personalization, and optimization.

The implicit message isn’t: What does health really mean? but rather: We can finally scale it.

Care itself is now framed as something we manage through dashboards and insights. It has become another domain where efficiency stands in for becoming attuned and paying attention to what’s going in with you and your body.

The “meh” thesis, distilled

One ad captured the entire night more cleanly than the rest.

YouTube TV positioned itself around a simple premise: everything else is kind of… meh. Except life on YouTube TV.

That was the pitch.

No story. No risk. No real claim beyond: we’re slightly less boring than the other options.

I couldn’t stop chuckling about this ad’s timing at the front of the line, because most of the ads that followed felt exactly like what its message sent—competent, glossy, and ultimately forgettable. Not bad enough to critique. Not good enough to remember.

Essentially, meh.

When the most honest ad of the night accidentally mirrors the audience’s experience of the ads themselves, it stops being a joke and starts being a diagnosis.

Safe, polished, and strangely flat

To be clear, the ads weren’t bad. They just weren’t… great. Clearly a lot of time, money, and resources went into their polished, inoffensive construction. But there was very little real humor. Very little surprise. Very little creative risk.

Instead, we got the parade of familiar luminaries:
Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson. Scarlet Johansen and John Hamm. Matthew McConaughy and Bradley Cooper.

Familiar faces doing familiar things while pitching products that aren’t going to make a whole lot of difference to how amazing our life is or isn’t at the end of the day. I’m still scratching my head about Scarlet Johansson being a spokesperson for Ritz crackers.

The vibe wasn’t “remember when Super Bowl ads were weird and daring?” It was: We can’t afford missteps right now.

When corporations with massive budgets underwrite (what once was but may no longer be) the biggest cultural event of the year, safety tends to win in a climate of uncertainty, massive change, and a growing economic divide between the haves and have nots.

The few moments that landed

A handful of ads did cut through the hazy film of sameness.

“Belief is a superpower” from the NFL landed for me, not because it sold a product well, but because it spoke to something internal, not procedural. The tween kid in his room giving his stuffed animals and figurines a pep talk like his own football coach gives him and his teammates was genuine and touching. Authentic confidence building is contagious and the world needs more of it.

The vodka ad urging us to “shake your bots off” worked because it acknowledged the absurdity of the moment instead of pretending everything is seamless.

Two ads focused on fathers passing farms down to their daughters stood out. One—ironically for ChatGPT—showed a family digitizing a century’s worth of handwritten documents to generate a water-usage report.

The technology wasn’t the point. Responsibility was, and that dichotomy matters.

What Super Bowl ads used to ask—and what they ask now

Super Bowl ads used to reflect our collective aspirations and anxieties:

• What makes us laugh?

• What scares us?

• What do we believe?

• What kind of future feels possible?

This year’s ads mostly answered a different question:

• How can we make life easier without asking anything of you?

And that leads to a more uncomfortable thought. Maybe the era of truly great Super Bowl ads isn’t over because creativity dried up.

Maybe it’s over because we no longer expect—or even want—to be challenged during the one moment that used to feel collective.

The Super Bowl isn’t collective anymore

The game used to be one of the last shared cultural events with everyone watching the same thing, at the same time, reacting together. Water cooler talk the next day at the office across the country, even the world, could last for days. Informal polls about which ads were awesome and which ones should never have been made filtered through cubicles and email chains and over lunch in the break room.

That may still be happening in offices and coffee shops today. There’s certainly a plethora of opinions flooding social media, but most of what I’ve seen so far is about the Bad Bunny halftime show rather than the lackluster ads. Turns out, a pop singer singing all his songs in Spanish is far more divisive and inflammatory than conversations about the crop of meh commercials.

What’s different from even ten years ago is now the ads leak early. Hours of commentary arrives before kickoff. The surprise is gone before the whistle blows.

There’s simply too much else competing for attention.

The Super Bowl is still massive, but it’s no longer singular.

And maybe that’s why the ads feel flatter now: because they’re designed for everyone and no one at once.

A quiet realization

For the first time in years, I didn’t worry I’d miss something if I left the room during the commercial breaks. The game was good, with a lot of solid defense from both teams. I was cheering for the Seahawks so of course I was happy with how the quarters unfolded.

My interest in the game more than the ads this year might say more about the cultural moment than the advertisers themselves. It may also point to how much I love the game of football but that’s a different topic for a different time.

What was overtly obvious to me after experiencing Super Bowl LX ads is this:

We’re living in a time that prizes:

• Efficiency over imagination

• Comfort over confrontation

• Automation over attention
  
  

And our biggest ads reflect that perfectly.

So maybe the real question isn’t whether the era of great Super Bowl ads is over.

Maybe it’s What does it say about us that our biggest cultural mirror no longer tries to surprise us, only to reassure us that meh is good enough?

I invest some time each day into staying current on specific topics, including the ever-changing landscape of AI.

This weekend, I read several articles by different people about their respective experiences using some of the more popular AI tools, like ChatGPT, Claude, and Google’s Gemini.

What stood out immediately was a growing division among users about which Gen AI tool is better—and why.

One man, in particular, wrote a long piece about why he recently deleted the ChatGPT app from his phone and mainframe computer. His reasons were sound.

First, he’d noticed a decline in his ability to think for himself and he didn’t like what he was noticing. With instant answers a quick prompt away, he’d fallen into the trap tools like ChatGPT set for anyone who ventures into its ecosystem looking for fast, frictionless output.

Next, he explained that had been using the free version for the last three years, and OpenAI is now going to start rolling out ads on the free version, which definitely presents a potential conflict of interest. Something he also doesn’t like. When a user inputs prompts, he argued, they are giving the tool data in the free version that the tool can then use to personalize ads and drive sales.

His big argument, at the end of the day, is that any time a platform takes on ad space, they automatically enter the enshittification phase of their platform.

He’s not wrong.

He also pointed out that, like everything else in life now, the gulf between people who can afford to pay for ad-free use of a tool like ChatGPT versus people who can’t or won’t and who will therefore be subjected to a slew of ads will grow wider.

I understand this argument. We’ve seen this film before, haven’t we? It happened to Facebook. It happened to blogs. It happened to YouTube.

At the end of the day, all of these platforms are businesses that are required to show a profit each quarter and fiscal year. It’s no different than your local coffee shop. Or the company you work for. Or your own business if you work for yourself.

A business needs to see a profit at the end of the day or why be in business at all? It doesn’t make sense for something to keep going if it’s bleeding money.

And yet, there’s an attitude these days—particularly about AI—rooted in an underlying expectation that these things are supposed to just be given to us, and that we shouldn’t have to pay.

In other commercial worlds, this phenomenon has been called the Walmart effect—rolling back prices. An earlier version of enshittification. Give it to me cheap. Give it to me for as little as possible and oh, while you’re at it, make it the highest quality you can, okay? Some people go through life like that, always looking for “the deal.”

I’m not here to judge anyone who thinks that way.

What I am doing is observing different behaviors around money mindset—especially in the algorithmic space. I’m noticing what kinds of expectations people have, including me.

One of the through lines of my book, It’s Not You, It’s the Algorithm, is my experience over fifteen years of showing up to emerging digital systems that were developed, deployed, and then quietly woven into the fabric of everyday life—where the exchange is not even.

Now, you could argue that no exchange is ever completely even. That’s fair. Sometimes one person gives more than the other because of capacity.

But in the context of technology, there is growing evidence that the companies running these platforms—who depend on users to show up and validate their existence—do so without any real reciprocity.

This is the breakdown.

This is the breakdown I experienced, and it’s the breakdown I’m seeing more and more people beginning to articulate.

I see people on Instagram, for example, posting that they’re closing their accounts because the algorithm has made them essentially invisible. I see musicians saying they’re taking their music down from Spotify because the payout per stream is insulting.

I see people pointing out that the accounts receiving the most engagement are often not accounts built organically from the ground up, but those belonging to people who already had a following, an audience, a fan base—and who simply brought that fan base with them.

That’s the difference.

And like any other entrepreneurial venture, building something of significance in the algorithmic space requires a lot of work including diligence, persistence, and consistency with absolutely no guarantee of success.

Yet, because of the way these systems are presented—very in your face, with constant exposure—they do something else. They lull people into thinking, Oh, I can win at this too. If I just do this, then I will get that.

That’s a very common phrase tossed around in the tech space: If this, then that.

We want the math to work. *If I show up and post, then I will get—*fill in the blank—paying customers, people liking me, invitations to speak, podcast interviews, television appearances.

And yes, there are the stories of the early discoveries. In the artistic community, people often point to Justin Bieber or Billie Eilish, both of whom can trace their early success to being found.

That’s the ultimate dream for many: I will be found.

I don’t have to go out and seek. I don’t have to do the uncomfortable work. Someone will find me.

It’s the same rescue fantasy that built an entire romance empire and fueled nearly every Disney movie until they started reversing the scripts.

And yet, this undercurrent—someone will find me; someone will rescue me and make my life great—still runs quietly beneath modern life.

Until you can read that terrain and see it for what it is, you will be influenced by it, primarily unconsciously. The decisions you make will be driven by that unconscious programming.

Every time you scroll a social platform, check your email, or skim a text thread, that undercurrent is there—forming thoughts and feelings, which then shape actions and decisions.

It takes work to examine yourself and your life that closely—to become truly self-aware—which is why most people won’t do it. It’s too much work.

Besides, for the most part, if you follow along the well-worn path already laid out before you, life probably won’t be that bad.

I’m not wired like that. There are days I wish I was. There are days I wish I were wired for an average life.

But I believe we’re not here to be average, that this life offers opportunities that require more of us than settling for the status quo.

And yes, it’s hard. I have failed. I’ve set goals and had dreams that didn’t come to fruition. I’ve had expectations dashed, especially in the online space. I’ve been disappointed many times.

But that doesn’t stop me from seeing—when I wake up each morning—that I get another day to live an exceptional life.

To live like I fucking mean it.

And maybe that’s the prize.

People older and wiser than me say it is. When I read their books, when I listen to podcasts and hear the same message repeated again and again, I hear the truth about what it takes to rise above average to live an extraordinary life.

If that includes deleting apps from the phone, or walking away from ChatGPT because it’s original promise no longer aligns with your expectations, so be it.

That’s what learning to read the terrain is all about.

The book traces how the Great Lakes have powered the growth of this country going back several centuries. Shipping lanes, raw materials, fur traders, labor, weather, judgment calls made under pressure. Even some details about Barry Gordy and his music empire Hitsville USA are shared. Some of the most popular music from the 20th century would never have come to be without what happens on the Great Lakes every day.

Whole systems layered together, doing their work out of sight while life above them carries on uninterrupted.

What I can’t stop thinking about is how invisible so much of what sustains modern life is, how it all operates quietly in the background. We benefit without understanding. We move without noticing. Until something falters. Until conditions change. Until a storm hits, bringing with it “the witch of November” (aka enormous life threatening storms and wind and waves towering twenty feet or more high), reminding us what’s actually holding things together.

And we might not survive.

Listening to this book is shifting my awareness from what’s visible to what’s structural.

To the scaffolding beneath daily life and the forces that operate quietly until weather, risk, or human error brings them into view.

There’s something sobering about that realization. And something grounding too.

Because paying attention—before the storm—is its own form of respect.

I recently started rowing again.

I rowed crew in college and loved the sport. In fact, it was one of my top criteria for choosing a college. Did it have a crew team? Along with a strong English department and a pre-med program? If the school checked those boxes, it made the list.

I eventually found The One and entered college with dreams of becoming a doctor, rowing crew, and continuing to study language, writing, and books.

Pre-med didn’t work out. Organic chemistry took me down quickly, wiping the doctor vision off my vision board.

But the others stuck.

I graduated with a major in English with a creative writing emphasis. I rowed crew for four years. I studied abroad in London. And over the years since graduating, I have continued to row on and off.

Several years before he died, my father bought a rowing machine, the kind with a container of water so that when you row, it sounds like you’re pushing your oars through water. I wasn’t sure if he ever used it, but my mom confirmed that, oh yeah, your dad did row. He had it outside on the porch until it was too cold, and then he brought it inside and used it in the front hall. He loved the sound of the water moving as he rowed.

I like that sound too. Unlike walking or biking or swimming or any other form of exercise, rowing is its own thing. People who row crew have a certain je ne sais quoi. First of all, there’s the rhythm of moving through the water, sliding on the seat, pulling and then releasing the oar.

Then there’s the camaraderie that forms when you’re in a four or an eight. Outside of Tacoma, Washington, where my crew team practiced, my boatmates and I became one unit, all moving in unison as we glided around American Lake.

When we weren’t on the water, that rhythm continued in the weight room, the student union building, even classes. We stayed on campus together during spring break while just about everyone else flew off to southern California or Arizona or Mexico, further strengthening our bond.

These are the memories I have now when I get on the rowing machine dad left behind and mom is napping in the other room. Rowing is one of the many through lines of my life and lately, I’ve been thinking about what stays with us through the years, along with what we pay attention to, and what we don’t.

I am watching my mother slowly die, an experience I didn’t see coming, and one nothing could have prepared me for. Every day I’m in the thick of caregiving duties: making sure she’s safe and comfortable and fed and dressed and clean. Making sure she knows I love her. Making sure she can find Law and Order or Blue Bloods reruns or one of the British shows she likes to watch on Acorns, using the Apple remote, which is one of the worst designs ever. Making sure she gets her proper medication and supplements, that she’s hydrated, that she’s paying her bills on time. Making sure she can log in to her iPad where her daily jigsaw puzzle apps await her eagle eye.

Nothing can prepare you for watching the slow decline of a parent or a loved one.

My father went fast. One day he was sitting in his chair, reading one of his books. The next, he was being carried down the front stairs and loaded into an ambulance. Within two weeks, he was gone. His last days were spent in a hospital bed on a ventilator, hooked up to a morphine drip. We speculate that once he got the diagnosis that he had an aggressive form of leukemia, he decided that was it. That he was done and let go.

In those two weeks between diagnosis and death, Mom sat by his bedside and held his hand, looked at him, and told him stories. Science suggests that people can hear what we’re saying even if they aren’t conscious or responding back. I like to believe that.

I like to believe my father knew my mom was there, that I was there, that my brother was there, because believing otherwise is just too depressing and sad.

Rowing on a machine is not the same as rowing on the water in a boat with seven other women and a coxswain. Still, it’s as meditative a movement as they come. It’s easy to get lost in the back-and-forth of pulling the flywheel and pushing with your legs, the sound of the water swishing in the container, unlike a Concept2 rowing machine that is simply a flywheel.

The machine my father bought reflects his love of water and boats, particularly small wooden boats and sailboats. And he loved that his daughter rowed crew.

The first—and only—boat he ever made for me was a small rowboat. There are pictures in some album in the attic of me in that rowboat as a sixteen-year-old, and again as a seventeen-year-old. Before I ever stepped foot into an eight shell, I was already forming my connection to being on the water, using oars to move myself from one point to another.

But it was never really about the destination. I simply loved being out in the boat. And yes, it was fun when our boat won a regatta. I still have the ribbons and medals I won in a box somewhere. But to be honest, it was the daily rituals and routines of practice that mattered most, whether on an erg, in the weight room, running the stadium stairs in downtown Tacoma, or out on American Lake running drills—long distance and sprints—hearing my coach yell through her megaphone at us.

Go faster!
You guys look great!
You got this!

When you’re in the throes of caregiving, you don’t have somebody moving alongside you, cheering you on, encouraging you to keep going, telling you you’re strong. It’s a solitary act, for the most part. And, like rowing, it is an act of commitment and, more importantly, devotion.

On particularly challenging days, I tell myself I’ll never regret making this decision to care for my mom. And I can also say that I won’t miss it either.

I won’t miss seeing her barely able to walk.

I won’t miss hearing her wince in pain every time she moves her legs because arthritis in her knees is so bad and she has AV Necrosis in her right hip.

I won’t miss asking her to repeat herself because she spoke too softly or slurred her words.

I won’t miss her choking because Parkinson’s makes swallowing challenging.

I won’t miss finding her sitting on the toilet with her hands covered in her own feces because she can’t wipe properly and her stool was loose.

I won’t miss her inhaling her tea instead of drinking it and not being able to breathe.

I won’t miss wondering if she will be awake when I check on her in the morning.

I won’t miss trying to navigate America’s ineffective and inhumane healthcare system as I set up appointments and look for reliable, trustworthy respite care.

I won’t miss the constant barrage of pharmaceutical ads running between segments of Law and Order reruns, or David Muir’s nightly news, or Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune.

I won’t miss seeing fear in her eyes when she talks about the future, wondering if she will get another summer at our lake house.

I won’t miss carrying this load alone.

I will miss the woman who gave me life.

I will miss her spirit.

Her unwavering optimism about the future.

Her love for me and my brother and her four grandchildren and friends.

Her love for my dad.

The day will come when I miss her.

In many ways, I already do.

I’ve realized something about myself.

I don’t Google much anymore.

When I have a question, I ask an AI tool to summarize the world for me—and I stay put. It’s efficient. It’s useful. And it’s changing something about how I think.

When the internet first showed up in my adult life, it was messier and goofier—cat videos, Charlie the Unicorn, links that led nowhere in particular. You didn’t just get answers. You wandered.

Recently, my chiropractor told me he signed up for an AI class after reading my book.
“I don’t want to get left behind,” he said—right as he adjusted my neck, which felt like an oddly perfect metaphor.

What struck me wasn’t the class. It was the instinct: to orient before deciding what matters.

I wrote a longer reflection about this here:
👉 I Don’t Google Anymore, and I’m Paying Attention to What That Changes

No rush. Just something to sit with.

MaryLou

This morning, before I was fully awake, I reached for my phone.

Not out of urgency. Not because something needed tending. It was simply the reflex — the familiar move many of us make before we’ve even decided what kind of day we want to have.

Within seconds, my attention was already elsewhere. Not on anything I’d chosen, exactly. Just… elsewhere.

What stayed with me wasn’t the content itself, but the speed. How quickly a morning becomes populated with other people’s thoughts, bodies, jokes, opinions, and ambitions before we’ve had a chance to arrive in ourselves.

Later, I noticed a stack of notifications waiting from LinkedIn. I’ve been mostly absent from the platform for weeks, so I was curious what I’d “missed.” It turned out to be a parade of reactions to other people’s activity including updates that didn’t help me think more clearly or orient my day.

Except one.

A friend had quoted something I’d said to him in passing, and shared how it had lingered with him. That kind of attention makes sense to me. It has weight. It travels differently.

The rest felt like motion without direction.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that distinction lately, what actually deserves entry into our days, and what simply arrives because the system is very good at sending things our way.

Attention has become porous. Not dramatically — quietly. It leaks out through small, ordinary moments that don’t register as losses until they begin to add up.

I wrote more about this after noticing how little of what greets us first thing in the morning is designed to help us decide, reflect, or create. The full essay lives on my site, where I’m trying to gather these observations more intentionally.

If you’d like to read it, you can find it here:
[The Notification That Didn’t Deserve Me →]

No urgency. No promise of solutions. Just a shared noticing.

Thanks for being here,
MaryLou

As the year comes to a close, I’ve been spending more time looking back than pushing ahead. Not in a dramatic way. Just noticing what actually stayed when the dust settled.

I didn’t sit down to write “lessons learned.” What emerged instead were a handful of realizations—some serious, some playful—that seemed to surface on their own as the year wrapped up. They felt worth capturing, if only as a record of attention.

I published the full reflection on my website this week. It’s simply a year-in-review, written without urgency or optimization, an honest snapshot of where I landed as 2025 comes to a close.

You can read it here:
👉 https://maryloukayser.com/what-stayed-with-me-in-2025/

Thank you for being here this year, in whatever way you were. I’m heading into the new one a little quieter, a little clearer, and very grateful for the space to think out loud.

— MaryLou

My brother, my mom, my dad, and I each had our own page, which sometimes spilled into two depending on the year.

I found the spiral notebook she kept when I first moved back into my childhood home to care for her in 2021. I set it aside, knowing I would want to look through it at some point.

Four years later, I finally took the time to look at the lists.

As I did, I couldn’t help but smile at the simplicity and appropriateness of the gifts I received each year, and also at the discipline mom had to keep a record like that year after year.

This is the first year in my life when I did not decorate the Christmas tree with ornaments. I put lights on it and the angel on top, and I also hung the garland with lights and clip-on birds on the front stairs banister.

And of course, I hung up mom’s stocking and mine.

Outside of this effort, though, I just haven’t had the desire or energy to do much with Christmas decorations.

Based on what I’ve been seeing online, I’m not alone in doing Christmas 2025 low-key. Plenty of memes have filled my feed on Instagram expressing a lack of interest in going all out.

One particular writer I follow posted a thoughtful reflection about not feeling the spirit this year. She titled it “Neither Merry nor Bright,” and here is an excerpt:

“If you haven’t sent cards this year or forgotten someone’s gift, if you don’t have matching pajamas or a festive family photograph, it’s okay. If you can’t find the energy to be merry and bright or your tree isn’t even decorated yet, that’s fine. If you don’t feel like watching your favorite Christmas movies or honoring the traditions that you normally always do, don’t sweat it. My friend, these things don’t matter. This year has been hard, really hard.”

It’s definitely been a mixed year for me, and in next week’s post, I will share my reflections about 2025. For now, here’s a screenshot of the list of presents I received and from whom when I was two years old.

It’s interesting and fun to look at what I got. I was particularly delighted to see that I received a package of fruit stripe gum, which I loved chewing for years until my teeth couldn’t handle sugary gum anymore. I also love seeing I received pots and pans, The Lollipop Tree record, The Little Engine That Could record, animal dominoes, and magnetic letters and numbers.

At two years old, I was already being primed for my life’s work as a writer and an educator and then, in about the seventh iteration of my career, a podcaster. Never underestimate the power of the present to influence who you become.

I feel blessed to still have my mom with me, that I will be celebrating another Christmas with her this year. My dad’s been gone for four years, and I miss him every day. My children are both in Oregon, celebrating with friends and family out there. I saw them in late October, and counted that visit as my holiday time with them.

I see people post on social media about parents who have passed and how much they miss having them during the holidays. I also see plenty of posts by young people who have walked away from their parents or their families for reasons that make sense to them.

Apparently, this is a growing trend, adult children wanting nothing to do with their parents or families of origin. I don’t know enough about the trend to comment in any detail at this time, but it does make me sad knowing not everyone gets a great family.

I recently read about a famous family that is currently experiencing a public feud between parents and adult son, with him blocking his parents on Instagram and other social platforms. Behind the scenes, people close to the parents say there’s a lot of hurt feelings on both sides. I don’t know enough about what’s happening to say any more than this, but I can say this story also makes me sad.

Life’s too damn short for extended bad feelings, and I also respect that everyone has their own reasons for what they choose to do with their lives.

The world can be a really hard and mean place. With current events being what they are, it would be easy to become hardened by the things paraded across the nightly news.

I do my best not to let things outside of my control impact my daily life. Most of the time I do a pretty good job. This holiday season I’m choosing to celebrate in a quiet and more private way, reflecting on Christmases past when the room was full of people I love, including my children, and the mound of presents spilling out from under the tree was massively ridiculous.

There won’t be many presents under the tree this year and I’m okay with that. When my mom asked me a couple of weeks ago what I wanted for Christmas I said, “I have everything I could possibly ever want.”

And I do. Except for a Mercedes SL500 convertible in sapphire blue metallic with cream leather interior, but I digress.

In the spirit of giving, I suggested she could buy me a couple of journals, which I picked out at Michael’s and wrapped and put under the tree to unwrap on Christmas morning.

How cool would it be to find a recording of The Little Engine That Could next to the journals, or a pack of fruit stripe gum in my stocking, although I know I won’t. I can at least imagine myself at two years old tearing open the packages, and mom writing everything down on the list, and later my dad putting the record on the stereo and everyone listening to the story that reminds us anything’s possible when you put your mind to it as I stuffed four or five pieces of gum in my mouth at once.

I can imagine what the holidays were like for my parents back then, when my brother and I were tiny and didn’t yet understand what Christmas is really all about.

I can remember all the Christmases when my own children were little, the squeals of laughter and joy and delight upon seeing what awaited them when they came downstairs in striped Hannah Anderson pajamas.

Those memories will forever be fixed in my mind, and they are enough to carry me through the rest of the season and well into the new year.