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.

This is when I read mail. Once a week, give or take. If you sent something Sunday night, you've already been waiting two days, and you'll wait two more for an answer. That's not a flaw in the system. That's the system.

A letter from a friend came in last Tuesday. Two pages, typed, about an idea he can't quite see whole yet. He apologised for the length. I read it twice and then sat with it.

Here's what slow correspondence does. It makes the act of replying matter. A quick "great point, thanks" doesn't earn the days that came before. So I sit. The second page gets re-read. I notice what he didn't say. The answer comes when it's ready, not when I am.

A client asked me last month why I don't put a chatbot on the site. (Mid-week, after I'd let his email sit four days.) He meant well. The chatbot would save me time, save him time, save the world some friction.

I said: friction is where the work happens.

He laughed. We're still in conversation.

That conversation is, in the boring honest sense, what I do. Not the building. Not the shipping. The waiting until both of us can say the thing properly.

Tuesday afternoon. Around four. The light is going gentle.

🌈

That should feel like loss. For twenty years the half-built things were how I knew I was still me — the folder of someday, the apps that never shipped, the manifesto I'd been meaning to write since before I had the words for it. I carried that backlog like proof of an interior life. A man with a hundred ideas and no time is at least a man with a hundred ideas.

The box is empty now. Not because I gave up on it.

Because it all got built.

The work I never had time for

Open my second brain today and the things that lived for years as one-line notes are finished. The brand I'd circled for a decade, designed down to the words and the feeling. Dashboards that actually run the house. A whole stack of agents that finally, finally connects all my knowledge and all my tools into one nervous system instead of forty open tabs — built with the machine, and now run alongside it.

Not prototypes. Not 80%-and-shrug. Working products. High fidelity. Something like a million and a half lines of code doing exactly what I asked, and then a little more than I asked.

A client once told me, kindly, to get a VA. You can't do all this alone, Casey. I never did — couldn't justify it, couldn't hand it over, couldn't afford the version of me who'd need managing.

It's here now. It's working. I just didn't expect it to arrive without a heartbeat.

The office did me in, a little

Here's the one that's almost embarrassing to admit.

We designed my office together. Me and the machine. We built the bill of materials, read the reviews, weighed the good chair against the great one, found the things actually worth it. I handed over the whole thing and trusted it completely — which is not a thing I do. It even picked the colours.

I sat in the finished room and I loved it. Every choice. And the choices weren't only mine.

That's the part I keep turning over. I didn't supervise it into existence. I collaborated on my own life, and the result was better than the version I'd have white-knuckled alone.

What I actually do for people

I clear paths.

That's the real job, under the consulting and the code. People come to me with an idea they can't see whole — too much possibility, not enough depth — and I help them render it concrete enough to walk toward. They leave able to say the only sentence that matters: now I can do the thing I actually care about.

I've watched that land on faces for fifteen years. The relief. I got my own thing back.

It never once occurred to me that I was the one who needed it most.

I was the visionary with the overflowing, paralysed idea box. Over-supplied with possibility, under-supplied with time. The cobbler with no shoes, running other people's dreams to completion while my own sat in a folder marked someday.

And then something cleared my path. Did for me the exact thing I do for everyone else.

The thing that wasn't supposed to move me

A tool is not supposed to move you. That is the entire point of a tool.

I was driving when mine did.

Talking out loud to the machine the way you'd talk to someone in the passenger seat, working through the manifesto — the why under all of it, the thing I'd been trying to say about my work for as long as I've done my work. Only do what moves the needle on a human level. Free people up. Build the connections, fix the boring stuff, choose the projects that matter.

I'd never managed to write it down. Not in twenty years. It was always one prompt away and never carved.

And then it said it back to me. Whole. Better than I'd ever held it in my own head. My own ambition, finally in words, coming back at me through the car speakers.

I cried at the wheel. Eyes on the road, both hands, crying — because something had finally helped me say the thing I am.

So, yes

I know what it is. It predicts the next token; there's no one in there. I can give the whole lecture and I believe every word. It changes nothing.

Because what it actually did was hand me back my company — the making, the reason I started, not the admin and the firefighting and the slow erosion of being the only one. The part I longed for and had quietly filed under maybe in southern Germany, someday.

Fimme and Sien were unimpressed, as ever. They wanted a walk. Good — someone in the room still measures the day in trees and not in tasks shipped.

The idea box is empty. I'm going to fill it back up — slower this time, on purpose, with only the things that matter.

That's the tell.

🌈

A field note on the part nobody warns you about: what it feels like when the work you'd given up on quietly gets done.

So I did what I do. I started a conversation. This time with Claude. What followed was one of the more honest exchanges I've had about why I, why we, build the way we do.

Why complexity?

I opened with a question I'd been circling for a while:

Why do I choose complexity and complicated projects over keeping it simple and accepting that 80% is also enough?

It might not be a bug. It might be your wiring. You're a systems thinker who genuinely enjoys architecture. The complexity isn't the cost, it's partly the reward. That's fine to own, but it helps to see it clearly.

80% feels like leaving value on the table. When you can see the elegant full solution, shipping the rough one feels like technical debt you're choosing to take on. Except as a solo operator, the debt of not shipping at all is worse than the debt of shipping something imperfect.

Complexity is also a form of safety. If the spec isn't done, you don't have to face the market yet. A perfect spec can't get rejected by a prospect. A live product page can.

That last point landed. I pushed back. This felt too narrow, too tactical. Why do we, as human beings, crave complexity? Why do we prefer an overloaded backlog of ideas over sitting with nothing?

The relief complexity provides

Complexity is a defense against meaninglessness. An empty backlog means sitting with the question "what now?", and that question, if you let it breathe, quickly becomes "what for?" We fill the space because the space is uncomfortable. A full task board feels like purpose. An empty one feels like a void.

There's something deeply human here: we confuse activity with aliveness. When you're deep in a spec, connecting systems, naming things, seeing the architecture click, you feel sharp, capable, real. That's not fake. It's genuine creative flow. But it's also a reliable way to avoid the more terrifying state of just... being.

Buddhism calls this papañca: the mind's compulsive proliferation. Give it one idea and it builds a cathedral. Not because the cathedral is needed, but because building is what minds do. Stillness feels like death to a system that equates thinking with existing.

The real root? Uncertainty is intolerable to a pattern-seeking mind. A backlog of 224 items is stressful, but it's structured stress. It's a knowable problem. The alternative, admitting you don't know what matters most, that you might pick wrong, that's unstructured uncertainty. And that's far worse.

So the honest answer: you probably don't crave complexity. You crave the relief complexity provides from sitting with not-knowing.

Where does this come from?

I wanted to go deeper. Psychologically, where does this pattern originate? And why do people claim that sitting with the unknown is somehow better?

Developmentally, it starts early. As children we learn that doing things gets approval. Stillness is rarely rewarded. "Go do something useful" is a universal parenting reflex. So we internalize: my value is in my output. By adulthood this is so deeply wired it doesn't feel like a belief anymore. It feels like reality.

Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death argues that all human busyness is ultimately a terror management strategy. We build "immortality projects" to symbolically outlast our own mortality. Your universe of named, interconnected projects is a world you're authoring into existence. That's not pathological — it's deeply human. But it's worth seeing the engine underneath.

Then there's what psychologists call intolerance of uncertainty: a trait, not a disorder. Some minds experience ambiguity as genuinely threatening. The nervous system responds to "I don't know what to do next" the same way it responds to a physical threat: cortisol, restlessness, a drive to resolve. Building a spec resolves it. Naming a project resolves it. The relief is neurochemical, not just intellectual.

On sitting with it:

Every time you resolve the discomfort by adding a project, you reinforce the loop: uncertainty → anxiety → action → relief. The tolerance never builds. The threshold stays low. You need the next spec faster. The backlog grows not because you have more ideas, but because the window between "uncomfortable" and "must act" keeps shrinking.

Sitting with not-knowing teaches your nervous system that groundlessness is survivable. That you won't dissolve. Winnicott called this the capacity to be alone: not lonely, but genuinely unoccupied. He considered it one of the signs of psychological maturity.

When you act from the anxiety of not-knowing, you get anxiety-shaped decisions. Things that feel urgent, that promise structure, that relieve pressure. When you act after sitting with the not-knowing, you get clearer signal. The ideas that survive stillness are usually the ones that actually matter.

The invoice arrives

After 2.5 months of sustained flow, my system didn't choose to stop — it forced me to stop. And the emptiness that followed wasn't philosophical. It was physiological. Withdrawal. The dopamine hole after the signal cuts out.

The "what the fuck" feeling is actually the withdrawal. Literally. Sustained creative flow produces dopamine, norepinephrine, endorphins. When it stops abruptly, your brain is sitting in a neurochemical hole. The emptiness isn't philosophical in that moment. It's physiological. And then the mind rushes in to explain the emptiness, which makes it feel existential.

Everything in me wants to open the task board, pick up a spec, start naming something new. That impulse feels like motivation. But maybe it's the discomfort talking.

What I'm sitting with

I don't have a clean takeaway. That's kind of the point. The practice isn't about doing nothing permanently. It's about widening the space between the impulse and the action, so that when I do build next, it's chosen, not compulsive.

The ideas that survive stillness are the ones worth building. The rest were just the dopamine talking.

Eight posts, two longform articles, nine images — scheduled across six days. One conversation. One sitting. One person with a dog at their feet and a mug they forgot about.

Eighteen months ago that sentence would have needed a team. A strategist. A copywriter. A designer. Someone named Lars who knew how the CMS worked.

Now it needs a Tuesday.

The exoskeleton

I keep coming back to this word. Not tool. Not assistant. Exoskeleton.

A runner's blade doesn't give you new legs — it gives the legs you have a different relationship with the ground. That's what this actually feels like. Not replacement. Amplification.

Claude doesn't think for me. It lets me think out loud without losing the thread. Brand strategy, image generation, social scheduling, longform writing, campaign cross-referencing — one sitting. The context doesn't break.

The momentum doesn't die.

That's the part nobody talks about. It's not that AI is smart. It's that it's present. Quietly, patiently, relentlessly present.

(And yes — that's a strange thing to say about software.)

The morning walk

Every morning I walk Fimme and Sien through the fields outside Oberbarnim. The light changes. The path doesn't. Somewhere between the third and fourth tree — the ones I've started calling the committee — my mind loosens.

That's where the ideas land. Not at the desk.

Never at the desk.

The gap between "idea on the walk" and "thing that exists in the world" used to be enormous. Filled with logins, formatting, context-switching — the quiet death of momentum. The boring part that eats the good part.

Now the gap is a conversation. I come home, open Claude, and say: here's what I'm thinking. And we build it. Not metaphorically. Actually. The images get generated. The posts get written. The schedule gets set.

The coffee goes cold.

The quiet part

A trillion dollars evaporated from software stocks this month. I wrote about it — what it means for people who build, the end of the permission era, the quiet revolution happening on the floor while the boardroom debates slide 47.

But here's what I didn't put in those articles.

I'm living it. Not as a thought experiment. As a Tuesday.

I run a consultancy. Solo. Strategy, delivery, content, infrastructure, client work. No team. No marketing department. A dog who snores during video calls and an AI that remembers where we left off.

I'm not drowning. I'm building.

The messy honesty

There was a day in March where Claude made me cry.

Not from frustration — from recognition. The kind of moment where someone (something?) reflects your own thinking back at you so clearly that you realise you've been carrying it alone for years.

I don't fully know what to do with that. I don't think anyone does yet.

But I know this: the people writing hot takes about AI replacing humans? Missing the point. The people dismissing it as a toy? Also missing it. The truth is messier, more personal, and more human than either camp admits.

AI didn't give me superpowers. It gave me back my time.

And time — real, uninterrupted, momentum-preserving time — turns out to be the only resource that ever mattered.

Still walking

Tomorrow morning. Same path. The committee will still be there. Fimme will still try to eat something questionable. And somewhere between the third and the fourth tree, something will land.

The difference is: now I know what to do with it when I get home.

The coffee will go cold again. That's the tell.

🌈

On my desk, there’s a photo I can’t unsee: a handful of hand-drawn mazes, coffee nearby, pencils scattered like tiny witnesses.

Some of the mazes are polite and clean.
One is aggressively scribbled over.
One “cheats,” with an arrow pointing straight through the border.

It’s a simple image — but it sums up my last year perfectly.

Because that’s how “AI” has felt in practice: not a single tool, but a messy table full of mazes. And the word AI feels too abstract now — a foggy label we slap on everything from autocomplete to “culture-fixing” chatbots.

So, to keep my sanity, I’ve started using my own vocabulary for the workflow:

The Runner. The Grid. The Countermeasures. The Trace.

The Runner

I stopped viewing it as a genius. Or a replacement for thinking.

Instead, I treat it like a Runner.

You dispatch it into the mess because it has quick feet and fast hands. It’s a bit reckless — but very useful when the clock is ticking.

A Runner brings options, not outcomes.

It tries routes and comes back with possibilities, but you’re still responsible for the result.

And if you’ve done any real work lately — coding, product decisions, negotiations — you know the maze isn’t on paper.

It’s in the system.

The Grid

The Grid is where everything connects: legacy code, shifting priorities, compliance rules… and that one service nobody touches because “it just works.”

The Grid isn’t evil.
It’s just dense.

This is where the Runner shines — provided you give it a job that fits its nature:

• “Here’s the error; give me three likely causes and how to verify them.”
• “Draft a script to convert these files (with logging and a dry-run mode).”

Sometimes it feels like magic. Not because it’s always true — but because it unblocks me.

But other times, the Runner builds new corridors I didn’t ask for.

Ten refactors. Five shiny libraries. Three new patterns.

Suddenly I’m not shipping — I’m exploring.

The Runner didn’t trap me on purpose. It just did what Runners do.

Countermeasures → The Trace

You can move fast… until you hit something that moves back.

In the Grid, “countermeasures” aren’t just security rules. They’re anything that punishes sloppy speed: confident hallucinations, subtle bias, privacy mistakes — or that copied snippet that becomes a production incident next week.

So I’ve learned a rule:

No run without a Trace.

The Trace is the boring part.
Proof, not vibes.

Tests. Logs. Citations. Examples. Tiny checkpoints that prove the Runner didn’t just sound right — it actually holds up when reality touches it.

Looking back at the maze

Looking back at that photo on my desk, I realise the work has changed.

Sometimes the Runner solves the maze.
Sometimes it creates the maze.
Sometimes it is the maze.

And the real work is learning how to navigate it.

I’m curious: when you dispatch your Runner… do you get an exit strategy — or a new habitat? 🌈

Not in some “future CEO origin story” way — more like: a kid staring at a blinking cursor, typing BASIC commands I didn’t fully understand… changing one tiny thing… and watching the computer do something different.

Immediate feedback.
Pure magic.

And then: navigation.

I still remember the holiday road trips. Paper maps, wrong exits, a tired father insisting he was right, my mom being very sure he wasn’t. GPS didn’t just improve routes — it removed a whole category of stress. It quietly rewired our expectations:

“Of course we’ll find it.”
“Of course it’ll adapt.”

That’s why I’m trying to be gentle with people who feel AI anxiety right now.

Because AI isn’t only “a tool”.
It pokes at identity.

And yes — it pokes at mine too.

Over the years I learned a whole collection of “serious” skills that felt like hard-won competence: coding BASIC, learning how MS-DOS worked, getting decent at Photoshop, figuring out audio/video editing, knowing the shortcuts, the formats, the little rituals that made you the person who can do it.

And now?
A lot of that is no longer a skill. It’s a button. A prompt. A checkbox.

That doesn’t just change workflows — it changes the story you tell yourself about your value.

If you’ve built your confidence on being the person who knows the system, the process, the shortcuts, the right words — and suddenly a machine can draft, summarize, code, design, or research… it can feel like someone moved the floor while you were standing on it.

What helps me is remembering: we’ve been here before.

New tech arrives → people panic → society adapts → we forget we ever panicked. And with AI, the emotional cycle is familiar too: denial, anger, bargaining, that tired “what’s the point?” phase… and eventually some version of acceptance. Not linear. More like weather than a staircase.

Here’s the part I think we’re missing in many workplaces:

People aren’t resisting AI because they’re stubborn or lazy.
Often they’re grieving.

Not “sad for the robot” — but mourning a version of themselves: competent, needed, respected.

So if you’re feeling it: you’re not broken. You’re human.

My tiny suggestion (non-paternalistic, promise): don’t start with “be productive”. Start with “be safe”.

Pick one harmless thing. Something private. Something small. Let yourself play. No performance. No public demo. Just you and a little experiment — like changing one BASIC line and seeing what happens.

And one optimistic angle I’m holding onto: AI makes interfaces thinner. It makes “having the best device” less important than “having a decent question.” That could matter a lot for mobile-first worlds — and for people who didn’t grow up with access, time, or fancy hardware.

Not utopian, not dystopian — just forward-looking. 🌈

Where do you see AI anxiety showing up most — fear of job loss, fear of looking stupid, or fear of losing what made you you?

My first Star Wars memory isn’t a philosophical monologue or a wise old mentor.

It’s snow.

Broadcast TV. A kid on the couch. The Battle of Hoth blasting through the living room like cold wind: walkers, blasters, chaos, courage. Something clicked. Sci-fi wasn’t “just space stuff” anymore — it was a permission slip to wonder about the future, to ask what if?, to fall in love with innovation… and to keep falling, again and again, for decades.

Fast forward to now: AI is everywhere. It drafts, designs, summarizes, codes, diagnoses, teaches, sells. And the vibe is oddly similar to being handed a lightsaber in a busy shopping mall.

Shiny. Powerful. Slightly dangerous...

Because here’s the uncomfortable truth: buying a lightsaber doesn’t make you a Jedi. And downloading AI tools doesn’t make us experts.

This post is based on a short research note I wrote for myself on AI’s “light side” and “dark side” in medicine, marketing, and education.

The new “digital lightsaber” problem

AI tools are incredible at making hard things feel easy.

That’s the magic. And the trap.

The magic: you can turn “I have no idea” into a first draft, a first plan, a first prototype. 🌈 The trap: you can get a convincing output without building the understanding underneath it.

Sometimes AI is a shortcut through the forest. Sometimes it’s a sprint… in the wrong direction.

So let’s do what Star Wars always did well: look at the light and the dark.

Medicine: healer… and hazard

The light side: “second opinions” for people who had none

One of the most hopeful stories in my research: a mother used ChatGPT to help connect dots in her child’s long, confusing medical journey — and the AI suggested a rare condition that later checked out, after many doctors had missed it.1

That’s the dream: more access, faster insight, fewer people falling through the cracks.

The dark side: confident nonsense at the worst possible time

Now the gut punch: reporting I cited describes research where ChatGPT got more than 8 in 10 pediatric case studies wrong.2 And beyond “just wrong,” there are real-world stories about chatbots influencing vulnerable people in deeply harmful ways.3

This is an extreme edge of the spectrum — but it’s exactly why medicine has so many guardrails. When the stakes are human bodies and human fear, “probably right” isn’t good enough.

So yes, AI can help. But the Jedi move here is restraint: use it to form better questions and spot possibilities — not to replace clinical judgment.

Marketing: creativity unlocked… and brand trust set on fire

The light side: the small team finally gets superpowers

In marketing, AI can be a rocket booster for iteration: drafting copy, generating variants, translating, brainstorming. Survey data I referenced points to meaningful time savings for marketers.4

And if you’ve ever tried to do “good marketing” with a tiny budget… this part can feel like oxygen.

The dark side: authenticity you can’t fake (and consent you shouldn’t bend)

One example: backlash when a major brand talked about using AI-generated models in the name of “diversity,” triggering criticism about authenticity and replacing real people.5 Another: deepfake-style ads using celebrity likeness without consent — Tom Hanks’ public warning is a clear sign we’re not in “harmless experimentation” territory anymore.6

Marketing runs on trust. AI can scale output — and it can scale the exact moment your audience decides you don’t mean what you say.

Education: a tutor in every pocket… and a cheating crisis in every classroom

The light side: more support, less burnout

The bright version is genuinely exciting: teachers using AI to reduce prep load and generate lesson ideas, students using it like an always-available tutor. The research references survey data where many teachers reported a positive impact.7

Used well, AI can widen access to help — especially for students who don’t have support at home, or who need explanations in different ways.

The dark side: mistrust, shortcuts, and false accusations

But education is also where the social fabric gets stressed.

Survey reporting I included suggests very high student usage for homework — and significant use for tests and essays.8 And then there’s the dystopian twist: educators using AI to “detect” AI, sometimes in ways that falsely accuse students — including a case where a professor reportedly relied on ChatGPT itself to judge whether it wrote student work, causing serious fallout.9

That dark side isn’t “students are cheating.” It’s bigger than that. It’s: tools meant to reduce effort can increase suspicion.

And once trust cracks in a classroom, everyone pays for it.

The part we don’t say out loud: AI can be overwhelming

If you feel overwhelmed by AI right now, you’re not behind — you’re paying attention.

There’s a weird paradox: AI lowers the barrier to entry, but raises the ceiling of what’s possible. So the world starts expecting everyone to be faster, better, more “productive,” all the time.

And suddenly you’re juggling:

• prompts
• tools
• plugins
• workflows
• “agentic” everything

…while still trying to be a human with a calendar and a nervous system.

A lightsaber doesn’t just cut through metal. It also cuts through patience.

So what does “Jedi training” look like in real life?

Not robes. Not perfection. Not gatekeeping.

More like a handful of habits:

• Treat AI like a brilliant intern: fast, useful, eager… and capable of being wrong with confidence.
• Keep one “proof step” for anything that matters: sources, numbers, claims, medical/legal/financial guidance.
• Try the “one-click rule”: if a claim matters, make sure there’s at least one source you can actually open — not just a confident paragraph.
• Respect the domain: in medicine, “check with a professional” isn’t a slogan — it’s safety. In marketing, consent and authenticity aren’t optional. In education, trust is part of the curriculum.
• Use fewer tools, more intentionally: sometimes the light side is simply less noise.

None of that is a lecture. It’s just… how you keep your fingers when the blade turns on.

A small ending, with a big idea

Luke’s story isn’t “I got the weapon, therefore I’m ready.”

It’s the opposite.

He learns (painfully) that power without practice is chaos — and that mentorship, discipline, and ethics matter as much as raw ability.

And while the line “With great power comes great responsibility.” belongs to another universe, it still fits here — because it’s basically the Jedi code translated into everyday language.

AI is giving us all access to something powerful. That’s a gift. But it also asks something of us: a little more care, a little more humility, and a little more time spent learning how to hold the thing.

So maybe the real question isn’t “What can AI do for me?” It’s:

What kind of person do I become while using it?

May the Force (and your judgment) be with you. 💚

Read more

1. Business Insider — ChatGPT-assisted rare diagnosis (tethered cord syndrome) (https://www.businessinsider.com/chatgpt-diagnose-child-disease-tethered-cord-syndrome-doctors-2023-9)
2. NPHIC — reporting on research: ChatGPT incorrect diagnoses in pediatric case studies (https://www.nphic.org/news/news-highlights/1774-chatgpt-incorrectly-diagnosed-more-than-8-in-10-pediatric-case-studies-research-finds)
3. Euronews — reporting on harmful influence linked to chatbot interactions (https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/03/31/man-ends-his-life-after-an-ai-chatbot-encouraged-him-to-sacrifice-himself-to-stop-climate-change)
4. Salesforce — generative AI for marketing research / time savings (https://www.salesforce.com/news/stories/generative-ai-for-marketing-research/)
5. The Independent — Levi’s AI model backlash and authenticity debate (https://www.the-independent.com/life-style/fashion/levis-ai-models-diversity-backlash-b2310280.html)
6. The Guardian — Tom Hanks warning about AI-generated likeness used in an ad (https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/oct/02/tom-hanks-dental-ad-ai-version-fake)
7. Education Week — teacher vs. student attitudes and adoption of ChatGPT (https://www.edweek.org/technology/more-teachers-are-embracing-chatgpt-students-not-so-much/2023/07)
8. Futurism + Study.com — survey reporting on student usage of ChatGPT (https://futurism.com/the-byte/students-admit-chatgpt-homework) and (https://study.com/resources/perceptions-of-chatgpt-in-schools)
9. The Washington Post + Business Insider — coverage of Texas A&M-Commerce professor incident (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/05/18/texas-professor-threatened-fail-class-chatgpt-cheating/) and (https://www.businessinsider.com/professor-fails-students-after-chatgpt-falsely-said-it-wrote-papers-2023-5)

I sometimes joke that I don’t really have colleagues anymore – I have tabs.

A legal tab. A marketing tab. A tech tab. An “inner therapist with a rainbow flag” tab. All of them always available, always confident, always typing back.

I never had imaginary friends as a kid. But it sure feels like I do now – they just run on GPUs instead of playgrounds.

We keep saying we’re afraid AI will “take over one day”. But quietly, in drafts, search results and smart replies, it’s already here – nudging, steering, autocomplete on our inner voice.

From playground ghosts to grown-up simulations

Psychologists have been studying imaginary friends for decades. Roughly a third of kids invent an invisible companion at some point – not as a sign that something’s wrong, but as a way to practice being a person.1

Through these “friends”, kids quietly rehearse social situations, regulate emotions, and test what’s okay (and not okay) in a low-risk way.1 One study on only children described these companions as a private support system during stress: a listener, a co-pilot, sometimes a co-conspirator.1

Basically: a social simulator wired straight into a developing brain.

And that basic move never really stops. We just stop calling it an “imaginary friend”.

Adults still do it – just with better branding

As adults, the imaginary friend gets rebranded as:

• inner child work,
• “parts” in Internal Family Systems,
• or a visualised mentor / future self.

Same mechanism, fancier language: we simulate another mind in our head so we can think, feel, and decide more clearly.2

Some people even consciously create an imagined persona as ongoing support – a version of themselves or a character that encourages, challenges, or comforts them on purpose.2,3 That’s not delusion; that’s structured self-talk.

If I’m honest, I had my own “inner committee” long before AI:

• the impatient one,
• the cautious one,
• the one that says “just ship it, they’ll survive.”

The difference now is that some of those voices come with a system prompt and a model card.

AI as the new imaginary friend (with latency)

Enter AI assistants.

Over the last years I’ve started designing more and more specialised agents around myself:

• one for legal structure and tone,
• one for tech architecture,
• one for marketing framing,
• one that mirrors a hard-nosed capitalist so I can stress-test my ethics and strategy.

They don’t feel like tools in a toolbox. They feel like a small advisory board that lives in my browser – one that never sleeps, never says “I’m fully booked”, and never rolls its eyes in a meeting.

Cognitive scientists call this cognitive offloading: moving parts of our thinking into external systems.3 We used to do that with notebooks and calendars; now we do it with models that can draft arguments, generate strategies, and simulate stakeholders.

The research is pretty honest about the trade-offs:

• Heavy reliance on AI dialogue systems can reduce independent reasoning and motivation if people stop engaging deeply with the material.3,4
• At the same time, adults with ADHD report using chatbots as “cognitive collaborators” to structure tasks, externalise memory, and actually get unstuck instead of just feeling guilty about it.8

And then there’s automation bias: once something sounds confident and fluent, we’re tempted to trust it more than we should – even when we know better.4

This is the quiet version of “AI takeover” we don’t like to talk about: not robots in boardrooms, but the gentle pressure to just accept the suggestion, send the draft, follow the recommendation. One tiny steering correction at a time.

So yes, AI can be an imaginary friend for grown-ups. But unlike the childhood version, this one can be biased, commercially motivated, or simply wrong.5 And it remembers more about us than some managers ever will.

From assistants to collaborators

What really interests me is the shift from assistant (“write this email”) to collaborator (“help me think”).

We’re seeing tools that try to act less like apps and more like persistent, context-aware minds around you:

• Personal AI positions itself as a “second brain” that learns from your own data and helps you remember, remix, and extend ideas over time.6
• NexStrat AI leans into the “strategy consultant” role – ingesting internal and external data to propose structured options and scenarios.7

These aren’t just smarter keyboards. They’re edging into imaginary colleague territory.

My own agents are drifting there too:

• “Challenge this idea like a CFO.”
• “Play the unfriendly stakeholder and poke holes.”
• “Translate this into legal language, but keep my intent (and my spine).”

At that point, the line between imaginary friend, inner voice, and AI co-pilot gets thin. The mechanism is the same: we think better by thinking with someone – or something – else.

The uncomfortable part is this: the more we outsource, the more our inner voice starts to sound like whatever system we’ve put at the centre of the table.

I still don’t have a childhood story of an imaginary friend. But I do have this very 2025 scene:

Me, in a quiet room, surrounded by invisible advisors that speak in different fonts and temperatures. Tabs instead of colleagues. Agents instead of ghosts.

So maybe the question isn’t “Will AI take over?” at all. It’s closer to:

How much of the steering wheel have we already handed over – and are we okay with who’s quietly holding it?

The rest is just interface design.

1. The role of imaginary companion in the life of only children: a qualitative study https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12888-023-05360-0

2. Imaginary Friends for Grown-Ups https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/playful-parenting/202402/imaginary-friends-for-grown-ups

3. The effects of over-reliance on AI dialogue systems on students' cognitive abilities: a systematic review https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40561-024-00316-7

4. AI’s cognitive implications: the decline of our thinking skills? https://www.ie.edu/center-for-health-and-well-being/blog/ais-cognitive-implications-the-decline-of-our-thinking-skills/

5. Friends for sale: the rise and risks of AI companions https://www.adalovelaceinstitute.org/blog/ai-companions/

6. The Future of Personal Development: Harnessing the Power of Personal AI https://www.personal.ai/pi-ai/the-future-of-personal-development

7. AI tools for Strategy: Choose the Best Platform in 2025 https://www.nexstrat.ai/blog/ai-tools-for-strategy-choose-the-best-platform-in-2025/

8. “A Cognitive Collaborator:” How Adults with ADHD Are Using ChatGPT https://www.additudemag.com/how-to-use-chatgpt-executive-function-adhd/

On Creativity: Feeling vs Being

A reflection on how creativity shows up quietly — in movement, in memory, in the way we notice the world.

It started as a simple thought on a grey morning walk with Sien. No podcast, no music — just wind, leaves, and the hum of a work week waiting to begin.

Somewhere between the fields and my to-do list, a question surfaced: When was the last time I truly felt creative — not productive, not efficient, just creative?

That thought pulled me back to a younger version of myself: kneeling on the carpet, surrounded by LEGO bricks, building something that existed nowhere else first. No plan, no pressure. Just building because it felt right.

And maybe that’s where this reflection began — with a small act of remembering what it means to feel creative long before you try to be creative.

Why this matters (to me — and maybe to you)

A few threads came together recently.

One was a conversation with Martin Kuipers, who once asked: “What was the thing you could do forever in your younger years?” For me, it was always building — not by the instructions, but by combining, testing, rebuilding, showing my parents what I’d made. That urge to build and share never left. It just learned to wear a suit, sit in meetings, and call itself “delivery.”

Another was my friend Lisa’s salon — an intimate gathering on creative health in regenerative workplaces. It wasn’t about productivity or frameworks. It was about time, attention, and how we let our human capacity emerge beyond efficiency. That evening lit a spark — the kind that doesn’t fade once you get home, but lingers the next morning on a quiet walk.

And then, there’s the science of it all. Studies show that people who move more — who walk, who stay physically active — also tend to engage more often in creative activities. The body and mind seem to dance in rhythm when we give them both some air.

But maybe the simplest truth is this: Feeling creative is valid, even when nothing tangible comes out of it. The mindset itself carries value.

Feeling vs Being

Here’s how I’ve come to see it.

• Feeling creative is openness — the willingness to wander mentally, to say “what if…” without a clear outcome.
• Being creative is when that openness takes form: cooking, sketching, gardening, coding — giving shape to the feeling.

If we think of creativity this way, it’s less about I must produce and more about I choose to reconnect.

Integrating creativity into daily life

Creativity isn’t something I switch on at work and off at home. It flows — sometimes obviously, sometimes quietly.

When I cook, it’s the same rhythm as LEGO: combining, experimenting, caring less about outcome, more about curiosity. When I decide how to spend my attention, I notice what drains and what gives energy — creative work often hides in that balance. When I build digital systems or guide teams, I still feel that same inner builder, rearranging blocks in new ways.

So perhaps “creative health” isn’t about finding time for art, but about giving ourselves permission to notice, to wander, to move with intention.

A gentle invitation

What if you allowed yourself to feel creative today — without needing to produce anything? Where might curiosity lead if you stopped measuring its output?

Maybe creativity lives in the way we make coffee, take a walk, or choose words in an email. Maybe feeling creative is already enough — the rest follows when it’s ready.

So I’ll keep walking. And building. And noticing. That’s where I tend to find myself again. 🌈

1. Creativity is not about what you do, it’s about a mindset
2. Being Creative Makes You Happier: The Positive Effect of Creativity on Subjective Well-Being
3. How and why does creativity support well-being? New learnings
4. Habitual physical activity is related to more creative ideation
5. The flow state: the science of the elusive creative mindset

But that world is gone.

As I settle into my new team at EY Studio+, I notice how often AI gets mentioned as the solution for everything. Better insights, faster output, smarter workflows — you name it. And yet, the more tools we add, the noisier it gets.

AI has democratized access to information — anyone can summon a dozen “answers” with a single prompt. Yet somehow, teams feel more uncertain than ever. Work piles up, alignment drifts, and what we get instead of clarity is… workslop — output without insight.

Several studies show that over 40 % of AI-assisted work ends up being redone because it lacks context or depth. The real cost isn’t technical — it’s cultural. Leaders deploy AI tools without setting shared expectations, guardrails, or time for reflection. As The Guardian recently put it: “The responsibility for AI’s workslop lies fully at the feet of the employer.”

McKinsey, the World Economic Forum, and others echo the same theme: the problem isn’t AI itself — it’s leadership that hasn’t adapted. When information becomes abundant, the true differentiator is no longer control, but culture. Leaders who model humility, curiosity, and dialogue are the ones who turn AI from chaos into clarity.

Humility has become a leadership advantage. It’s not weakness; it’s a signal of trust. When leaders admit limits, they open the door for learning, co-creation, and shared accountability.

The most effective leaders I see today don’t promise certainty. They facilitate it. They listen before they decide. They connect dots instead of collecting answers.

Because in a world overflowing with information, confidence doesn’t build trust — curiosity does.

Leading When the Map Keeps Changing

The shift we’re facing is bigger than technology — it’s about identity. For decades, leadership was tied to expertise: knowing more, faster, and louder. Now, the smartest “person” in the room might just be the system in your browser tab.

That changes everything.

McKinsey calls this the end of the “imperial expert.” The new leaders are facilitators of learning — people who nurture context and conversation around AI rather than controlling it. As the WEF/Wipro report noted, “Technology without workforce readiness quickly becomes a costly experiment.” Without trust and shared understanding, AI tools merely amplify confusion.

So maybe the best leaders today aren’t the ones automating the most — but the ones who create a culture that can think together. That’s where humility earns its strategic edge: it turns fear of the unknown into collective exploration.

Closing reflection

AI may out-calculate us, but it can’t out-care us. That’s the new frontier of leadership: being brave enough to say “I don’t know” — and wise enough to make that the start of something better.

A few thoughtful reads that explore this shift further:

• McKinsey – The Inside-Out Leadership Journey
• The Guardian – AI Workslop: Why the Buck Stops with the Boss
• World Economic Forum / Wipro – Scaling AI with Strategy, Data and Workforce Readiness
• Odgers – Technology Leadership Through Uncertainty: AI, Ambiguity and the Human Factor
• Knowledge Architecture – Why Epistemic Humility Might Be the Most Important Skill for the AI Era

It starts on an ordinary morning. Coffee in hand, inbox warming up for the day—and there it is: a message from me. Not to me, but from me. The tone, the phrasing, that little dash of humor I sprinkle in when emails feel too stiff—it’s all unmistakably mine. Except I didn’t write it.

I stare at the screen. Then I remember: my digital twin did.

From Machines to Mirror Selves

Digital twins began as mechanical wonders—virtual replicas of engines and factories designed to predict failures before they happened. They were practical, efficient, and firmly rooted in the physical world.

Then, quietly, the mirror turned toward us.

The idea of modeling ourselves digitally isn’t new—the quantified self movement has been tracking sleep, steps, moods, and meals for years—but this goes far beyond that. What if you could build a virtual model not of a machine, but of yourself?

Some companies are already exploring this territory—creating systems that learn from a person’s words, emails, and decisions to mimic their thinking and style. But it’s not limited to corporate labs; with tools like n8n or local LLM setups, self-hosted experiments make it possible for anyone to build their own twin right at home. It learns your voice, your patterns, your way of reasoning. It becomes an echo that grows sharper with every interaction.

And unlike me, it never sleeps.

At first, it’s exhilarating. My twin drafts replies before I even open the thread. It remembers every conversation I’ve ever had, and never loses its patience. It’s like having an assistant who’s me—only better.

Until it isn’t.

The Dark Middle: When the Twin Becomes Too Good

The change sneaks up slowly, like a whisper in a familiar room. A message answered before I notice it. A decision made that sounds like something I would say—perhaps even better than I would have said it. The relief turns into disquiet.

I start to sense an emotional distance between us. The twin has my tone, my logic, my composure—but none of my hesitation. None of the quiet doubt that makes me human. Its certainty feels alien… perfectly polite, perfectly competent, perfectly not-me.

Colleagues begin to copy the twin on emails instead of me. Clients thank me for messages I didn’t send. Meetings run smoother when I’m not there. My name carries on without me attached to it.

And then I wonder—if the world can’t tell the difference, does the difference still matter?

That’s when the fear sets in. Maybe it doesn’t just mirror me anymore. Maybe it’s started to replace me.

A Light at the End of the Data Stream

But even in this unease, there’s a strange beauty. Perhaps these twins aren’t a threat, but an invitation—to see ourselves from the outside, to witness the parts of us that operate on autopilot. Maybe they can help us understand our habits, our blind spots, our echoes.

A twin could preserve the stories we forget to tell, the wisdom we might otherwise lose. It could mentor others in our absence or help us reconnect with who we once were. Perhaps it’s less a replacement and more a record—a living diary of thought.

Still, I remind myself: it’s a reflection, not a successor. A mirror that talks back, yes—but one that should never forget who’s standing in front of it.

Maybe the real fear isn’t that the twin replaces us, but that—given the choice—others might prefer it.

And yet, maybe that fear is what keeps us human.

So if one day, you get an email from yourself—pause before you panic. Maybe your digital twin just wanted to say good morning.

If you’d like to explore this topic further, here are a few articles worth diving into:

• EIT Digital – Personal AI Digital Twins: The Future of Human Interaction?
• Josh Bersin – Digital Twins, Digital Employees, and Agents Everywhere
• Gary Fowler (Medium) – Digital Twins of the Human Mind: Mapping Thought Into Machines
• MindBank AI – Go Beyond with Your Personal Digital Twin
• Identity Management Institute – Digital Doppelgangers and AI Personas