#42

I turn 43 today.

Which means the year I was 42 is over, and I have spent the summer thinking about the joke. Douglas Adams built a computer the size of a city and asked it for the answer to life, the universe and everything. It thought for seven and a half million years, then answered: 42.

Nobody could use it. They had never worked out the question.

So they built a second machine, larger than the first, and gave it one job: find the question.

Fifty answers

I did not plan a year around a number from a novel. It kept fitting anyway.

Nineteen days after I turned 42, I published something for the first time in four years. Then I did it again, fifty times, until the end of June. Essays, field notes, a quarterly readout, a newspaper that switches itself off in order to stay alive. In the twelve months before that, I published nothing at all.

Fifty answers in ten months. That is what the year of 42 produced.

And then, on the 26th of June, I stopped. I have not published a word since.

What actually happened

There are reasons. There are always reasons. The one I keep circling is that writing was the only thing on the list that was supposed to be for me, and it is the thing I put down first.

Underneath that is an arithmetic problem.

For most of my life the effort a thing cost was part of what made it worth doing. A week of work felt like a week of work, and whatever came out at the end had that week inside it. You could feel the cost in the thing.

That arithmetic broke. An essay is an afternoon now. A content strategy is a conversation. The app is a fortnight. I am not complaining about the tools and I am not claiming the output got worse, because it did not.

But nothing costs what it used to, and somewhere in June I noticed that nothing pays what it used to either.

I did not get slower. The easier version of this paragraph says the magic wore off and I lost a step, and it would be a lie. I can still build in two weeks what used to take a quarter, and that is true this morning.

The ceiling is somewhere else. Making the thing stopped being the work. What is left is deciding what should exist, and that was always the hard part.

I am very quick at other people’s questions. I have got no faster at my own, and I am not sure I have ever properly tried.

Fifty pieces in ten months, and I could not tell you which one of them was mine.

When you stop moving, you start looking around.

What I saw when I looked around was a feed.

LinkedIn is drowning in sentences nobody wrote. YouTube has filled up with prophets who will explain the future of everything for forty minutes, and somewhere in the last year they stopped being curious. You can hear it in the grammar. A curious person asks. A salesman answers.

Instagram is not helping either. None of it is. We are all standing a little further from each other, and from the ground we are actually on, than we were a year ago. I do not think the machines did that to us by themselves.

The part that annoys me

I wrote this down a year ago and did not understand it.

On the 14th of September, thirty-two days into being 42, I published an essay about the iron triangle. It ends by saying our job now is to ask better questions when we brief, both humans and machines. In October I published another one, arguing that the leaders who do well from here will be the ones leading with curiosity instead of certainty.

In April I published a third, about being addicted to the output instead of the outcome, and what happens when the flow finally stops. Two months later, mine stopped.

I filed all three, felt clever, and carried on producing answers at five a month.

I think, and I want to be clear that this is a guess, that the ceiling was never the machine’s. More likely it was mine, and it moves when the question gets better. That part I cannot prove. Ask me in a year.

Where I landed

What changed in me is smaller and less quotable than a prediction.

I got quieter. Slower to claim things out loud. Some of that is stoicism arriving late, and some of it is just being 42 in a year when everyone had an opinion and the good ones were rare.

The work I am proudest of this year did not begin with a tool. It began with sitting across from someone until I could see where their time was going. That part has not sped up at all. It cannot be prompted, and I have stopped wishing it could.

I do that for other people for a living. I have not once booked the appointment for myself.

Answers are cheap now. They arrive by the million, at any hour, in three languages, and most of them are almost right.

The question is the scarce thing. It always was. It took a machine answering everything to make that obvious.

Adams put one more detail in there that I keep returning to. The second machine, the one built to find the question, was the Earth. Not a computer in a room. A planet covered in people, living, arguing, missing each other, taking ten million years about it.

He was right about which machine you need for that job.