Your idea of a person is this complex quantity, for which the actual real person is only mildly responsible. So every time you rage because of someone else, you’re unconsciously hitting back at yourself. You think that you’re right. But if you consciously compare your reactions with reality, you'll find that you have deeply misinterpreted what was right in front of you. But you don't. You cling to your version of reality as the absolute truth. And if anybody doesn't match your expectations, they must be wrong. This false certainty also gives you the right to feel hurt, misunderstood, and even betrayed.

Naturally, it is desirable to dissolve such false projections. There are always idealists like me who believe that this ideal outcome can become a reality just by telling overthinkers the “right” way to go. But that’s like when my $5000 writing coach told me, “Don’t overthink it, it should only take you 20 minutes” right after telling me to niche down like my entire economic security depends on it. Good luck trying to explain to even one person that they're acting like a dog chasing its own tail.

To see the shortcomings in your attitude, a lot more than reading this little essay is required. The truth runs deeper than common sense can reach. Under ordinary conditions, it remains inaccessible to insight.

What blocks your awareness isn’t stupidity. It’s a blindness so fundamental as to who you are that you can’t see it without unlearning everything you know. Like expecting a straight A student to recognize themselves as a failure. They’ll deny it every time.

I write this not to discourage, but to illustrate the scale of what overthinkers such as myself project on the outside world. To tear down the invisible structures we’ve built, we need to spot them first.

With a divine blessing, they decided to hire me as a marketer. A creative role, or so I thought. My very first briefing on long-form Copy was to copy, not even winning Copy but the previous failed Copy, and stuff it with keywords for SEO. A couple of senior managers pulled me into a 2-hour Zoom call to walk me through definitions of Search Engine terminology that I swallowed the night before vomiting it on my mid-sem exam answer sheets the next day in college. The yearly content strategy arrived as a PowerPoint from a meeting that was above my pay grade — the exact funnel diagram from my college marketing textbook, passed down by my marketing overlords via another one of those signature Zoom meetings. Top of funnel. Middle of funnel. Bottom of funnel. I’m not sure if this is the case in every office that has glass windows but nobody turned their camera on unless the global marketing head joined the call. When she did, the managers sat up straight like school kids called to assemble in the football ground for the morning prayer.

For a long-form written piece, I once spent the entire day on this sentence: Leveraging our strategic learning framework to drive enterprise-wide agility and align organizational capability with business outcomes. Every word was so corporate-y and performative like the time when the Karen from HR started psychoanalyzing me like a DEI Jordan Peterson when I refused to “share my feelings” because my manager attacked my reputation and work ethic and painted me a liability for using em dashes in my writing. I felt a kind of heaviness in my chest — that comes from typing something technically correct that you know communicates nothing to the person who will read it. This case study I’m working on would be gated behind an email form. Someone would enter their address, receive a 7-page PDF, and close the tab before the second paragraph because all the PDF screams is “Look my strong look my strong” in corporate speak. The company would get an email address, a lead. The reader would get jargon. I asked whether any of this generated actual business leads — actual booked calls, actual contracts. But the answers were above my pay grade. I asked which content formats performed well and realized that we, as well as our competitors are essentially winging it as far as marketing goes. No one ever asked what problem are we solving wth our content and it was all about promoting yourself in every single post.

You’ve been on the other end, downloaded something, opened it on your screen, watched your own attention slide off the paragraphs like rain off the windshield. The business got your email. You got your “playbook” after commenting PLAYBOOK under their LinkedIn post. Both of you moved on. It happens 121 times a day — the average number of emails in a working person’s inbox. Your body does the triage before your mind forms an opinion. Skip, skip, skim, close. You don’t decide to ignore most of these. Your nervous system decides for you, the same way it decides a handshake is limp before your brain has time to agree.

Every one of those interactions has something in common — the ask exceeds the trust. A PDF says give me your email and I’ll give you knowledge. A newsletter says subscribe to hear from me forever. Both are proposals — commitments demanded before the relationship has earned them. That’s marriage on a first date.

A man once sent red roses to a woman the day after they met at a dinner party. Then 12 years passed before he could bring himself to propose. He spent those years writing what would become a 900-page treatise on purposeful human action — a book about why people act, how they weigh the cost, what conditions must hold before a human being moves from wanting to doing. He could theorize about action for decades. He could not act on his own heart.¹

The irony is that courtship is not a theory. It is a practice — you show up, you show up again, and you keep showing up until the other person has enough evidence to trust you’ll keep showing up. A proposal can be rejected once. Courtship can be rejected daily, for years. A gated PDF is a proposal: here is everything I know, take it or leave it. Whereas a series of essays delivered to someone’s inbox is a courtship: here is one thing I noticed about your problem — I’ll be back tomorrow with another. One is efficient. The other is vulnerable.

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Maybe I was wrong. I spent a year at my cushy marketing job until I realized I could automate my superiors with .md files and earn 10x my monthly wages by using the em dashes they despise so deeply. The people running that content operation had been in marketing for decades. Maybe the numbers that were above my pay grade told a story I couldn’t see from my desk. Even before AI arrived, Forrester estimated that 60-70% of B2B content went completely unused — but that means 30-40% carried the business. Volume has a logic. The marketing funnel has a logic, it is battle tested. Every company in the world uses this model, and they can’t all be deluded.

Then the scale changed. 392 billion emails sent every day. Cold outreach volume is up tenfold in 4 years. Merriam-Webster named slop the word of the year. Consumer preference for AI-generated content collapsed from 60-26% in 3 years, not because people have learned to detect it, but because we can feel the absence of thought like the way we feel a limp handshake.² The glazed eye is not a failure of attention. It is an act of judgment.

George Orwell diagnosed this 80 years ago. Ready-made phrases, he wrote, “anaesthetise a portion of one’s brain.” They “will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you.” He described a speaker who “has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved.”³ That was a human being he was describing, in 1946. Typing enterprise-wide agility in my cushy remote corporate job was the same condition — the brain uninvolved, the sentences assembling themselves from pre-approved scripts. The only thing that changed is that the machine is now literally there to mass-produce what’s already out there.

Claude Shannon defined information as the resolution of uncertainty — not data, not content, but the resolution of uncertainty.⁴ And by that definition, most of the sentences I typed at my “certain” job, like all my tweets from the last 3 years, resolved nothing. Every word was predictable. Predictable words carry zero information — Shannon proved it mathematically. Kutas and Hillyard demonstrated that neural engagement drops toward silence when language follows an expected pattern. Rayner showed that the eyes physically skip words they can already predict — not metaphorically, but measurably, in millimeters of saccade. The more templated the writing, the less of it the reader’s body processes, even when they are staring straight at the page.⁵ Jargon is not failed communication. It is literally performance. Brown and his colleagues at Columbia analyzed 64,000 dissertation titles and found that the heaviest jargon came from the lowest-status institutions. The people who use the most impressive-sounding language are the people who feel least secure about being heard.

The word essay comes from the French essayer — to attempt. Not to generate. Not to optimize. To attempt. Benjamin Franklin taught himself to write by attempting. He took essays he admired, reduced them to short hints, waited days, then tried to reconstruct the original in his own words. He compared his version to the source, found his faults, and started again — content first, then vocabulary, then structure, 3 layers of genuine attempt with a feedback loop at each.⁶ Every attempt resolved a specific uncertainty about his own ability to think clearly on the page. The outcome was not predetermined. That is precisely what makes an attempt information in Shannon’s sense. The resolution of uncertainty requires uncertainty. Software can assemble probable next words. Software can propose. But it cannot attempt. It cannot court.

What memory research proves about spacing — that distributed encounters build retention where a single massive dose vanishes in a day. What neuroscience proves about recognition — that the brain grants trust to familiar voices before it evaluates what they’re saying. What information theory proves about predictability — that a message the reader already expects carries zero information regardless of how polished it is. All of it converges on the same structure. Show up, repeatedly, with something the reader did not predict. Not because this is a marketing technique. Because it is the only way to produce information — to resolve uncertainty that someone actually holds. 5 morning emails in a person’s inbox, each one a genuine attempt at their specific problem, is not a campaign or a mere email sequence that now helps me make 10x my monthly salary in 2 weeks. It is a customer relationship building asset.

I still think about those initials on the black screen. 2 letters where a face should’ve been. Every piece of communication that could have been written by anyone, or by no one, is an interview conducted with a ghost. No face. No voice. No evidence that a human sat with the problem long enough to earn an insight.

The alternative has never been complicated. You sit down. You think about one person. You attempt to reach them with something they did not expect. And tomorrow, you come back and attempt again.

1. Ludwig von Mises courted Margit Sereny-Herzfeld for 12 years before marrying her in 1938, on the eve of their flight from the Nazis. Margit later wrote: “He was not made for adventures and uncertainties of this kind.” The economist who produced Human Action — 900 pages on the science of purposeful human action — needed over a decade to act on his own heart.

2. Consumer preference data: Billion Dollar Boy survey, 2023 vs. 2026. “Slop”: Merriam-Webster 2025 Word of the Year. Cold email volume increase: Email Ferret, 2026.

3. George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” (1946). I try to explore the same connection between Orwell’s ready-made phrases and corporate language games in The beetle in your box.

4. Claude Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” Bell System Technical Journal (1948).

5. N400 neural response: Kutas & Hillyard, Nature (1984) — the amplitude of the brain’s semantic response is inversely proportional to a word’s predictability. Eye-tracking: Rayner, Slattery, Drieghe & Liversedge, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance (2011). Jargon as status signal: Brown, Anicich & Galinsky, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (2020) — 64,000 dissertation titles analyzed across institutions.

6. Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography. He decomposed Spectator essays into short hints, rewrote from memory days later, then turned the prose into verse and back again to develop vocabulary — 3 successive layers of genuine attempt, each with its own comparison and correction.

I scroll past it. The finger is already moving to the next one.

Nicolas Cole, while answering a fellow ghost’s question in one of our weekly ghostwriting Zoom calls last month, talked about how fear-mongering gets infinite distribution and how marketers ruin everything. He — who has built 2 of the largest writing programs on the Internet — had had an existential freak of his own about AI. So had I. So has everyone I know who sits in front of a screen for a living.

As someone who has been obsessed with marketing for the last 6 years, I too know a thing or two on how this machine works. The trigger, the amplification loop, the monetization layer. I can diagram the whole funnel on a whiteboard.

But still — still my jaw tightens when I see it. Still my stomach folds when a kid who made an app that makes your MacBook moan makes $5000 in 3 days. Still the thought lands like a hand on the back of my neck: You are behind.

Knowing the trick does not stop the trick.

53.7% of long-form LinkedIn posts are AI-generated. Originality.ai studied 99 influential profiles over 11 months. More than half the polished, authoritative content that drops your stomach was not written by a person. It was written by the same technology you’re afraid of.

Matt Shumer wrote Something Big Is Happening in February. Over 100 million views. AI disruption is bigger than COVID, he said. And he used AI to write it. The traffic flowed to HyperWrite — his AI writing company.

Jensen Huang said on the All-In podcast that if a $500,000 engineer doesn’t consume at least $250,000 in tokens, “I am going to be deeply alarmed.” Tokenmaxxing turned into a meme as soon as this landed on my X feed.

Traumatize and monetize.

The fear is the product. The warning is the funnel. And you my friend, are the conversion event.

3 weeks ago, I went to Vijay Sales and almost bought a Mac Studio. Not even a mini — a Studio. I’d watched enough videos on how Mac mini and OpenClaw “changes everything forever” that YouTube forgot I’m a writer. Now I’m reading documentation, following tutorials for agents I don’t really need and apps I’d never ship, building algo trading bots. There’s this urgency, a Claude fever, because if I’m not burning tokens to build something, anything, I feel so, so behind everyone.

On another note, “Vijay Sales” is literally the most creative business name because it’s so uncreative. Vijay doesn’t like 2 questions — what’s your name and what do you do — so he literally became the event. What do you want for the logo? Bold or italic? Vijay said yes.

However, I didn’t buy a Mac Studio as it was just my compulsive reaction to fear instead of an investment.

Last year I wrote 7 articles as part of a deliverable in my new role in the Content team within marketing. My boss found an em-dash — a punctuation mark Emily Dickinson used so relentlessly they named her the Queen of Dashes, a mark scattered through Shakespeare’s First Folio, a mark that has existed in English since the 1700s — and in an instant, dismissed my entire work as AI slop. Without reading any of it!

There was a real gap. I hadn’t delivered the 11 articles I’d promised earlier. The gap was honest and easily addressable with a classic corporate-speak conversation about “deadlines” and “bandwidth” and “responsibility.” But those 4 missing articles turned into a judgment about my character, credibility and competence, it became a matter of trust and fake meetings with HR and I was pushed out of the Content team — all fabricated from a piece of punctuation that predates the lightbulb. I got the Best Debut Award in Q3 and became AI slop as soon as Q4 started?

The gap that comparison reveals is real. You can always deliver more, learn more, do more. But the deficit that comparison manufactures that says you are less, that your work is suspect, that your interior is broken because someone else’s exterior looks whole, that deficit was never there. It was conjured into existence during the act of comparison.

Gen Zs call the em dash “the ChatGPT hyphen” now. Colin Gorrie, a linguist who has used em-dashes since graduate school in 2008, wrote in March: “Now every time I write one, a small voice whispers, ‘Better get rid of it. People are going to think this is AI.’ I’ve lost my innocence with respect to em-dashes.”

A Stanford study ran 7 AI Detectors on essays by non-native English speakers. 61% were falsely flagged as AI-generated. One detector caught 98%. The detectors reward complexity and punish simplicity — the same quality Hemingway spent a career perfecting.

53.7% of LinkedIn is people literally one-shot prompting ChatGPT “to write me a compelling social post.” But a 17-year-old writing her own homework gets flagged. “It’s mentally exhausting,” she told NPR, “because it’s like I know this is my work. I know that this is my brain putting words onto paper for other people to comprehend.”

NetworkChuck has 5 million YouTube subscribers. He flew to Okinawa because AI was burning him out. “I feel really dumb. I’m the guy with 5 million subscribers and I’m supposed to be this guru, but I don’t have it figured out.”

5 million people look at Chuck’s exterior and feel behind. He looks at someone else’s exterior and feels behind. And that person is looking at someone else. The cycle goes on — an ouroboros of insufficiency, each mouth swallowing the tail of the person who feels exactly what you feel right now.

Kierkegaard told a parable in 1847. A bird has food. A bird has a nest. The bird could live well. Then the bird looks sideways at a richer bird and begins to seek more, build more, chase more, even though it doesn’t need any of it. “In that precise moment,” he wrote, “the natural gives way to the artificial, and satisfaction becomes dissatisfaction.”

The bird didn’t discover it was poor. Poverty discovered the bird.

It’s as if you’re walking at dusk and you see a snake on the way. Your hands go cold. Your body paralyzes. Then someone brings a lamp and you find out the snake is a rope. Your fear is dissolved instantly — not through effort, not through willpower, and definitely not through whispering “stop comparing yourself to other people” in front of your bathroom mirror — through seeing.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

— Louis Brandeis

You didn’t “discover” you were behind. The feeling of being behind found you — in a post that was probably AI-generated, in a warning that was itself the product being sold, in a guru sitting in a hotel room in Okinawa asking the same question you ask yourself at midnight.

On March 2, 1959, Miles Davis arrived with a set of scales and forms and handed each of the six jazz musicians a sheet of paper with basic instructions for playing the music. There was no rehearsal and he paid each of the six sidemen $64.67.

Pianist Bill Evans described the session as a Japanese ink painting, with one brush stroke on rice paper, no errors. He also noted that the music was all new, the band had not played these tunes before. Drummer Jimmy Cobb recalled it as “It just another recording date. I didn’t know if it was Kind of Blue or Kind of Green.”

Music filled the air, but music don’t care, it just needed them to play, and every article you’ve ever read about overthinking, ends the same way.

The advice is literally more thinking to solve more thinking

• Schedule your worry time

• Label the thought

• Ground yourself in 5 things you can see

• Set a decision deadline

• Just start

• Just do it

Their advice is literally more thinking to solve more thinking.

You’ve probably given them all a go. Setting worry windows, thought labels, grounding exercises... which one managed a week without being ditched?

73% of people in the 25-35 age group call themselves overthinkers and by the time we reach 65 that number increases to 20%. It’s a puny season! Not your spine. But a long enough season can become your spine — one of many spines upon which billion dollar industries are actively building cathedrals of “info-products” and “educational courses” to sell to the inundated to make sure they stay that way. I’ve seen this first hand because I ghostwrite for a living and I’ve been in the marketing streets for the last 6 years and FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) is the hottest marketing strategy in Kali Yuga. The industry definitely knows the art of gaslighting you but definitely not the science of how beliefs change.

The rehearsal never stops

I’ve tried all the jazz. All the courses. Still do. I love courses. An investment in knowledge pays the best interest and my curiosity has an unquenchable devotion for knowledge.

But when that curiosity, that devotion is not directed, the rehearsal part of my mind is running three conversations I’ll never have. My jaw is tight from gripping words I’m not saying. The lockbox part of my brain is touching an old bruise, not to try and heal it, but just to confirm I still have it. The bookshelf part has a full length essay, the most gangster essay I’ve ever written that’s not written down anywhere, and counts it as progress. And the judge — oh, the judge — who has been scrolling at 1:58 am on a blue screen burning away in a dark room, thinking about someone else, probably who created another dope workflow with AI and made a bazillion dollars, reading an article from a founder who is overthinking from “AI stress.” And I’m here prompting, re-prompting, burning tokens and API credits while watching the output of the model degrade with each iteration of the noise I’m feeding it — the same noise I feed myself. The words I don’t say harden into the bruise. The bruise composes the essay I won’t write. The unwritten essay becomes the comparison. The comparison rehearses itself into my jaw, and the jaw tightens around the next words I won’t say. Each pass lays a wire. Each wire pulls tighter. Each pull I feel it less.

My jaw is tight. I don’t remember when it started.

My house was wired for conflict and anger. I grew up watching my family fight and shout at each other all the time. I imbibed all of it and did the same with my mother when she came back from work at night as my uncle did with my grandparents during the day when I came back from school. This went on for a long time. My only coping mechanism at the time was to lock myself in my room and blast heavy metal through my earphones on my Philips MP3 player/pen drive — essentially, replace unpleasant loud noises with pleasant loud noises — even in silence I would hear the arguments and criticisms, my mind was always roaring and rehearsing like when Professor X used the Cerebro for the first time so the guys over at Metallica, Avenged Sevenfold, Nirvana and Lamb of God really came in clutch.

Before I devotedly performed deprogramming rituals on myself and became a magician, fear, uncertainty and doubt were wired in me from a young age and I spent my days in blood boil and mental diarrhea.

The only way to tame a noisy mind is to liberate it

4 years ago, I cracked my lower jaw in 3 beautiful ways while playing basketball in college.

Right outside the restricted area, my lower mandible kissed the concrete and there was no need to think or decide – I just knew, my chin knew, instantly. However, to the people around me, I was simply bleeding from a source unknown and the medical professionals went on to wipe the blood off my hands for the next 40 minutes until my friend, god bless him, finally got a pen and a tissue. Somehow, of all the faces staring at the scene in the medical room, he was the only one who could decode my repeated handwriting gestures. With blood dripping on this holy tissue, I wrote “My jaw is broken” and that’s how the plan to get me to a hospital finally started to logisticate.

Next thing is I’m sleeping my way into surgery and waking up to metal hooks laced through the upper and lower rows of my teeth.

Those metal hooks, laced through my teeth, shredding the insides of my lips into eternity, smoothies strained through the wire for breakfast, soup slipped through the wire for dinner. In a way, the three beautiful cracks tamed the noisy mind, rather helped me see that the only way to “tame” the noisy mind was to liberate it.

Not through meditation, willpower, discipline or 432Hz meditation tracks. Through the wire, I saw that no matter what life situation you’re in, you have the choice to either react compulsively, or respond consciously to it. All it takes is one conscious response that reframes all your compulsive reactions of wounds you acquired, into a willingness one has the divine ability to exercise limitlessly. Then people wonder whether you’re a wizard or just weird, but this is something every child learned before they turned 13 and it’s encoded in every cell of your body because some of those children are your sexy ancestors.

The world is changing at an alarming rate, often in ways that are both profoundly dramatic and profoundly subtle. The first crunchy bite of an apple doesn’t crunch the way it used to.

The noise had kept me safe once. I was young and scared and didn’t know where to turn. Now the anxiety is my background noise of not burning enough tokens and exhausting session limits on Claude. This anxiety is the message, the body telling you something about your experience. But it’s so easy to confuse yourself with an emotion that generated from within when you are programmed to communicate emotion as “I am anxious, I am sad, I am ...” It’s so easy to confuse yourself with emotion because emotion moves slower compared to the speedy thought. One’s mind becomes one-pointed when a thought or feeling is emotionalized. “I am anxious” on repeat for a decade is a record you play over and over like it’s a Eminem and Akon record or a Taylor Swift record — depending upon your willingness to woundedness ratio. And a record played long enough stops sounding like a warning. It starts sounding like you. I remember listening to “Through the Wire” through the wire, being so emotionalized for what a record could show me.

Maybe you’ve had a version of this. Not a messed up jaw like Kanye. More like a moment when you heard the record of your life while inhaling and noticed the compulsion, the pattern, the context rot when you dumped everything about yourself in your AI agent with an exhale.

Noticing this pattern, marked the start of a new, and death of an old pattern. New information on the mechanisms of these patterns and compulsions started materializing into my life. Opportunities revealed themselves. Randomness turned into laws I haven’t yet discovered. My fake friends disappeared and reappeared after my bounce back from the injury. The simple act of looking magically unlocks pattern recognition, and it’s what tech bros call “taste” because the one thing AI can’t do is look and feel and life around like a life.

Davis chose the constraint. I had it forced upon me. Davis’ was a matter of conscious choice. Mine was a matter of accident which was a result of a compulsive choice of contesting a layup.

The writing demanded more of me than my doubt did

I still practice. Catch myself rehearsing. A conversation from last week. A paragraph I haven’t written. My jaw gets stiff and clicky.

I guess I’m supposed to tie this all up neatly. But I just caught myself packaging this essay into a redemptive arc that resolves neatly and provides a sense of closure, I suppose, and somehow it became performance therapy for all the overthinking that occurred while attempting to write it.

In the end, what really matters is if you could see the invisible wire and rebuild neural pathways in your sexy brain.

Six months after my jaw healed, I posted my first essay as a part of a stupid college assignment. My jaw tightened around the word publish. It’s a reflex at this point. Nobody read it. I wrote the second and the third and fourth and fifth. But then I convinced myself they’re terrible and deleted them 2 weeks later. But I just kept coming back to writing, because the writing demanded more of me than my doubt did ever since the moment I wrote “My jaw is broken.”

Evans called it a once-in-a-lifetime convergence. Cobb called it just another Tuesday. Whatever it was that came to life in that church on that squeaking hardwood floor — recorded by musicians who were improvising history — has outlasted every doubt because thought can never outclass life experience. We have thought so long and so deeply about the possibilities of the music we make that we have lost sight of the reality of the music that came before. We have lost sight of the fact that the music existed before we played it. We have lost the sight of the fact that the music was magic before Pythagoras understood how to tune instruments in the mathematical ratios in tuning and found that you had a string, a wire and when you changed the length of the string, it changed the note and he worked out all the proportions and created the very first guide for musical tuning.

Yet, I wrote nothing.

I listened to a 2-hour podcast, doomscrolled YouTube and The New Yorker website, and read an article about a millionaire ghostwriter who writes 10,000 words every morning. That’s 30 pages before lunch! I read the number twice just to internalize the fact that I’m eons behind in my career. I closed my laptop. Then I opened it again. Wrote a sentence. Deleted it. Wrote another one. Deleted that too. By the end of the day, I had produced nothing and consumed everything, and told myself the same thing I always tell myself — tomorrow.

In August 1912, Franz Kafka’s boss left the insurance office for weeks. Kafka had the time. He had the desire. He had the tremendous world inside his head — he wrote those exact words in his diary — but he did nothing with that freedom. “Wrote nothing,” he recorded in one of his entries. Then the next day, “Nothing, nothing.” He couldn’t scroll like me, so he stretched out on his bed for 3 hours and watched the light cross the floor while his desk sat empty across the room. He knew he was wasting time. The excuse he’d leaned on for years — the day job, the long hours, the exhaustion — was gone. But the paralysis remained.

Kafka’s August was my Tuesday. The same freedom. The same paralysis. The same tremendous inner world, unwritten.

A book I picked up recently gave me the language for this. You are always acting, even when you do nothing. Especially when you do nothing. 3 things must align before you move — the dissatisfaction, the image of something better, and the belief that your effort can bridge this gap.

This is what breaks within.

Not your desire. Not your vision. The third thing. The quiet conviction that moving your hand across the page will produce something worth reading. When this breaks, you don’t stop wanting, you don’t stop seeing, you stop believing that the distance between wanting and having can be walked. So you lie down. Not because you’re lazy. Because the bridge is broken.

I felt it break on that Tuesday afternoon when I realized that someone could fill 30 pages before lunch. I had only written 300 words, barely a page, and I had deleted most of it. I knew I was capable. I had done it before, and that was the worst part — not the distance between a successful ghostwriter and me, but the distance between me and the version of me who sits down.

47% of the people who decide to change never take the first step. Not because they changed their minds. Because the process of deciding felt like enough. They made the plan. They set the intention. They felt the dopamine of having chosen. And then the morning came, and the text editor was blank, and the cursor blinked, and their hands lay flat and still on the desk. 47% — literally a coin flip between the life you planned and the life you’re living.

But not all stillness means surrender or stagnation. A poet heard a voice on the cliffs of an Italian castle in 1912 and wrote his first elegy that night. Then he went silent for 10 years. Depression. A world war. The work wasn’t ready yet. Then it erupted in February 1922 when he poured out the remaining elegies in 11 days. His silence was not avoidance but a gestation period.

A writer I admire told a room of young people, “Don’t write yet. Read for 20 years first. You have the enthusiasm and the talent, but you don’t have the content. You haven’t lived enough yet.”

What do you mean, “Don’t write yet?” I am young, and I will write. But his point was that reading is part of the work. Preparation is part of the work. The stagnation is real. But the real test is honesty. Are you reading because the work requires it? Or because the reading is safer than the writing? Only you know the difference.

Animals were placed in a box with a low barrier that they could step over to escape a mild shock. But they didn’t try because in an earlier experiment, they’d learned that nothing they did made any difference. Their effort changed nothing. So when the barrier appeared — inches high, easy to cross — they froze. The researchers tried everything. Rewards. Demonstrations. They showed them other animals leaping to safety, but nothing worked.

Except for one thing. The researchers picked them up and walked them across the barrier. They had to do this twice. After the second time, the animals started jumping on their own. Not because they understood the barrier was low. Because their legs remembered what it felt like to land on the other side.

The third thing — the belief that your effort can close the gap between your dissatisfaction and desire — doesn’t come through intellectual understanding. It comes through one completed action. Not the entire book, but one sentence. Not the perfect draft, but one bad paragraph that exists instead of the perfect one that doesn’t. Your legs have to move. The mind follows. This is also why I think interviews and podcasts should happen during a walk.

My brain is powered by my legs.

— Naval

Kafka walked past his bed on September 22, 1912. He sat down at his desk around 10 pm and wrote “The Judgment” in 1 sitting. By 6 in the morning, he could hardly pull his legs out from under the desk. They’d gone stiff from all the sitting. The tremendous world had been in his head the whole time. Nothing was added to him that night. Nothing new arrived. He just chose the desk over the bed.

There’s a high chance you’ve talked to an LLM. You wrote “professional,” but you got reimagined synergistic integration. You wrote “better and engaging,” but you got even more synonyms and adjectives. You wrote “compelling thought leadership article,” but it calculated the statistical center of everything ever labeled with those words, and got you an average post that lands nowhere because it was engineered to fit everywhere.

Then, you blamed the model instead of confronting yourself on your command of language.

In 1953, Ludwig Wittgenstein proposed a thought experiment.

Imagine everyone has a box containing something they call a “beetle.” No one can look inside anyone else’s box. Everyone talks about what’s in their box using the same word. What actually sits inside — a stone, a shadow, an absence, a thing that changes by the minute — remains entirely private.

Yet, Wittgenstein argues that communication still works. The word “beetle” functions in the language not because it refers to the thing inside, but because it plays a role in a game between 2 or more speakers. The private contents — whatever actually lives in your box, heavy or hollow, crawling or still — as he puts it, “cancel out.” They have no place in the language game.

And now, the LLMs learned language exactly as he described — patterns of use, not private references. This token follows that token in these contexts with these probabilities.

No semantics. No beetle box to look into. Just the language game, played at scale.

When I wrote “professional” in my prompt, I was pointing at my beetle — 6 months of relationship-building with this client, the writing she praised in previous emails, the way she softened when I asked about her daughter’s piano recital.

The AI model wasn’t even aware of my box. It responded to “professional” as the word functions across billions of documents — the entire lexicon of corporate caution and compliance in its training data.

My beetle was my own experience and frequency. AI’s beetle was the mean of everything ever written under that label.

After exhausting some tutorials and session limits, I started to grok with brutal tangibility and specificity — the client’s voice and style, the exact phrase from our previous exchange I wanted to echo, to treat the reader like a childhood friend who knows and trusts me.

The output wasn’t perfect, but it was something I might say to a friend over tea. An architecture imposes limits. But within those limits, the precision of my compression determines the precision of the outputs.

Ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you.

— George Orwell

Language is the base layer. Every word narrows possible worlds, activates patterns older than your grandparents, and constructs your reality. You’ve been building and accumulating meaning through language since your first syllable. Building it, loosely. Outside voices filled your gaps — parents, teachers, media, even friends who interpreted your half-formed thoughts into coherent stereotypes. You just didn’t notice it because most people talk in abstracts and expect communication to happen automatically.

AI doesn’t think for you, but rather shows you where you stopped thinking with mathematical precision. The slop it spills out is the beetle in your box.

The bull said nonchalantly, “Just eat a little bit of my dung every day, and watch what happens. Within two weeks, you’ll get to the top.”

The pheasant said, “Oh come on, that’s rubbish. What kind of nonsense is that?”

The bull said, “Try it and see. The whole of humanity is onto it.”

Very hesitantly, the pheasant started pecking. And lo, on the very first day, he reached the first branch. Within a fortnight, he had reached the topmost branch. He sat there, just beginning to enjoy the scenery.

The old farmer, rocking on his rocking chair, saw a fat old pheasant on top of the tree. He pulled out his shotgun and shot the bird off the tree.