Traumatize and monetize
How I almost bought a Mac Studio
In between posts, there’s a brief moment where the screen goes dark and I see my face in the glass. Then another post slides up and someone else’s face replaces mine. Their automations and workflows. Their AI agent armies running overnight. Their prototype built in 10 minutes.
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.
This is not my joke but “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.