This is my son. He's two.
I received this picture yesterday evening. And besides the usual fatherly pride of having successfully produced what appears to be a happy child, I felt something else.
Envy.
Look at him. That stick is f***ing incredible.
Not pretty good. Not interesting. Not worth investigating further.
It is quite possibly the greatest stick ever discovered. I haven't benchmarked it against other sticks, but the vibes are strong.
When was the last time you looked at something like that? Something completely ordinary. And thought:
Oh my god. This is the best thing ever.
I actually remember the last time I felt something close to it.
AI.
The first time I really understood what these models could do, I must have had that same look.
Wait. I can build that? Today? I can take something that used to require three days and do it before lunch?
Holy shit.
This is epic.
He'd apparently reached the same conclusion. Except his breakthrough was a branch.
With AI, I can turn an idea into reality ridiculously fast. Wow. This is epic.
With this stick, I can go hit my brother. Wow. This is epic.
Different tool. Same sense of wonder.
And lately, I think I've been losing mine.
I've always been good at multitasking. Which is a nice way of saying I've always been bad at doing one thing.
AI has turned that particular character flaw into a superpower.
And then handed the superpower cocaine.
There is always something I could be doing now. An agent can be running an experiment. An LLM can research an idea. I can kick off a build. Check another result. Ask another question. Explore another rabbit hole.
And because all of this suddenly costs so little effort, doing nothing has started to feel strangely expensive.
Somewhere, a GPU is idle because of me.
That part crept up on me.
For years, after a busy day or week, my way of decompressing was immersion. A great movie. A deep book. A huge game. Something that swallowed me whole for a few hours. No measurable output whatsoever.
Recently, that stopped working.
I'd reach the end of a movie and realise it hadn't really touched me. Maybe the movie sucked. Entirely possible.
Except it kept happening.
Then I started noticing what I was actually doing during those two hours.
I'd asked an LLM three questions. Read a blog post. Checked something an agent was building. Started an experiment so the results would be waiting for me in the morning. Looked something up because the movie reminded me of something.
And probably looked up an actor on IMDb because apparently knowing that he was also Guy Standing Near Car #2 in a 2007 movie was urgent.
I was watching the movie.
Technically.
My eyes had certainly been pointed at it for substantial periods of time.
But I wasn't in it.
Once I noticed this, I started catching myself everywhere.
A quiet moment had become an opportunity.
Five minutes? I can get something done. Waiting for someone? Ask a question. Watching television? Second screen. Playing a game? Maybe an agent can work on something in the background. Taking a shower? Finally, uninterrupted architecture time.
The hunger for more had escaped work.
It had found the rest of my life.
And the annoying thing about becoming aware of a bad habit is that awareness doesn't magically make it disappear.
I knew what I was doing. I still wanted the little hit.
Just one quick question. One result. One notification. One tiny piece of progress.
Then another.
By the end of the movie I'd accumulated a dozen tiny dopamine hits. None of which I remembered.
And I'd traded them for the one big hit the movie had spent two hours trying to build.
Sometimes I'd even missed enough of the story that the ending didn't land. Which is a particularly efficient form of entertainment.
Spend two hours watching a movie while simultaneously making sure you don't experience the movie.
I miss a good stick.
Scroll back up. Look at that picture again.
The world around him isn't more interesting than mine. Objectively, I have access to vastly more interesting things.
If I want inspiration, I can scroll Reddit. If I have a question, I can ask an LLM. If I have an idea, I can open my laptop and build a 3D multiplayer game. One of us may be overengineering happiness.
My son walks into a forest.
Finds a stick.
And absolutely loses his shit.
My baseline has moved.
His hasn't.
And that's why I'm jealous.
Not because I want fewer possibilities. I fucking love the possibilities.
I don't want to give AI back. I don't want to become less ambitious. I don't want to stop building things. I don't want to pretend the solution is throwing my phone into a lake and moving into a cabin where I churn my own butter.
I just want to remember that more isn't the point of every moment.
In my latest presentation, I said something I still believe:
I can go 20x.
The world is still 1x.
It was about AI. About how our ability to produce is accelerating much faster than everything around us.
But looking at this picture, I realised I'd forgotten an important part.
Maybe the line isn't:
Go 20x.
Maybe it's:
Work at 20x.
Enjoy life at 1x.
Because the whole point of becoming faster shouldn't be finding twenty times as many things to fill the time you just saved.
Sometimes the point of saving time...
Should probably be having the time.
My son doesn't need twenty sticks. He doesn't need to compare this stick with the top ten sticks on Reddit. He doesn't need an LLM to explain the stick's structural properties. He doesn't need to build an agent that searches the forest for a better stick while he sleeps.
He found his stick.
And for that moment, it was enough.
Enough.
So I'm going to try something.
Work at 20x.
Then stop.
Watch the movie. Play the game. Read the book. Go into the forest. Whatever.
Just occasionally allow one thing to be the whole thing.
Find your stick.
I'll go find mine.
