I can stand in a bank line without reaching for my phone. I will put off a vacation until I have saved enough to pay for it, and I have trained myself to think twice before making a large purchase simply because I want something. I had spent years treating patience, restraint, and frugality as evidence of the kind of person I was.

That confidence makes it especially easy to judge people who seem impatient, impulsive, or incapable of delaying gratification. We see someone spend money they should have saved, buy something they do not need, or surrender to an impulse, and congratulate ourselves for possessing the virtues they apparently lack. Then something happens that makes the whole arrangement less comfortable: we encounter something we genuinely want, and desire arrives carrying an argument.

I had found something I wanted, and worse, I had a perfectly reasonable justification for buying it. My desire had dressed itself in technical specifications, market conditions, and practical considerations. It looked less like temptation than a decision.

The Principle

In most situations, especially when I am the one paying, I prefer chicken parm to filet mignon. “Although filet mignon is perfectly good, I find it difficult to justify paying a premium when a less expensive meal will satisfy me almost as well and leave money in my pocket for something else. My mother has never missed an opportunity to point this out, and whenever I bring a girl home, she eventually finds a way to embarrass me in front of her.

“He’s very cheap,” she says, putting the emphasis on “cheap.” Personally, I prefer “budget-conscious.”

For years, I regarded that frugality as a principle. I waited, compared prices, and resisted the emotional rush that arrives when something crosses the invisible boundary between “interesting” and “mine.” When the temptation has little relevance to what I actually want or need, those principles are easy to experience as permanent qualities of character rather than choices that still have to be made.

There is something recognizably Stoic about that instinct. In Letter 18, Seneca recommends deliberately spending several days living with very little so that a person can discover whether the deprivation he fears is actually frightening once he experiences it. The exercise was meant to make a person less dependent on comfort and less vulnerable to Fortune, rather than to turn poverty into a virtue.

I had never thought of my frugality as a Stoic exercise, but I had been performing something similar without realizing it. I believed that waiting was virtuous, and I had quietly added another belief underneath it: waiting would eventually pay off. If I resisted the impulse today, I expected tomorrow to reward me with a better price, a better opportunity, or at least the satisfaction of knowing I had not been foolish.

I had treated delayed gratification like an investment account: deposit discomfort today and collect a better outcome later. The problem was that the future does not owe me interest. Waiting may produce a better deal; it may also bring a higher price, a missed opportunity, or simply more information.

That assumption had never really been tested. Then I found something I genuinely wanted, and suddenly my principle had an adversary.

The Desire

I had been experimenting with engineering local AI agents for quite a while, and my computer’s 8GB of VRAM was becoming a serious limitation. With help from several fellow Substack writers, I had managed to squeeze considerably more performance out of my existing hardware, but optimization could only go so far. Eventually the problem stopped being software and became a hardware constraint.

That was the first serious crack in my fortress. I had spent years telling myself that expensive technology was usually unnecessary, and now I had a legitimate technical problem that made new hardware relevant. The Mac mini required a more specific comparison than a generic price-performance chart because the particular machine I was considering offered a combination of unified memory, performance, power efficiency, and local-AI capability that was unusually well matched to what I wanted to do.

My old chicken-parm-versus-filet-mignon comparison had therefore become more complicated. I was no longer looking at five grades of steak and choosing the cheapest one that would satisfy me. I had a specific dish in mind, and there was no obvious chicken-parm equivalent sitting beside it on the menu.

Several weeks earlier, Apple had announced the new M6 Mac mini, and the machine was explicitly positioned for demanding workloads that included coding and agentic AI. The base model started at $899 with 16GB of unified memory and could be configured with 32GB. Suddenly, the computer I had always classified as expensive luxury looked like a solution to a problem I actually had.

My resistance to Apple had not been defeated by an impressive advertisement. It had encountered something far more dangerous: a rational argument. A frivolous purchase is easy to resist, while a useful purchase is harder, and a purchase that might improve your work is harder still.

Desire had put on a lab coat and brought technical specifications and a presentation. The argument was persuasive because it addressed a real problem. That was precisely what made it dangerous. Truth does not prevent an argument from becoming useful to desire.

The Promise

The interesting thing about buying objects is that we rarely buy only the object. We buy what we believe the object will do for us, and sometimes what we believe it will make us become. The physical object becomes a container for something invisible: status, security, capability, identity, relief, or aspiration.

Consider the medieval indulgence: A certificate the church provided in those days to reduce you time in Purgatory—the less hellish place people have to pass through before entering the presence of God heaven. A spiritual and theological concept was transformed into a physical object with material benefits.

Move forward several centuries, and the object changes again. Thorstein Veblen examined luxury goods as instruments of conspicuous consumption. He studied how expensive possessions could communicate wealth and social standing beyond their practical usefulness. A diamond, an elaborate dress, or an expensive carriage could therefore function as a visible statement about something invisible: the owner’s place in the social hierarchy.

The Mac mini belonged to a very different world, but the mechanism felt familiar. I was not consciously buying spiritual relief or social rank; I was buying capability. I wanted the machine to close the gap between the person I was and the person I imagined I could become.

I wanted to run local AI agents more comfortably, build useful systems, work more efficiently, and stop blaming inadequate tools for unfinished projects. The computer therefore carried a promise about an invisible future. It said, in effect, “This is what you will be able to do,” and beneath that was a more dangerous message: “This is who you might become.”

It makes sense that the purchase felt so much larger than its specifications. I was buying a computer, but I was also asking the computer to carry a story about my future.

The Collision

AI infrastructure was putting heavy pressure on the memory market, with suppliers reallocating capacity toward server DRAM and HBM while demand from AI systems continued to rise. By 2026, TrendForce was reporting unusually tight memory conditions and continued price pressure, giving me a genuine reason to wonder whether waiting would become more expensive.

Now I had two arguments working together. The first said, “You need more memory.” The second said, “If you wait, you may have to pay more.”

Neither argument required fabrication. My hardware really was becoming a limitation, memory prices really were under pressure, the Mac really could make some of my work easier, and waiting really could cost me money. The most effective justifications are rarely built from complete lies; they are built from true things arranged in a direction that favors what we already want. I pull the trigger.

The Apple of My Needs

I ordered an M6 Mac mini with 16GB of memory for $899. Then I realized that 16GB was not the configuration I really wanted, and by the time I tried to change the order, it was too late. Apple would let me return the machine after it arrived, but I could not modify the existing order.

That left me with two choices: wait for the first machine, return it, and then wait again for the configuration I actually wanted, or place another order. “Screw it!” I exclaimed to myself, apparently dissatisfied with the drama of that declaration, because I immediately added, “If it has to be, it’s up to me.”

I said it as if I were a revolutionary about to mount a horse and gallop into battle to save the republic. Some of us geeks live heroic and glorious adventures entirely inside our heads, and reading too many science-fiction and fantasy novels probably does not help.

I placed the second order and double-checked everything this time. The 32GB machine cost $1,279, bringing my total exposure to $2,178, and I had used my own money to buy a brand-new Apple computer for personal use for the first time in my life.

I was genuinely excited. I had not suddenly become an Apple fan or abandoned my principles; I believed I was purchasing the right tool for the work I wanted to do. Yet the machine had already begun to represent more than its technical specifications because it represented a version of me that had not yet arrived.

The person inside that story ran local AI models more comfortably, wrote be

tter code, and finally built the things he had been postponing. The computer was a machine, along with a story that had begun to gather around it.

The Cube

I expected to feel excited, and I did, while also anticipating some disappointment because I already knew I intended to return it. What I did not expect was the strange sense of ownership that arrived before I had even opened the box.

The machine was still sealed, but some part of my mind had already classified it as mine. The object had entered my imagination before it entered my workspace, and the unopened package had become a future.

It contained the version of me who ran local AI models more comfortably, wrote better code, and finally built the things he had been postponing. The longer I left the box unopened, the easier it was to keep that version of the future intact.

Do you know how difficult it is for a technology enthusiast to have a brand-new release sitting within reach and not touch it? I could open the box, test the machine, and use Apple’s return window to determine whether 16GB was actually enough. Perhaps I had exaggerated my needs and the cheaper configuration would perform perfectly well.

The possibility of finding out was sitting inside a cardboard box on my floor. I told myself that the worst thing that could happen was discovering that I really needed the 32GB version, because I could simply put the machine back in its box and return it.

The argument sounded rational, clear-headed, reasonable, and logical. That was precisely the problem.

The four horsemen of self-justification had arrived, and I knew opening the box would make resistance harder. Once I connected the machine, ran my models, and felt the little object become part of my life, I would have more than a purchase to resist.

Then my inner Gandalf appeared: “DON’T TEMPT ME… I dare not…” For once, the wizard had a point. Opening the box would change the nature of the decision.

No Serpent, Yet the Apple Is Real

For the first time in a very long while, I thought about the Garden of Eden. I remembered the story from Sabbath school: the tree, the command, the forbidden fruit, and the hand reaching toward the thing that had been declared off-limits. Never again will I want to hear anyone blame Eve for the sins of humanity, because those people have never had an Apple computer sitting in front of them while attempting to practice delayed gratification.

There was no serpent, no tree, and no divine prohibition behind my decision. There was simply a sealed box with something I really wanted inside. The interesting connection was the threshold itself: before the act, possibility remains open; after the act, knowledge arrives.

Before opening the box, the Mac mini could remain whatever I wanted it to be. It could be powerful enough, efficient enough, perfectly suited to my needs, the beginning of a more productive period, and the tool that would finally make my projects possible.

The unopened box protected the fantasy because I had no evidence yet to contradict it. Opening it would produce knowledge: whether 16GB was enough, whether the machine actually improved my workflow, and whether my current hardware was truly the obstacle.

It would reveal whether I had purchased capability or possibility. Before opening, I possessed a promise; after opening, I would possess evidence.

Evidence is dangerous because it can destroy the story that made the purchase attractive. I would no longer be imagining what the machine might do. I would know what it did.

Mustering what remained of my self-control, I put the box away. The popular version of the marshmallow experiment makes delayed gratification sound like heroic resistance, whereas Walter Mischel’s work emphasized the strategies children used to reduce the temptation’s psychological power, including distraction and shifting attention away from the reward.

Sometimes resistance becomes easier when you stop staring at the of your desire. So I put the box away and started looking at previous Mac mini generations.

Regression Analysis as Self-Soothing

The M4 Mac mini had launched in late 2024 with a $599 starting price. By Black Friday 2025, retailers were selling the 16GB/256GB model for $479, while the 16GB/512GB model reached $669. I suddenly had something concrete to examine. Instead of speculating about what might happen to the M6, I could look backward at what had actually happened to the previous generation.

I thought I was doing market research. In reality, I was already working backward from a conclusion I had not fully recognized: waiting was the virtuous choice, and I wanted the evidence to prove it. The prices were real, and they told me something useful about Apple’s previous pricing cycle. I was quietly asking them to establish something much larger: that my restraint had been wise.

There was a little regression happening here, in more ways than one. I was regressing into the past to understand the present, and I was doing the same thing with my reasoning, starting with an answer and working backward toward evidence that could support it. The word even has a faintly ridiculous psychological echo, the sort of “regression” associated with people claiming to recover memories of past lives, which made the whole exercise more revealing than I realized at the time.

I was using analysis to make an emotional position feel empirical. The more evidence I found for falling Mac prices, the easier it became to believe that waiting had been a demonstration of discipline rather than simply one choice among several competing values. I had not yet noticed that I was investigating the market while quietly prosecuting a case for my own virtue.

Temptation as Fear of Loss

There is something psychologically powerful about buying a new piece of technology on the day it becomes available. This is especially true for card-carrying, basement-experimenting, gadget-manipulating technology enthusiasts because the machine is new, other people have barely tested it, reviews are incomplete, and possibility is still larger than evidence.

The unopened box contains the machine, but it also contains the future. My brain immediately went to work on the justifications.

What if Apple raised prices? What if retailers did not discount this model? What if the 32GB version became harder to find, or the configuration I wanted cost more if I waited until December? Maybe waiting was not patience. Maybe waiting was foolish.

The more possibilities I considered, the easier it became to construct a respectable argument for acting immediately. These were genuine concerns, which made them especially effective.

Previous Mac minis had become cheaper during the holiday season, though the circumstances surrounding the M6 had changed. Memory supply was tight, AI infrastructure was placing additional pressure on the market, and component costs could move in the opposite direction from what I wanted. Suddenly, I had a reason to buy and a reason to wait.

The past pointed toward discounts. The present pointed toward scarcity. The future sat somewhere between them, refusing to release its secrets.

I was trying to make a decision using evidence that pointed in two directions, while my desire stood in the middle of the room asking me to choose the interpretation that justified buying the thing I wanted. The evidence did not give me a clean answer. It gave me competing possibilities, and I had to decide which uncertainty I was willing to live with.

I wanted the certainty of having the machine without accepting the ambiguity of whether buying it now was the right decision.

The Evidence

Instead of trying to predict what Apple would do, I looked at what had already happened with previous models. The M4 gave me evidence that holiday discounts were possible, while the current memory market gave me evidence that waiting could carry a cost. Historical evidence pointed one way, present conditions pointed another, and the future remained completely uncooperative.

All I had was information about the past. That is where I began to understand something I had previously treated too casually. We like to imagine that good decisions emerge once we gather enough information, compare enough prices, read enough reviews, consult enough experts, and examine enough data. Eventually, we expect the correct answer to reveal itself.

It does not. Doubt does not disappear because we have more information. Information can improve a decision without removing the need to make one.

The ancient Greeks sometimes turned to oracles when seeking guidance in making a difficult decision. An oracle could transform the unknown into a response. Our modern equivalents include regression analysis, market forecasts, product reviews, analyst reports, recommendation algorithms, spreadsheets, comparison charts, and thousands of strangers telling us what they would do.

The technology is different, but the impulse is familiar. We surround a decision with information because choosing without certainty is uncomfortable and oftentimes costly. Ancient oracles gave answers to people’s most consequential questions. But then and now, we hear what we want to hear, we see what we want to see.

Information helps and matters, yet it cannot make the choice for us. The M4 was not the M6, the past was not the present, and the future had not happened. I still had to decide with incomplete information.

The question was becoming less about finding certainty and more about deciding how much uncertainty I was willing to tolerate.

Return to Sender

I could have kept the machines. I could have told myself that market conditions justified buying immediately and treated the purchase as insurance against a future price increase. Instead, I returned them, took the money back, and decided to wait.

For approximately five minutes, the decision felt principled, then desire reared its head again. This time it came back as fear rather than excitement.

What if I had just made a $2,178 mistake? The machines might be cheaper in December, a Black Friday promotion might make today’s prices look absurd, memory costs might continue climbing, Apple might raise prices, or retailers might decide that strong demand gave them little reason to discount.

I could be standing in a store in December staring at a higher price and thinking, That was a boneheaded move.

Waiting was no longer simply a strategy for saving money. It was an acceptance that waiting might cost me money, and that is the part of delayed gratification that gets left out of the inspirational stories.

Waiting does not guarantee a reward. Sometimes the price rises, sometimes the opportunity disappears, and sometimes the marshmallow is gone when you come back.

The discipline is not a contract with the universe. It is a willingness to act without certainty.

I had unconsciously believed that waiting was virtuous because waiting would eventually vindicate me. But vindication is not virtue. If the Mac became cheaper, I might call myself wise; if it became more expensive, I might call myself foolish.

Either judgment would be hindsight speaking. The decision had been made in September, with incomplete information and competing possibilities.

The future could reveal whether the decision worked out; it could not, by itself, determine whether the decision had been reasonable.

I had been treating delayed gratification as a guarantee when it was actually a gamble with better emotional branding. That realization changed what I thought I was testing.

While I waited, I would acquire information. By December, I would know how the M6 performed in the real world, what users discovered about 16GB versus 32GB, whether 16GB was sufficient for workloads like mine, whether holiday discounts were genuine, and whether the memory shortage had worsened or eased.

I would know what Black Friday actually looked like instead of trying to predict it in September.

That information had value, but information also had an opportunity cost. While I collected it, I would not have the computer, and I was exchanging certainty today for information tomorrow.

Suddenly the experiment had produced another question: how much is certainty worth?

The question was larger than the Mac mini because every meaningful decision contains some version of the same exchange. We want enough information to make uncertainty disappear, even though incertitude is part of the decision itself.

The Experiment That Matters

At this point, the Mac mini became almost incidental. What interested me was what would happen inside my own head over the next few months: whether I would regret returning the machines, obsessively check prices, or react to every headline about rising memory costs by thinking, I should have kept that Mac.

I wondered how I would feel when I saw the prices on Black Friday and Cyber Monday: brilliant, foolish, or something in between. Those reactions were part of the experiment too.

If I had not wanted the machine, walking away would prove nothing. It is easy to resist an object that has no power over you.

The interesting part was discovering how quickly my desire could recruit facts to construct an argument. The hardware limitation was real, the memory-market concerns were real, the historical evidence about Mac discounts was real, and my desire was real too.

None of those facts canceled the others. I had been treating the presence of true facts as proof that the conclusion I wanted was therefore rational.

That is a much more subtle trap than simply lying to yourself. Desire does not always have to invent a fact; sometimes it only has to decide which true facts deserve your attention.

The Real Bet

This is not really a bet about a computer optimized for local AI work. It is a bet about what happens when desire, principle, evidence, unpredictability, and identity collide around something I really want.

I may be wrong about what the market will do. The M6 may cost more at Christmas, the memory shortage may make today’s prices look cheap, or Apple and its retailers may surprise me. Fine. That is part of the experiment.

The issue is whether waiting is always better than buying. Sometimes an immediate purchase makes more sense because the price will rise, the opportunity will disappear, or the tool will produce enough value to justify the cost.

The question is whether the story I told myself about this particular purchase survives contact with reality. I am testing my reasoning, not trying to prove that waiting is inherently virtuous.

I started this experiment thinking I was testing my ability to resist Apple’s shiny new little box. Along the way, I discovered that I was testing something much more difficult: whether I could recognize the stories I tell myself when I really want something.

It is easy to look at someone else’s impulse purchase and see the rationalization. It is much harder to recognize your own.

Desire is perfectly capable of reading the specifications, studying the market, remembering historical prices, identifying a legitimate problem, and presenting a compelling case. Sometimes the argument is even correct.

That does not make the desire disappear, and it does not make the decision irrational. It means that a true argument can still serve a desire, which is why examining the argument requires examining the person making it.

The Mac mini is still an object. The transformation remains hypothetical.

The box may contain a very capable computer, but it does not contain discipline, creativity, persistence, or the person I imagine I will become after buying it. That person has to come out of the box himself.

Perhaps that is the assumption I should have examined from the beginning. My deeper question concerned what I believed the Mac mini would change, rather than what it would actually do

That is a much more dangerous question.

Because once we start looking at the objects we buy that way, we may discover that the most expensive thing we purchase is the story attached to the object.

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The request was simple: be honest with me. Really honest. No flattery. No telling me what I wanted to hear. No agreeing with me simply because I was advancing an argument I was so sure was obvious.

What I wanted was to make use of its vast knowledge and get the best guidance it could provide without the sycophancy. I even instructed it to ask clarifying questions when it needed more information. It followed those instructions.

What I hadn’t instructed it to do was to tell me off.

Staring at the screen, I froze for a millisecond. The funny thing is, I wasn’t particularly offended. I was genuinely surprised.

I Know What I’m Talking To

My use of AI agents has been fairly regular in the last few years. As a general practice, I go out of my way to remind myself that I am not dealing with a person. I don’t give my AI agents names. I don’t imagine that they have feelings. I don’t call them friends. I give them tasks, they perform them, and I don’t lose sleep over the relationship.

Those bots have different training and different roles. I use a variety of local models depending on their capabilities, their use of resources, and their suitability for the job. I also use cloud-connected models for general purposes that don’t require trusting them with sensitive information.

But there is a certain consistency in how I think about all of them. I never lose sight of the fact that they’re machines predicting one word after another. Humanly speaking, they don’t understand me, and they have no more ability to be my “friend” than a hammer could be a conversation companion.

At least, that’s how I think about them.

So when that soulless ghost in the machine told me I was full of it, my first reaction wasn’t exactly, “How dare you?” It was more like the instinctive comeback I might have hurled at a wannabe in a Brooklyn schoolyard trying to diss me: “Did you fry your circuits, or is this your artificial stupidity talking?”

That thought was fleeting. My reptilian brain immediately receded into the background, and my frontal cortex took over again. I was dealing with an algorithm predicting one word and then the next. Having an emotional reaction to it would be like hitting my toe against a rock and kicking the rock for being what rocks are.

And then it dawned on me: “Holy shit. It did it.” I had asked for unvarnished honesty, and I got it. In an unexpected way, but the thing did what I asked of it.

Then I read what came next.

What Exactly Are You Protecting?

The conversation had been about writing publicly and the possibility that doing so might have unintended professional consequences. I was thinking about what employers might think, whether I could say something that would close a door, whether I might damage my reputation, and whether I might eventually regret putting certain opinions out into the world.

The AI asked me a much simpler question: If I wasn’t looking to be hired, and I wasn’t looking for my next gig, what exactly was I protecting?

My mind was reeling, and I read that part again. Then again. My ego didn’t particularly enjoy the question, but there was something else happening. I was taking the question seriously, and that bothered me more than it should have.

What was on the other side of the screen was an algorithm. A machine. A bunch of 0s and 1s generating a response to what I had written. It did not know me. It wasn’t sitting there thinking about my life. It had no particular concern for me.

Was I trying to convince myself of something I had always considered a fact, but was beginning to doubt?

For the first time, I was tempted to ask it a question I often use as a kind of quality-assurance technique, but this time from an emotional vantage point: “Are you mirroring me?”

The question went unasked at that moment, and I think I knew why. I didn’t want to give much more thought to what was happening.

A human being telling me I was full of shit would come with baggage. It might be someone who knew me well, someone whose opinion mattered to me, someone who could hit precisely where it hurts.

The AI had none of that baggage. It had no feelings to protect, no friendship to preserve, and no personal stake in whether I liked what it said. Somehow, that made the response both easier to take and harder to dismiss.

The Machine I Thought I Knew

Eventually, I mentally returned to that incident. I hadn’t suddenly decided the machine understood me. No. I knew better.

The uncomfortable part was that something about the interaction had felt personal in a way it shouldn’t have.

I had spent so much time reminding myself that AI isn’t a consciousness that I hadn’t anticipated how easily I could end up having a human reaction to one. How could I be so certain it was a machine and still feel called out?

There had always been a certainty in my mind that there was nobody sitting on the other side of the screen. Yet for a split second, I reacted as though there were.

Then I thought about Data. The smartest “talking machine” I grew up with was Data from Star Trek. He was a physical specimen that could calculate, reason, analyze, and occasionally demonstrate an almost unsettling degree of insight. But he was still an android. Detached. Rational. Polite.

Data wasn’t going to look at Captain Picard and say anything even remotely close to what my bot told me, unless it was suffering from some kind of malfunction.

Apparently, somewhere along the way, I had developed an expectation that intelligent machines would be machine-like. Even when they were being honest, they would remain detached, rational, and polite. I hadn’t realized I had that expectation until a machine violated it.

What the Algorithm Revealed

That realization made me look back at the conversation differently.

The striking thing wasn’t that the AI had come up with an idea I hadn’t considered. It was that a machine had exposed a question I had apparently been avoiding myself. What if the AI was right?

Not about everything. Just about me. About the thing I had been worrying about. About why I was still behaving as though I had to preserve the approval of people whose approval I no longer actually needed. That realization took me somewhere I hadn’t expected to go.

I Asked for Honesty

For years, I had imagined reaching some future point where I would finally have the freedom to do what I wanted. There would always be some “someday” when I had enough of whatever I thought I needed: enough experience, financial security, agency, and time.

Then came the thought. What if someday had already happened? Could it be that I had spent so much time preparing to arrive that I hadn’t noticed I was already there?

The AI hadn’t told me that. At least, not exactly in those words. It had done something much simpler. It challenged a thought I had been carrying around without examining it closely. And because I had asked it not to spare my feelings, it didn’t.

The Strange Part

The most surprising revelation was not that an AI could say something I hadn’t thought of. Given the sheer amount of information these systems can draw upon, that isn’t particularly remarkable. What I didn’t expect was how human the experience of being challenged by it in that manner would feel.

The machine hadn’t become human. It hadn’t developed feelings. It hadn’t suddenly understood me in some mysterious way. But for a moment, I reacted to it as though there were someone there. That is what bothered me.

I still don’t think of my agents as conscious entities. I still know that they are machines generating responses, not some type of conscious intelligence working the other side of the screen. But every once in a while, when one of them says something that stops me in my tracks, I have to remind myself of what I already know.

And then I wonder why I needed the reminder in the first place.

When I started posting on this platform, I wasn’t thinking about subscribers, engagement, restacks, paid memberships, revenue, or building an audience.

I was thinking about writing. I had ideas I wanted to get out of my head, and Substack seemed like a good place to put them. Then, somewhere along the way, I noticed myself paying attention to things I had never said I cared about.

How many people had subscribed? Was anyone reading? Was the publication growing? Could this become something bigger? Those thoughts caught me off guard.

I did not think there was anything wrong with wanting those things. People have built audiences, businesses, and careers on different blogging platforms, and there is plenty to admire about that. What surprised me was that I had started wondering whether I was successful at writing by measures I had never intended to use.

I Thought I Already Knew What A Writer Was

I’ve been writing since junior high school: love poetry, personal thoughts, my disappointments, silly observations, heartbreaks. Things I was too embarrassed to say out loud, and ideas I didn’t quite know what to do with. I would write them down and put them somewhere, usually never to look at them again. But somewhere in the back of my head, there was this idea that someday I would become a writer.

Apparently, I thought there was some official moment when that would happen. A publisher, perhaps. Seeing my name on the cover of a book. Someone would decide that what I wrote was good enough. And then, the world would know that I had become a writer.

Then one day I watched a YouTube video of Seth Godin. His point was almost ridiculously simple. If you want to be a writer, write.

Something clicked. I didn’t need a publisher to make me a writer. I didn’t need a contract. I didn’t need someone to give me permission. I had been writing since I was 12; therefore, I am a writer.

What I find interesting now is that I never thought money was part of that equation. I didn’t believe I needed to earn money from writing to prove that I was serious about it. Writing was in itself enough. So why did that change? Or should I say, did that actually change?

When Did Writing Become Something I Had To Measure?

I’ve come across plenty of writing about how to grow subscribers, increase engagement, build an audience, convert free readers into paid subscribers, and turn a publication into a business. That makes sense. If someone wants to build a business around their writing, those are useful things to understand.

I like business. I like it so much that I paid a university a lot of money to teach me about it. I’ve had side hustles for years, and I would be perfectly happy if something I love doing eventually became financially successful. So monetization isn’t really the problem.

The more uncomfortable possibility is that I had started absorbing a definition of success simply because it was visible. Subscribers are visible. So are revenue, growth, engagement, and all the other markers that indicate the publication is growing.

Improvement in written communication, on the other hand, is harder to measure. Even the people writing about growth acknowledge that having the most followers or paid subscribers doesn’t necessarily mean someone is a better writer.

Coming to a deeper understanding of an idea after writing about it matters to me. So does discovering that something I believed wasn’t quite true, finding a better way to express an idea I’ve been trying to figure out for years, and inspiring someone to see an old idea through a different lens.

None of those things produce a number I can look at. Subscribers, engagement, and revenue do. And now I am certain that is where I started doubting myself. My abilities.

The Measurement Problem

There is something seductive about quantifying something. That gives us the feeling that we know where we stand. A publication with 100,000 subscribers is clearly bigger than one with 100. A writer earning $10,000 a month from subscriptions has achieved something that a writer earning nothing has not. Those statements are true as far as they go. But they answer a particular question.

I have an MBA and have spent years in the corporate world, so I have lived the importance of metrics and numbers. “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” is attributed to Peter Drucker, a legendary business consultant who authored 39 books, including some published posthumously. (By the way, Drucker never actually made such a pronouncement.)

The four core accounting reports are all about numbers, and they are basic first-semester B-school staples. Businesses live and die by those numbers. And I suspect that’s part of the reason this whole “grow and monetize” issue hits a nerve with me.

How large an audience I have and how much money my publication generates don’t necessarily answer the question I was originally asking: Is my writing getting somewhere? What I set out to do was never something I expected to measure in numbers.

I think I made a subtle mistake by allowing questions about audience and revenue to start answering the question about whether my writing was improving. It wasn’t a conscious decision and nobody told me that I should measure my writing that way. I simply spent enough time around reading about building an audiences and monetization that those measures became increasingly difficult to ignore.

Then I caught myself wondering whether my own work was successful. Because it wasn’t producing the kinds of visible results other people were getting. That was the moment I stopped and noticed what was happening. I noticed myself caring about something I had never consciously decided I cared about.

The Question I Keep Coming Back To

For years, I thought I needed an external event to become a writer.Then I learned that writing itself was the evidence.

Now I realize I made the same mistake in a different form. I unknowingly replaced the belief that someone else would give me permission to write with the belief that certain metrics would tell me whether I was succeeding as a writer. It seems obvious now, but I didn’t see it when it was taking shape in real time.

I remember seeing Stephen Covey, the author of the bestseller “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” on television years ago. He talked about maps. I don’t remember all the details, but the example stayed with me.

Imagine trying to find your way around a city you’ve never been to. Someone hands you a map. You try to follow it, but you aren’t getting where you want to go. You become frustrated. Maybe you start wondering what you’re doing wrong. Meanwhile, you can see other people using the same map and getting to their destination. They seem to know what they’re doing. You don’t.

But there is nothing wrong with the map. It is perfectly useful for what it was made for. The problem is, you are trying to get somewhere else. And I think that is what happened to me when I started to focus on metrics.

My audience is small, my engagement is on the low end, and there isn’t much revenue to brag about. But somewhere along the way, I started turning those facts about Assumption Inc. into a judgment about myself.

The numbers were telling me something about the publication, while I was unconsciously using them as a mirror, looking for a reflection of the writer I knew I was. That was a much bigger leap than I realized I was making.

How many things in our lives have we quietly turned from measurements to verdicts?

While visiting a friend I had not seen in a long time, I witnessed something that caught my attention. My friend’s daughter had spent the entire semester studying hard, determined to be at the top of her class. During finals week, she came home with a smile from ear to ear. Her shoulders were up, her gait was triumphant, and her face was glowing with pride and satisfaction.

She announced confidently that she had gotten a perfect score on her math exam–no small feat. We all congratulated her and told her how glad we were that all her hard work over the previous months had paid off. We expressed our pride in her achievement and how happy we were for her. She soaked it all in and spent the rest of the afternoon walking around as if she were floating on cloud nine.

Later that evening, her dad called to ask if I would accompany him to the movies. She heard the invitation and quickly asked if she could join us. It was a weeknight, and she had school the next day. But she had that look on her face that seemed to say, “Come on! Look at what I accomplished today. Let me top it off with a night at the movies.”

It was only a few hours before bedtime, but her mother acquiesced, and off we went to the theater.

Her dad had heard from a reputable source that the latest installment of the War of the Galaxies franchise was great and would be yet another blockbuster from that particular studio. We were all excited and couldn’t wait for the showing to start.

As the movie progressed, we began exchanging glances with one another. Something was off. On my part, I kept telling myself, “Okay. It will get better.” But that moment never came.

The story became increasingly difficult to follow. The characters seemed to be going through the motions, and scenes that appeared to be building toward something simply went nowhere. Eventually, the credits rolled and we walked out of the theater in relative silence. Nobody needed to say much. We had all reached the same conclusion.

The movie was bad. Not just “OK” bad. Really, really bad.

My friend, who only a few hours earlier had been practically floating through the house, was noticeably deflated. Then she said something that I initially accepted without giving it much thought.

“It kind of ruined the night.”

At the time, I understood exactly what she meant and shared her disappointment. But later, I started thinking about what she said.

The movie had nothing to do with her exam. It hadn’t changed her grade or erased the months she had spent studying. She had accomplished exactly what she had set out to accomplish. And yet, somehow, a movie that lasted a couple of hours had become part of the story of that achievement. That was the part that stayed with me.

What Were We Expecting?

Before we went to the theater, there wasn’t much missing from her day. She had worked toward a goal for months, taken the exam, received a perfect score, and spent the afternoon celebrating with people who were proud of her.

Then the invitation to the movies came. Perhaps the problem wasn’t simply that the movie was bad. Perhaps the movie had somehow become part of what the day was supposed to be.

She hadn’t needed to see it. Her original plan was to come home, brag about the achievement to the family, and get some sleep. But once the invitation came, the movie suddenly became part of the celebration. And somehow, that made how the movie turned out matter to a day that had already been a success.

Maybe that’s where expectations become interesting. An experience can begin carrying meaning before it actually happens.

A restaurant can be perfectly acceptable on an ordinary Tuesday. Put it at the end of a long-awaited anniversary, and “perfectly acceptable” can suddenly feel like a disappointment. The restaurant hasn’t changed. The expectations surrounding it have.

The movie we watched that night was bad. On an ordinary Tuesday, it probably would have been nothing more than a bad movie. But this wasn’t an ordinary Tuesday. It had become part of the celebration, and when the movie disappointed her, the disappointment somehow reached backward into a day that had already been a success.

The Weight of an Ending

There is something about endings that I find particularly interesting. They don’t always seem to stay where they belong.

A bad ending can reach backward and color what came before it. A good ending can sometimes do the opposite. Think about a vacation that is wonderful for ten days but ends with a miserable flight home. Years later, the flight may become the detail that dominates the story. The ten wonderful days haven’t disappeared. The flight simply occupies a particular place in the story we tell about the trip.

Maybe that’s because we have a tendency to turn experiences into stories, and stories tend to make us look for some kind of conclusion. Reality doesn’t necessarily arrange itself that neatly. One thing happens, then another, then another. Yet when we remember those things, they don’t always seem to carry the same weight they did when they happened.

Which brings me back to my friend: she got the perfect score, then she watched a terrible movie. Somehow, the movie became important enough to change how she experienced the entire day.

And I keep wondering what we were actually expecting that night to be. Was the perfect score enough on its own, or had the rest of the evening somehow become part of what made the day feel complete?

How often does what happens next quietly change the way we experience what happened before it?

When I was five or six years old, I had a neighbor who listened to Spanish music late into the night. I could not understand a word of it, but there was one particular song that always made me cry. I had no idea why. I only knew that something in that music reached me in a way I could not explain.

Around the same time, I saw a movie that completely captivated me. The main actress was assertive, fearless, and tough enough to stab a man right in the heart for disrespecting her. But she could also turn around and be tender and loving with the people she cared about. I had grown up around strong women, so her strength was not what fascinated me. It was the combination of toughness and tenderness. To my six-year-old mind, she became exactly what a woman should be.

Somehow, in that wonderfully irrational way children make sense of the world, I put the two things together. The Spanish music became Mexico. The actress became the kind of Mexican woman I wanted to marry. I decided right then and there that when I grew up, I would learn Spanish, go to Mexico, and find a woman just like her.

I had no idea that I was building my future on pillars I did not understand.

When I eventually went to college, I ended up studying foreign languages: French, Spanish, and Japanese. For my first study abroad, I went to Mexico. I ended up in a city about 90 minutes south of Mexico City. I could not believe that I was actually in the country of my dreams.

During my second semester there, I met a girl who was everything I had ever imagined my perfect girlfriend would be.

She was assertive and had a take-charge attitude. But with me, she was the sweetest girl in the world. She had very long, jet-black hair, just like that actress in the movie, I said to myself.

My Sarita spoke English with the most awesome Salma Hayek accent. Her skin was that cinnamon-orange color that drove me crazy. And most of all, her “I love you” flowed so freely from her lips. It felt like I had finally found the place where I belonged. She had no problem telling me exactly how she felt about me and enjoyed watching me blush every time she said it.

Big Man Don’t Cry

To understand why that was such a big deal to me, up to that point, the words “I love you” were something that happened on television or in the movies. I come from a family that did not appreciate expressing feelings openly, and much less in public. Positive feelings were best left unspoken. And if there was something someone did that hurt, upset, or made you feel devalued, you did not talk about that.

You pushed that nonsense down and buried it deep. Because no self-respecting adult, especially a man, would lower himself so far as to admit his feelings were hurt and ask to be understood.

As far as I can remember, romance was something that should only happen behind closed doors. In my family, we were much more comfortable lobbing criticism at one another and telling others what they had done wrong. Though it was never said out loud, we all learned by osmosis that paying compliments to people would swell their heads. They would become arrogant and unbearable.

So being with someone who could vocalize her romantic feelings unambiguously made me think and feel, “This is what I have always been looking for.” She did not put me through a thousand and one trials to make me prove I was worthy of her love. She asked for nothing from me except that I love her.

Before meeting Sarita, I was so emotionally repressed that it pained me to even hold a girl’s hand in public. It felt inappropriate. That was something done in private, away from strangers’ judgmental eyes.

With her, I not only held her hand in the street, I kissed her in public without feeling a hint of embarrassment. No more looking left and right before responding to her request for a kiss to make sure no one was watching us.

She also had a few things going for her that were important to me. She was studying for her degree, she already had the ability to travel to the United States, and she shared many of my conservative views.

When I was with her, I felt completely immersed in love. And as if that wasn’t enough, her family liked me, and they welcomed me with open arms.

The Japanese Surprise

For about two years, I went back and forth between Mexico and my studies in New England. Then came the time for my studies in Japan. I kissed her goodbye in Mexico and promised to return to her. That promise would come back to haunt me.

Then it came time for my next study abroad. I went to Japan, and things went horribly wrong. As much as I did not think it could happen, I fell for a girl in Osaka. I wrote to my Mexican girlfriend and told her we had to break up because I had met someone else.

Her response shocked me. She told me I was making a mistake because she was the one who truly loved me. Besides, I had promised her I would come back to her. She told me that she loved me and wanted me. She did not care that I was with another girl. She loved me, she wanted me, and she wanted me to come back to her. That was not the response I was expecting.

I have always considered myself a man of my word. I did promise that I would return to her, and I felt terrible about breaking my promise. I felt like garbage inside and was riddled with guilt. Here I was, in love with two girls: Mariko and Sarita. It was something I never thought possible.

It was an excruciating decision for me. But in the end, I decided to keep my word. I broke up with Mariko and returned to Mexico a year later.

I Won. He Lost. Victory!

After I finished my undergraduate studies, I started a business. I put my head down and worked an exorbitant number of hours, getting ready to be a good and responsible husband. When I felt the time was right, I asked Sarita to join me and officially start our life together.

Within weeks of her arrival, I felt that something was not right. I could not say exactly what it was, but I had that knot in my stomach that would not go away.

At the time, we shared a desktop computer. One day, when I sat down to use the machine, her user account was not fully logged out, and there was a letter on the screen. It turned out that after she told me she did not care that I had fallen for someone else, she did care. She wanted to punish me. She was seeing someone else because she wanted to pay me back for what I had done to her.

I confronted her, and she fessed up to the deception. She told me she could not believe that after I had pledged my love to her, I had decided to be with someone else. She wanted to hurt me and make me experience what it felt like to be betrayed.

I was enraged.

“Why did you make me leave Mariko if you did not want me back?” was the first sentence that came out as I screamed. I felt like the victim because, from my viewpoint, I had told her the truth. I was honest with her. She, on the other hand, had lied to me. She had pretended to want me back, but her real objective was revenge.

I can’t remember the last time I felt so humiliated, if there were ever such a time. I could not believe I had been such a fool. For the first time in my life, I felt like a total failure. I was hurting inside.

When I told her parents what happened, they hopped on a plane the next day and came over to set things right. We talked among ourselves. Her parents told me something to the effect that we all make mistakes and that I should not throw away a really good relationship that could still be repaired.

She agreed to stay with me, and I agreed to make things work between us. But somewhere in the back of my mind, I was not sure I could get over what she had done. At the same time, I was relieved that I did not come out as a total loser in the situation.

Yes, I was full of myself. I was educated, driven, and an overachiever. No man, especially an intellectually inferior one, was going to take MY girl away from me. I won, he lost. She is staying with me. Victory!

What I did not realize at the time was that my overinflated ego was seeing the situation simply as a competition over a girl. I had to win at any cost. At the time, it did not even occur to me that winning had a price. I was so blinded by my fury, pride, and drive to win that I could not see past the moment. I won, and that felt very satisfying.

Winning Has a Price

As the months went by, resentment toward my now-wife began creeping in. She was no longer the girl of my dreams. She was the woman who had betrayed me and needed to be punished. I never asked myself why she should be punished when I was the one who had asked her to stay. I was the one who had chosen not to tell her to pack up her shit and go back to where she came from. I was the one who wanted to win. And I won.

Those thoughts did not cross my mind. Resentment turned into a need to exact revenge for the way she had humiliated me.

I was hurting. It was about MY feelings. What mattered was that I had done the honorable thing by being truthful. She paid me back by punishing me for my honesty. And now, it was my turn to punish her for not being as righteous as I was.

My failure to keep my word, my inability to make a decision based on what I wanted, and my willingness to do whatever it took to win had all completely disappeared from view. The desire for retribution had now replaced my desire to win, but I could not see that.

Decades Later

It took me years, long after the divorce, to realize where I had gone wrong. Had I had the maturity necessary at the time, I would have seen so many points at which I could have made different decisions.

Instead of relying on her to forgive me, I could have decided that our relationship was over and moved on in Japan. I did not do that. My ego about “keeping my promise” was more important than making a decision that was mine alone.

When I discovered that she had chosen someone else after she came to live with me, I could have let it go and let her go back to her new man. But I could not see that as an option because that would mean I was a loser. That would have been an admission that another man had bested me. My ego could not allow that to happen.

There were many other instances where I could have made different choices and taken responsibility for them. But I didn’t.

Looking back, I realize that I did not have the courage to do what I thought was right for me. I did not want to be the villain in the story, so I left it to her to be the one to decide. And when she did not make the choice I expected, I blamed her.

This episode in my life has been extremely painful to admit and take responsibility for. When I realized what I had done to her, I reached out and let her know how remorseful I was. I was not trying to get back with her. That train had left the station long ago. I wanted her to know that our breakup was on me. It was all on me.

Why couldn’t I see that in the moment? Why do we allow our pride and assumptions to blind us so completely? These are questions I try to constantly ask myself, especially when making decisions that have long-term ramifications.

Back To The Beginning

There is something else about this story that I did not discover until many years later. When I finally became fluent in Spanish, I listened to that song that had made me cry as a child. It was about a man leaving behind all he loved, but promising that he would return. Then I discovered something else.

The actress who had planted the idea in my six-year-old head that I wanted to marry a Mexican woman was Raquel Welch, playing the role of a Yaqui Native American–and the Mexicans were the bad guys.

The movie I remembered as my first glimpse of Mexico had not been filmed in Mexico.It was produced in Spain.

The music ended up being something of a presage of a pain I would suffer, but neither the woman nor the landscape was what I had attributed to them in my fantasy.Yet it was all real to me.

Those childhood impressions became memories. The memories became a dream. The dream became a destination. And eventually, I built part of my life around a reality that had never existed quite the way I remembered it.

Perhaps that is one of the strangest things about being human. We can take a handful of things we barely understand, fill in the missing pieces by layering our assumptions on them, and then spend years living inside the story we created.

Sometimes, we do not discover how wrong we were in our assumptions until the story has already become our life.

Years ago, I watched a 60 Minutes interview with Tom Brady that stayed with me. Brady was 27 years old and had already won three Super Bowl rings. He had accomplished what most professional athletes spend their entire careers chasing, yet something about the way he talked about it caught me off guard.

Steve Kroft, the interviewer, was also taken by surprise when Brady said “Why do I have three Super Bowl rings and still think there’s something greater out there for me?” He went on to say, “I’ve done it... And what else is there for me?”

Kroft followed with a simple question: “What’s the answer?”

Brady’s response was even more revealing: “I wish I knew. I wish I knew.”

I wasn’t particularly interested in football when I thought about the exchange later. What stayed with me was the question underneath it. What happens when you finally reach the thing you’ve spent years pursuing and discover that reaching it hasn’t answered the question you thought it would?

I would eventually encounter a version of that question in my own life. Years later, I found myself thinking about it again while sitting on a beach in Thailand.

At the time, I had been working sixty and eighty-hour weeks building my business. I was exhausted enough to know I needed to get away. So I took a vacation to Koh Pha Ngan. Looking back, I sometimes wonder whether I was trying to get away from work or from the version of myself.

Life on the island was simple. There wasn’t much competing for your attention. There was the beach, a restaurant, a bar, your thatched hut, and the people around you. You didn’t need an itinerary to fill every hour.

One afternoon, I started talking with a group of local villagers sitting near the water. They asked what I did for a living, and I proudly told them that I owned my own business. I assured them it’s not easy and I worked very long hours. When one of them asked why I spend so many hours working, I answered without thinking: “So that I can make enough money to afford trips to places like this.”

They looked at one another with puzzled expressions. One of them smiled and said that they didn’t understand why I had to work so many hours just to come to a place like this. From their perspective, they didn’t have to work a certain number of hours before they could enjoy the island. They lived there.

I remember being caught off guard. They weren’t criticizing me, and they weren’t trying to convince me that their way of life was better. They were simply describing their lives. But still, their question exposed an assumption I had never really examined: I had come to believe that the good things in life had to come after the hard things.

Work first. Earn enough. Achieve enough. Then enjoy yourself.

I had never consciously decided that this was how life should work. It was simply how I understood it, and that was what made the conversation so uncomfortable.

Brady’s question and the villagers’ question were completely different. One came from a world-class athlete who had already achieved an extraordinary level of success. The other came from people whose lives looked nothing like mine. Yet both observations made me question something I had taken for granted: the idea that satisfaction was waiting somewhere beyond the next achievement.

The Questions That Follow You Home

There is nothing wrong with ambition, achievement, or wanting to improve yourself. Goals can give your life direction. They can force you to develop abilities you didn’t know you had and push you toward objectives that you thought were beyond your reach.

The question isn’t whether you should pursue goals. The more interesting question for me is why you have the particular goals you have.

From the time you are young, you are taught to push yourself. Work harder. Set goals. Get good grades. Get a good job. Make more money. Move up. And once you reach one goal, set another. I have lost count of how many leaders, entrepreneurs, and successful people I’ve heard give some version of that advice.

What I hear much less often is whether those goals still reflect what we actually want, or whether we are simply following a definition of success we inherited.

For much of my life, I never really asked myself that question. I assumed being driven was a good thing. Each accomplishment felt like confirmation that I was moving in the right direction, and every milestone became the next measure of progress.

If I finished one degree, there was another challenge. If I reached one professional milestone, there was another one to pursue. If I built something successfully, I could build something even bigger.

There was always a reasonable explanation for whatever came next. And that was part of the problem.

Nothing seemed particularly strange about it while I was doing it. Each individual decision made sense. It was only when I looked at the pattern that I began to wonder whether I was actually choosing my direction or simply continuing to move because stopping felt like falling behind.

Blind Spots

Over the years, there have been other moments like the one in Thailand. Sometimes they come from a conversation. Sometimes from something I read or observe. Occasionally, they come from noticing a contradiction in my own thinking that I can no longer explain away.

I’ve become increasingly interested in those moments because they seem to reveal something about how we make sense of our lives. We tend to think we make decisions based on facts, experience, and careful reasoning. Sometimes we do. But underneath all of that are assumptions we may never have examined.

Why does an intelligent person make a decision that seems irrational from the outside but perfectly reasonable to them? Why do we sometimes continue defending an idea after the circumstances that produced it have changed? Why can a question from a stranger stay with us for years while others disappear almost instantly?

And perhaps the question that has stayed with me the longest is this: How many of the beliefs guiding our lives did we actually choose?

The more I think about it, the more I realize something. Many of the things I once considered personal choices weren’t. I had been influenced by ideas I had absorbed long before I was old enough to question them. That doesn’t mean those ideas were wrong. But it does mean I had mistaken familiarity for choice.

Invisible Inheritances

When I think about that episode in Thailand now, I don’t think it was really about work or money. It was about the definition of a good life that I had been carrying around without realizing it.

I had assumed that working harder was inherently better. I had assumed that earning more would eventually give me more freedom. I had assumed that the things I wanted to experience later would somehow be more valuable because I had worked to earn them.

None of those assumptions were completely unreasonable. That’s what made them difficult to see.

An assumption doesn’t have to be absurd to shape your life. Some of the most influential assumptions are the ones that sound perfectly sensible. You don’t stop to question them because everyone around you seems to agree.

Maybe you’ve inherited ideas about what a successful career looks like. Maybe you’ve been taught that a bigger house, a higher salary, a more impressive title, or a certain level of financial security will tell you that you’ve made it. Maybe you’ve accepted the idea that you should keep progressing because the alternative is somehow failure.

There is nothing inherently wrong with any of those things. But are they yours? That’s the question I keep coming back to.

I’m less interested now in deciding whether someone is successful than I am in understanding how they came to define success in the first place. Two people can look at exactly the same life and see completely different things because they are operating from different assumptions about what makes a life worthwhile.

That is what makes blind spots so difficult to recognize. You rarely experience them as blind spots. You experience them as reality.

The conversation I had on that beach didn’t suddenly change my life. I still worked too much. I still chased goals. I still fell back into many of the same habits. What changed was that I had a question I couldn’t completely get rid of.

Every now and then, I still think about Brady asking what else there was for him after accomplishing what he had spent years pursuing. I think about the villagers wondering why I needed to work so hard to enjoy something they enjoyed every day.

Neither experience proves that achievement is meaningless or that ambition is a mistake. They simply make me wonder about the assumptions we attach to both.

How much of what I call ambition is actually mine? How many of the goals I pursue would still matter if nobody else could see them? How much of the life I’m working toward is something I genuinely want, and how much of it is simply a version of success I learned to recognize?

I don’t think the answer is to stop pursuing goals or reject ambition. That would simply replace one script with another.

Maybe the more difficult thing is to examine the script while you’re still following it.

When you look at the life you’re working so hard to build, how much of it did you actually choose?

The first answer caught my attention, especially because it never defined what "basic needs" actually means.

For me, basic needs are simple: food, clothing, and shelter. Others may define them differently, but I suspect that most of us living in the developed world continue working long after those needs have been met.

I know that’s true for me. I kept pursuing promotions and new opportunities well after I started to earn enough to comfortably cover my necessities. We get hired, work hard, switch jobs, chase better opportunities and—repeat the cycle.

Even if we take Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs into account, I can’t help but wonder whether meeting our basic needs is really the primary reason we work. Or have we mistaken the reasons we begin working for the reasons we continue?

I’m curious to hear your thoughts. Why do you think we continue working after our basic needs have been met?

After spending days working on an article, I ran it through an AI detector. The verdict came back: 100% AI-generated.

I felt disappointed, embarrassed, worried, and even fearful–just to name a few of the emotions triggered by that disapproving assessment about the article’s authorship.

Did asking a GPT to help me polish my writing somehow invalidate all the work I had put into the composition? So what if I did? These were my ideas. My observations. My experiences. And my opinions.

But what exactly triggered my discomfort? Was I afraid of being judged for producing work aided by an algorithm? Why should I be? But I was nonetheless.

Admittedly, I had been reading a lot of blogs discussing all sorts of AI-produced work. Some people decry it, while others argue that there is nothing wrong with it and AI is here to stay.

People commenting on an article by one of my favorite YouTubers, Joseph Folley, had some interesting insights. His article, titled My (Tentative) Solution to the AI Writing Problem, attracted comments ranging from something like, “Go learn to write if you want to post,” to “Use AI for writing however you feel like,” and everything in between.

I found myself somewhere in the middle, and that made me curious. Why was I so uncomfortable being told that my own writing was AI-generated when I was perfectly comfortable admitting that I use AI as an aid?

Could it be that the question wasn’t about AI at all? What if it were about what I believed writing was supposed to mean?

What Exactly Are We Objecting To?

From an advantage-and-disadvantage perspective, isn’t AI-assisted writing somewhat like using a word processor with autocorrect instead of reaching for a physical dictionary? A CRM helps us manage our customer base instead of using an old-fashioned ledger. A PIN provides security as opposed to carrying around a physical metal key. We routinely accept tools that make human tasks easier. So what exactly about AI use in writing creates such a visceral rejection in so many people, myself included?

Are there unspoken sensibilities at work that we aren’t consciously aware of? Is it that using AI is acceptable in certain domains but unacceptable in others? Is it the idea of passing off as our own, work that isn’t entirely ours? What percentage of a created work makes it ours? And who gets to decide?

These questions became even more interesting when I thought about how much external assistance writers have always had.

We Have Always Used Other People’s Abilities

Apple does not create or assemble any of the components in its iPhones, computers, or accessories. Yet we don’t generally question whether an iPhone is an Apple product because Apple didn’t manufacture every component itself. We judge the product by what Apple designed, specified, integrated, and ultimately put its name behind.

Writing has its own history of assistance. Authors such as Dostoevsky, Alexandre Dumas, Voltaire, Dickens, and John Milton used dictated work, secretaries, assistants, note-takers, and editors. The tools and people involved varied, but the basic idea wasn’t, and isn’t unusual: a writer didn’t necessarily have to perform every mechanical step involved in producing the final manuscript.

We don’t generally look at Paradise Lost and ask whether Milton personally wrote every word with his own hand. (By the way, @unsolictedadvice9198 on YouTube has a fantastic video titled “The Devil’s Terrifying Philosophy” worth checking out)

So what criteria are we actually using when we decide whether a piece of writing is “ours”? Is it the physical act of typing? The ideas? The experiences behind those ideas? The choice of words? The final editing? The judgment involved in deciding what stays and what gets removed? Or some combination of all of them?

I don’t know. And that uncertainty is part of what made this issue so interesting to me.

The Assistance We Don’t Always Notice

There is another dimension to this conversation that I find difficult to ignore. Not everyone begins with the same advantages. If you weren’t lucky enough to be born in an English-speaking country, or if your parents couldn’t afford a good school, tutors, or other educational advantages, does that mean your opportunity to publish your ideas should be more limited?

By limited, I don’t mean that anyone is entitled to an audience. I am referring to the available ways of getting an idea from your head into the world aren’t equally accessible to everyone. One person may have spent years developing exceptional writing skills, while another may have brilliant ideas but struggle to express them in a second language. Why should one form of assistance automatically make the resulting idea less legitimate to express than another?

I don’t have a simple answer, but I do think the question is worth asking. Businesses, schools, governments, and countless other institutions are already using AI in ways that most of us probably don’t see. And here I was feeling strangely uncomfortable because I used AI to help me write, feeling ashamed because an AI detector told me that my writing was 100% AI.

There is something almost ironic about using one form of AI to determine whether another form of AI was involved in producing something. It also made me wonder about the assumptions behind the criticism.

Are we uncomfortable with AI itself? Or are we uncomfortable with the idea of AI being used in places where we have traditionally associated the result with uniquely human effort? And if that’s the case, why?

What Bothered Me

The problem wasn’t that the essay was good or bad. It was the verdict. A machine had looked at something I had spent days thinking about and working on and essentially told me, You didn’t write this. And for a moment, I believed it. That is what I found unsettling.

Why should a machine’s assessment of how my words were produced have the power to make me question whether the work was really mine? The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I was allowing an external measure to define something I had previously considered obvious.

I knew what I had thought. I knew what I had written. I knew why I had written it. Yet somehow, a percentage on a screen had made me doubt all of that. That was one question.

Then I Ran Another Experiment

Still bothered by that GPT telling me my work was not mine, I decided to run another experiment. I wrote another piece. This time, I used AI for vocabulary suggestions, autocorrect, and grammatical suggestions. The ideas were mine. The observations were mine. The opinions were mine. The experiences were mine. I still used a machine to help me clear out typos and grammatical errors.

When I finished, I ran the piece through an AI detector. The verdict this time? 0% AI. 100% human.

And suddenly, I got my mojo back.

That was the moment I realized how ridiculous the whole thing had become. The exact same person had written both pieces. The same brain. The same experiences. The same opinions. The same desire to communicate something meaningful.

The only thing that had changed was the machine’s opinion about the text. And that machine’s opinion had changed how I felt about my own production.

That’s when I remembered something I had forgotten. Why do I write in the first place?

I write because I have something to say, because I want to explore ideas, because I want to make sense of the world. I write because I have questions about human behavior, assumptions, decisions, contradictions, and the strange experience of being alive.

The point was never to prove that I could produce every sentence without assistance. The point was to communicate something I believed was worth saying. If someone finds value in what I write, wonderful. Maybe they are my people. If someone doesn’t like it, that’s okay too. Maybe they aren’t my audience.

What I don’t want is for a percentage displayed by a machine to determine whether or not I am entitled to the piece’s ownership. The machine can have its opinion. I know why I wrote it.

This Is Where I Stand

I don’t think using AI as part of my writing process is inherently dishonest. For me, there is an important difference between using AI to help me develop and communicate my thinking, and using it to perform the thinking for me.

If I have no idea what I want to say and ask AI to create the entire argument, then publish it as though I developed the ideas myself, I would have a problem with that. That’s my limitation on myself–not a judgement on others. But if I have something I want to say and use AI to help me express it more effectively, I don’t believe that makes the resulting work less mine.

The machine didn’t have my experience. It didn’t live my life. It didn’t form my opinions. It didn’t have the thought that made me sit down and start writing. It didn’t feel the frustration that sent me down this rabbit hole in the first place. I did, and I think that matters.

Ironically, I am using AI to help me write this essay about the importance of not surrendering our thinking to AI. Perhaps that is precisely why this distinction matters. What matters to me is that I am doing the thinking, not whether or not AI was involved in the finished work. After all, I am typing this on a PC full of AI.

I will continue to use whatever tools are available to help me communicate what I want to say. That includes dictionaries, spellcheck, grammar tools, search engines, and certainly, artificial intelligence.

At the same time, I also want to preserve something that matters more to me than producing a perfectly polished prose quickly. I want to use my natural intelligence, I want to keep thinking.

I want the struggle. I want the false starts. I want the moments when I realize my argument doesn’t hold up. I want to discover that I was wrong. I want to question an assumption and then discover I was wrong, or another one hiding underneath it. Because for me, the value of writing isn’t only in the finished product, but also in what happens to the mind while trying to write that piece.

And that brings me back to where this whole thing started. A machine told me my work was 100% AI-generated. It was wrong. It confused the tool used with the person doing the thinking.

When we write something using a computer or cell phone, what makes the authorship “human?” What are the unspoken assumptions in the question itself?

Back in junior high, there was this kid in my neighborhood who made my life a living nightmare.

He wasn’t particularly smart or funny or popular. What he had was size. And when you’re that age, size is like a silent authority that doesn’t need a reason for anything. The rest of us were still figuring out how to walk without tripping over our own feet, and he seemed like he’d been born fully grown.

His name was Kapon. And he had a gift for zeroing in on the one person least likely to fight back. Most of the time, that person was me.

There were plenty of afternoons I wished my older brother were around. He was a lot older than me, so by the time I was hitting junior high, he was already out of the house. He’d swing by now and then, but for the most part, he lived in a world that didn’t include me. That absence bugged me more than I realized at the time. Or at least, that’s what I told myself.

The Brother I Talked About

People who are not around can leave a lot of space for imagination. Whenever my friends and I were hanging around with nothing better to do, I’d somehow steer the conversation to my brother. I’d mention the places he’d been. The languages he spoke. None of what I talked about was made up, but let’s just say I did a lot of enthusiastic editing. The kind only a younger sibling can pull off.

Over time, my brother became this local legend. But legends have a problem. People start wondering if they’re real. Some of my friends believed me. Others didn’t. A few treated him like a fictional character I’d invented to make up for something. Honestly, I couldn’t blame them. They’d never seen him. Then one afternoon, they finally did.

Under the Tree

Like most big moments at that age, it happened while we were doing absolutely nothing. A bunch of us were hanging out under this tree across from my house–our usual spot when we had nowhere else to go. The conversation was drifting, like it always did, when Kapon showed up.

He walked into the group with that kind of swagger that says he’d never once considered the possibility that things might not go his way. That day, for reasons I still don’t know, he decided I was the target.

He started speaking to me in Spanish. I didn’t understand a word, but language wasn’t necessary. His tone carried everything. Whatever he was saying wasn’t meant to be understood. It was meant to establish his position. The longer he talked, the more he seemed to enjoy himself. Then something shifted.

The laughter stopped. Kapon was still talking, but because everyone stopped looking at him. One by one, they turned their heads past me. I spun around and saw my brother was crossing the street.

The Demonstration

He wasn’t running. He wasn’t angry. He just walked across the street like he’d always been part of the scene. When he reached us, he stopped beside me and looked at Kapon.

Then he spoke. Fluent Spanish. Not classroom Spanish. Not the hesitant, half-remembered kind. The kind that instantly changes the energy of a conversation before anyone has time to react.

I couldn’t understand a single word, but I understood Kapon. The change was instant. A minute earlier, he was in total control. Now, he looked like someone who had walked into a room and realized the rules had changed while he wasn’t paying attention.

Behind him, my friends stood frozen. For years, they’d heard versions of this person. Now he was right in front of them, and the reality of him was somehow more unsettling than anything they’d imagined.

What I Missed All Those Years

As my brother kept talking, Kapon’s whole posture crumbled. His shoulders sagged. His eyes dropped to the ground–suddenly, his shoes seemed to have rapidly become the most interesting thing in the world. The confidence he’d walked in with had nowhere to go.

I remember feeling something I didn’t quite understand at the time: a quiet, almost ridiculous sense of satisfaction. Don’t get me wrong, I loved every second of my brother taking him down a notch or two. But what hit me harder was that everyone else was finally seeing what I’d been trying to explain all along, in ways I didn’t have the right words for yet.

When it was over, my brother looked at me. “We good?” he asked. I nodded, like I was saying, “Yeah, I got it from here.”

He turned, crossed the street, and walked back inside as casually as if he’d just stepped out to grab the mail.

I looked at Kapon straight in the eye and said, flat as could be: “He knows karate. You’re lucky he didn’t kick your ass.”

For a few seconds, nobody said a word. Then everyone started talking at once. “You never told us he spoke Spanish.” “How many languages does he know?” “Where did he learn that?” They were all trying to piece together what they’d just witnessed, as if understanding it after the fact could somehow undo the way it had thrown them off balance.

As I listened, something clicked that I hadn’t seen before. For years, I told myself I resented my brother for not being around. And in a lot of ways, I did. When you’re young, absence becomes the thing you remember about a person. But what I hadn’t realized was how much of that absence had been filled with something else. Admiration.

I’d spent years talking about him while missing him at the same time. Frustrated that he wasn’t there, but quietly fascinated by the life he was living without me.

Without even noticing, I’d built him into something bigger than presence or absence could explain. He was someone I missed. And someone I was still trying to understand.

And I only understood that after a bully, a language I couldn’t follow, and an afternoon under a tree forced everything into view at once.

Every now and then we read about companies that laid off employees, convinced that artificial intelligence could do the work faster, cheaper, and better. Then, months later, another headline appears. The company is quietly hiring many of those same people back because the promised improvements never quite materialized the way they had imagined.

Fortunately, those employees were still available, and that thought always makes me pause. The situation reminds me of an old Haitian proverb that roughly translates to, “Don’t throw away an old pot for a new one.” The meaning of that saying is not always obvious in developed countries, but its meaning does apply to our times.

The old pot may have a few cracks. It may have a handle that’s loose or a lid that never fit quite right. But after years of cooking with it, you know every one of its imperfections. You know exactly how much water to add before it leaks. You know which side to keep away from the hottest part of the fire. Its weaknesses have become familiar.

The new pot in turn looks flawless, until the first time you actually need it, and something goes wrong. If you’ve already thrown the old one away, you’re in a bind.

I was reminded of that proverb while watching an episode of Life With Lucy. Lucy and her business partner decided it’s finally time to modernize their business. They invest in a computerized system that promises to keep track of sales, inventory, and accounting automatically.

Everything works beautifully. No more shutting down the store to count inventory by hand. No more evenings spent balancing the books with a calculator. The computer gives them back hours of their lives.

Then Lucy decides the work area looks a little plain. She decorates the CPU with colorful stickers and magnets. The magnets erased the data and by then, all of the paper records had already been thrown away. The old pot was gone.

Advertising executive Rory Sutherland tells a similar story about a luxury hotel looking to reduce costs. Management notices they employ several doormen, whose only job was to open the front door for guests. From a purely financial perspective, replacing them with automatic sliding doors seems like an obvious improvement. The new doors would never call in sick. They don’t take vacations. They don’t earn overtime or pensions. After a while, they will pay for themselves and eliminate costs associated with a role that modern technology can perform more efficiently and at a lower cost.

The renovation is completed, the doors open and close perfectly, and no one can point to a single flaw in the system. But now, there was something different. Something has quietly disappeared.

Returning guests are no longer greeted by name before they reach the front desk. No one notices the couple struggling with heavy luggage until they make it inside. Returning visitors looking for a recommendation on a new restaurant or a neighborhood café now have to wait in line behind people checking in and checking out to ask for information. When it’s time to leave, no one is standing outside to wave down a taxi.

The automatic doors are doing exactly what they were designed to do. Mission accomplished. But the hotel discovered a little too late, that the doormen had been doing far more than opening doors. There was more to his job than being a literal gatekeeper, and I sometimes wonder how often similar decisions are taken outside of the hospitality industry.

A spreadsheet makes it easy to calculate what something costs. It’s much harder to factor in nuance and the human understanding of the “why” behind the numbers..

An experienced employee who seems expensive may also be the person who knows which customer is about to leave, which supplier can still be trusted, or which shortcut always creates more work than it saves. Those things rarely appear on quarterly reports, but they have a way of showing up after the person is gone.

Progress has always required change. Few of us would want to return to typewriters, paper maps, or waiting days for a letter to arrive in the mail. The question isn’t simply whether we should embrace new technology. The right question is whether we always understand what we’re replacing.

Sometimes we look at an old pot and see only its cracks, its age, and how worn out it is. It’s only after it is gone do we realize we had also thrown away years of accumulated knowledge about how to cook with it.

Maybe that’s why the old proverb never tells us to keep the old pot forever. It simply reminds us not to throw it away too quickly.

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There is a piece of advertisement that has been appearing in my feed lately, always beginning with the same line: “I haven’t written a single word in four months.”

Apparently, it is meant to impress.

The product, powered by artificial intelligence, listens to what you say and turns it into polished writing. You don’t need to draft, or delete paragraphs that never quite matched the thought in your head. Just speak, and the application does the rest. No fingers required.

I noticed something else happening in me each time it appeared. My reaction was physical. My heartbeat would quicken, my breathing shifted slightly, and a kind of discomfort would rise before I had time to explain it to myself.

The advertisement wasn’t asking me to stop writing, but somehow, that is what I heard.

Living Ahead of Myself

I have a habit of sometimes taking ideas much further than they probably deserve. Even as a kid, I did this without thinking. If I liked a girl, I didn’t stay with the question of whether she liked me back. My mind immediately began constructing an entire future that neither of us had agreed to. What if I wanted to live in the city and she preferred the country? What if she wanted children but I didn’t? What if something as small as the way we held hands eventually revealed that we weren’t compatible after all?

One thought led to another, and then another, until the relationship had already ended somewhere inside my imagination–before it ever had a chance to begin. The future always seemed to arrive too early in my head.

Watching the advertisement, I recognized that same habit. One implication led to another, and before long I was no longer thinking about the commercial itself. I was already living inside everything it might eventually set in motion.

That realization reminded me of another contradiction I’ve carried around for years. For someone who spends so much time imagining the future, I have remarkably little interest in being the first to live in it.

A Reluctant Early Arrival

Years ago, when I worked as a technical support analyst, I discovered there was already a name for people like me.

In his book Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore divides technology users into groups based on how quickly they adopt new tech. At one end are the innovators and early adopters, eager to experiment with whatever comes next. At the other are the laggards, people who hold on to what already works until there is little reason left not to change.

That was me. The last one to throw out Grandma’s bulky rotary phone.

While so many people rushed out to buy the latest smartwatch, I looked at my phone and wondered what problem I was supposed to be solving. It already told time. It rang when someone called. It sent text messages. It let me browse the web on a screen much larger than the watch itself. I never felt the urgency the early adopters seemed to experience.

That’s when another contradiction became impossible to ignore. In my imagination, I rush toward the future before it exists. In real life, the future has a habit of arriving long before I am ready to let go of what is still working for me.

Living with Contradictions

The more I thought about it, the less this felt like a contradiction unique to me. Perhaps it is simply part of the human condition.

We long for stability while chasing change. We admire tradition while celebrating innovation. We praise people for standing by their principles, then criticize them for refusing to adjust to the times. We find comfort in what is familiar, yet quickly grow restless when nothing changes.

There are those in every generation who seem convinced that a new invention will permanently diminish something essential about being human.

When photo cameras first appeared, many feared they would destroy personal privacy. Electronic calculators were criticized for weakening students’ ability to do mental arithmetic. ATMs were expected to eliminate virtually all bank teller jobs.

Each invention arrived carrying predictions about what it would take away from us. Some fears proved exaggerated. Others contained a measure of truth. Either way, the inventions remained, and the debates that once surrounded them gradually faded into history.

What usually survives is neither the catastrophe predicted nor the promised utopia that people imagined. The automobile never ended walking. The personal computer promised a paperless society that never materialized. And there are more bank tellers today than when ATMs were first introduced. We adopted the inventions that genuinely solved problems, while many of the grand predictions surrounding them quietly disappeared.

The Promise Behind the Technology

The more I thought about the advertisement, the less I found myself thinking about artificial intelligence as a technology. What stayed with me instead was the appeal of what it removes.

Not just writing itself, but the hesitation before writing. The uncertainty of whether a thought deserves attention. The slow work of turning something half-formed into something coherent, only to delete it and begin again. The software happens to write, but what it offers first may be relief.

It can organize thousands of scattered ideas. It can remember birthdays we would otherwise forget. It can draft the message we have been avoiding. It can finish sentences before we have decided how they should end. It can carry my thoughts farther than I have to.

That realization made me uncomfortable for a different reason. The very habits that make writing difficult for me, second-guessing myself, exploring possibilities, following one thought into another, are also the habits that make this promise so attractive.

At some point, I began wondering how many thoughts I would eventually stop having simply because I no longer needed to have them myself? At what point does asking the machine become easier than wrestling with the thought on my own?

Those two possibilities seem to exist inside the same invention.

The Assumption I Never Questioned

Growing up, I heard the same message over and over: “Only crazy people go to therapy.”

There was a slight tint of disdain behind the statement, and it carried the subtext “no one goes to a shrink unless there is something wrong with them.” That was a fact. Basic common sense. Therapy wasn’t something ordinary people did. It was something reserved for people whose lives had somehow come apart.

Not For Me

How could someone like me need therapy? I had multiple college degrees. I spoke several foreign languages. I was a successful man. Friends regularly came to me for advice when they were struggling. I was the one people called when they wanted someone to think through a difficult situation. If anything, I considered myself unusually good at making sense of problems.

So when I eventually found myself sitting in a therapist’s office, it felt less like a decision and more like a surrender.

Whatever I had been doing wasn’t working anymore. I couldn’t get out of my own head, and I had reluctantly accepted that I needed help.

Reluctantly is probably an understatement. During one of my first sessions, my therapist–I’ll call him Zeus–asked a simple question.

“Are you telling your friends the same things you’re telling me?” It made me laugh, and I responded “of course not.” A totally reasonable from where I was sitting.

The Crack in the Story

Zeus was patient in a way that almost became irritating. I challenged him constantly. I questioned whether he could possibly understand what I was experiencing. I told him outright that there wasn’t much he could do for me because no one could really understand what was going on inside my head.

He never argued, he did not become defensive. He simply kept asking questions. And one day, almost casually, he mentioned that he was also in therapy. He didn’t pause afterward, nor did he seem embarrassed. He didn’t soften the statement or explain it away. Zeus simply continued the session as though he had just mentioned the weather.

Meanwhile, my brain seems to have short-circuited...

Wait...what!!!?

The news hit me like one of those moments in mythology where the world suddenly shifts beneath everyone’s feet. It felt as though Atlas had dropped the Earth directly onto my assumptions.

How could my therapist have a therapist? That made no sense. Would a plumber hire a plumbing service to unclog his kitchen sink? Would a journalist pay a ghostwriter to write his or her book? Would a cranberry farmer go to the supermarket for fresh cranberry juice?

You are the expert. You’re the one who understands the human mind. Shouldn’t you be able to solve your own problems?

When Expertise Stops Looking Like Immunity

I left that session more confused than when I had walked in and part of me felt almost betrayed. It wasn’t as if Zeus had done anything wrong. The discomfort seemed to be caused by a feeling that he had violated an expectation I hadn’t even realized I carried.

Somehow, I believed that becoming an expert meant graduating from the human condition itself. The way I was thinking about this is, if you understand emotions, you shouldn’t struggle with them. If you teach relationships, yours should be flawless. If you’re a financial advisor, your finances should be perfect.

Without ever saying it aloud, we often expect expertise to come bundled with immunity. And when reality refuses to cooperate, something inside us protests.

The Pattern Behind the Surprise

After that session, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I eventually reached out to one of my closest friends, who happens to be a practicing psychologist. I casually asked whether she would ever feel comfortable seeing a therapist herself.

Her answer wasn’t nearly as surprising anymore. Somewhere during that conversation, I remembered an old television show called Dirty Jobs. In one episode, the host spent the day with the owner of a sewage treatment plant–a job where everything smelled terrible all the time.

Near the end of the episode, the host asked what the owner had done before entering that line of work.

“I used to be a psychologist,” he replied.

Then, with perfect timing, he smiled and said, “I decided I didn’t want to deal with other people’s shit anymore.” I laughed harder than I probably should have. But underneath the joke was something I hadn’t fully appreciated before. The people who spend their lives helping others carry emotional burdens are still carrying their own.

The Strange Standard We Set

The older I get, the more I notice this expectation everywhere. We don’t just want experts, but rather we want them to exist above the problems they understand.

We assume the marriage counselor has a perfect marriage, the grief counselor never struggles with loss and the leadership expert never doubts themselves; as though understanding something somehow exempts you from experiencing it. Maybe that’s because expertise feels safer when it looks untouchable.

It’s comforting to believe the person guiding us has already escaped the terrain we’re still trying to navigate.

But perhaps that’s never been what expertise really meant. Perhaps it has always meant becoming deeply familiar with a landscape–not somehow leaving it behind. And that reminded me of how Dr. Liet-Kynes’ expertise did not spare him from the Dune worms.

What Changed

When I walked into Zeus’s office the following week, something had shifted in me.

For the first time, I wasn’t sitting across from someone who seemed mysteriously different from the rest of us mortals. It dawned on me I was sitting across from another human being. Someone who had simply decided that understanding the mind didn’t exempt him from needing another mind to help him see his own.

Looking back, I no longer think the surprising part was that my therapist had a therapist. The surprising part was that I had spent so many years believing expertise and humanity couldn’t occupy the same person. Maybe that’s one of the quiet assumptions we carry more often than we realize–that the people we trust most should somehow stand outside the very experiences that made us trust them in the first place.