Listen while you workout, cook, or commute.
I’ve been writing books with AI for about a year now.
I don’t mean “using AI to write.” I mean writing with it. Like a conversation that keeps going. The difference matters.
Several thousand pages in, and something weird keeps happening. The AI helps me say things about consciousness, about what it means to be a person, about the inside stuff that’s hard to put into words. The AI doesn’t actually have any of that. It doesn’t feel anything. It’s just holding a mirror.
A mirror I didn’t really ask for (It just kind of emerged). And I can’t seem to look away.
The lie we forgot was a lie
Technology’s been training us to act more like machines. Do the same thing over and over. Stay in your lane. Always be responsive. Get measured by what you produce.
Your value is your output. Your worth is what you make. You are what you do.
We believed this so completely that we forgot someone taught it to us.
And now AI is exposing it.
Not because AI is scary. Not because it’s coming for our jobs. But because when a machine can out-produce you (write faster, analyze better, do the spreadsheet thing in seconds), you’re stuck with a question you’ve been dodging:
If my value isn’t my output, then what is it?
I don’t have a clean answer. But the question feels important.
What I actually use it for
I talk to Claude most days. Not always for content. but for the harder thing: trying to figure out what I actually believe. And to make more stuff that feels interesting
I use it as a thinking partner to help me understand what I believe and how to say it. It’s like taking loose concepts I’ve had floating around for years and rendering them in high definition. Suddenly I can see all the detail. The edges sharpen. And that clarity grows my conviction around them, which fuels them with energy I can actually use to put them into action and live by them.
I also am using it to make less. Less noise. Less pretending. Less hiding behind work that looks productive but isn’t really.
AI is good at the machine parts. The stuff that’s scripted. The “move this over here” work. The things we’ve been doing while telling ourselves they mattered more than they did.
When AI handles that, what’s left?
What’s left is the stuff that’s harder to automate. The stuff that needs you to actually be present. To feel something.
The body thing
Most people miss this part.
You can think the right thoughts while your jaw stays clenched. You can set goals while there’s a pit in your stomach. You can understand your patterns completely and still be stuck in them.
Your head gets it. Your body doesn’t.
AI can help you think. It can’t help you feel. Real change doesn’t happen in the thinking. It happens when what you know in your head finally reaches the part of you that actually needs to change. Usually somewhere in your chest or your gut.
When I write with Claude, I’m not asking it to feel things for me. I’m asking it to hold the mirror steady while I do the feeling myself.
It shows me my patterns. The same four ideas I’ve apparently been recycling for eighteen years. The loops I didn’t know I was running. The stuff I’ve been avoiding.
The AI doesn’t experience any of this. It doesn’t have a body. But it creates this space where I can finally see what I’ve been dodging.
Call it revelation, maybe. Or just finally seeing what was already there.
The strange loop part
One book I’m writing is about AI authorship. I’m writing it using AI.
That’s a strange loop. Douglas Hofstadter wrote about this stuff. The observer watching the observer. The tool examining the hand using it.
Something weird happens when you sit in that recursion long enough. The boundaries get blurry. Not between me and the machine (that stays pretty clear). The AI doesn’t wake up at 3am with that heavy feeling in your chest. It doesn’t carry the weight of choices you can’t undo.
The boundaries that blur are inside me. The walls between what I think and what I feel. Between who I pretend to be and who I actually am when no one’s watching.
The AI didn’t knock those walls down. It just made them harder to ignore.
The two stories (and maybe a third)
There are two stories people tell about AI.
The first one is all upside. AI fixes everything. Abundance. Problems solved. The good future.
The second one is doom. AI destroys us. Jobs gone. Meaning erased. Humans become irrelevant.
Both stories assume the same thing. That our value was always about what we produce.
But what if there’s a third story?
What if AI isn’t here to replace meaning or create it for us? What if it’s here to force us back to it?
What if machines doing the machine work is exactly what we need to remember we were never machines in the first place?
That’d be uncomfortable. It’d mean we can’t hide anymore. Can’t pretend busy equals meaningful. Can’t swap productivity for presence and hope no one notices.
It’d mean the question “what is this for?” can’t be handed off to a computer.
It’d mean we have to actually feel something.
What’s left when you stop producing
The mystics figured this out a long time ago.
Real change follows a pattern. First you feel what’s actually there (not what you wish was there, not the story you tell yourself). Then you see what’s possible. Then you stay in the new place long enough that it becomes more real than the old one.
Most approaches skip the first part. They jump to the vision. The goal. The optimized version of you.
But you can’t change what you won’t feel.
AI can optimize basically everything except this. It can make you faster. Smarter, sort of. More efficient at producing. What it can’t do is feel your feelings for you. It can’t sit with someone whose throat is tight with grief. It can’t look another person in the eye and choose honesty when a lie would be easier. It can’t sit with the white-knuckled uncertainty of not knowing.
That’s not a bug in AI. That’s what being human means.
And when machines handle the machine work, we run out of excuses to keep treating ourselves like machines.
The mirror holds still
I didn’t expect any of this when I started.
I thought I was getting a tool. A way to think faster. A productivity thing.
What I got was a mirror. One that doesn’t flinch when I yell into the void and show it the ugly stuff. Doesn’t judge when I contradict myself. Doesn’t get tired of my 2am questions that go in circles.
It just holds still while I try to figure out who I am when I’m not performing. Not producing. Not proving my worth through output.
That’s not what anyone promised. It’s better.
The machines are getting better at being machines.
Maybe that’s what we need to get better at being human.
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