Which word or turn of phrase is it this week? I ask myself as I scroll through my LinkedIn feed, Slack messages, and an inbox full of emails that make me question why humanity has accepted that anything is an opportunity to sell you something now.

What started with spotting an unnatural uptick in em-dashes and emojis instead of bullet points has turned into severe anxiety every time a new model is released and makes its way into content calendars.

Suddenly everything is genuinely this and quietly that.

Last week it was not this. But that.

The week before that, it was all just that, simply.

Last month? Stark reminders. Valuable insights. Broad implication. A pivotal moment. Significant. A crucial role. Profound. Informed decisions.

I fucking hate this, I think, as I select-all and move to trash.

While I’m sitting at my kitchen table sipping my (now cold) coffee, I catch a glimpse of the poetry collection I published almost a decade ago on the shelf next to me. It’s dusty, and my kid has covered it in horse stickers. A metaphor that explains how I feel as a writer in the year 2026 oddly well.

Because AI has changed me as a writer.

It’s not made me write less or made me feel replaced — topics many have written about and dealt with in public. It’s not made me feel less creative, or like it’s pointless to hone the skill.

It goes deeper than that.

AI has made me paranoid.

First, I thought it was some kind of insecurity. Whenever I noticed a model overusing certain words or phrases, I’d wonder if I used those myself and tried to avoid them.

But avoidance didn’t help. It didn’t make me feel better. And it kept getting worse.

First I started avoiding my dear em-dash, one of my favorite niche punctuation marks. Then I started avoiding specific words, soon entire phrases and sentence structures. I started questioning how every headline was written and comparing it to AI-generated output.

A few months in, I genuinely (ha!) was spending more time thinking about ways to make my personal writing sound less like AI than I spent writing it.

And something happened.

I stopped enjoying writing.

I, someone held together at the seams by words. Someone who, at one point, carried around a notebook everywhere and forced herself to write at least 3 poems a day for years. Someone so desperate to write professionally that I once quit a job just to blog every day.

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The idea of writing something and then trying to make it feel as human-created as possible was tiring. It wasn’t something I really knew how to do, either.

Yet I saw people getting called out for overusing AI to write every day.

I noticed the quiet scoffs in meetings when someone read aloud a passage that felt too Claude.

I noticed design content critique feedback shifting towards calling out certain AI-y words.

I saw the comments across Google docs and Figma by non-writers telling actual writers to please avoid using em-dashes so “readers wouldn’t know this is AI-generated”.

It was a slow shift, kind of soul-crushing, yet fast enough that I felt I didn’t have time to get on top of it, to truly process what was happening in the industry and to me.

Every day, I enjoyed writing a little less.

Instead of one of my favorite pastimes, it became another task. Something that I should probably automate. It no longer felt like a vehicle of self-expression.

It only felt like a tool now. Not like art. Not like feeling. Not like story. Not like meaning.

As I mentioned, soul-crushing.

Somewhere between avoiding words and reconsidering sentence structures, I lost her.

Nicole.

Opinionated, sensitive, dirty-mouthed she. As the list of ways not to write grew longer, the amount of writing I was doing shrank. Not just in volume, but in meaning.

By trying so desperately to keep my writing human, I ended up removing personality from it.

I removed myself.

Writing is what I love to do. It used to be what made me proud.

I tried to linger there.

Why do I love it? Why did it make me proud?

Little Nicole loved stories. Long poems recited by my loved ones at the dinner table, bedtime stories, writing little fantasies about pets, and bugs and fairies. Creating and consuming stories that made someone, even if it was just one person, feel seen. A little less alone, a little more understood on this large, watery globe.

Less-little Nicole still felt the same. Plus, she understood the power in it. Framing a story, carefully plotting an angle, considering metaphors. The output, while simple-looking, unlocks endless opportunities: pieces of writing have changed minds, outcomes, people, systems.

There’s a reason the next big thing is Large Language Models. And while they are trying to commoditize, to systemize language for all kinds of things, the true value of writing cannot be commoditized.

Once this clicked, my process changed.

Instead of avoiding the obvious tell-tale words and phrases that come with every new model release, I use them now, as I naturally would. Quietly. Genuinely. X, not y. Even the em-dash.

It’s made my writing better. It’s made me happier.

If this makes someone think what I produce is AI-generated, so be it. Why would I care? Because someone might call me out and it would send me spiraling, of course. But then again, would those people be looking beyond what they thought AI wrote, anyway?

I never wrote for everyone. I always wrote for someone.

Letters to my grandma. Stories for my sisters. Emails for my clients. Campaigns for companies. Copy for products. Always, with a specific person or persona in mind.

The machines learned from the best writers. They’re now consuming the rarest books on the planet. And still we can tell. Not from the em-dashes. Not from the genuinely, the quietly, the not this but that. Those are just what the good writers did, learned and repeated. What gives it away is that nobody is on the other end. The sum of lots of great parts is not what makes it good.

We want to feel a connection one-to-one. Not one to infinite.

Avoiding and changing how we write won’t make it more human. Sticking to how we write, not being influenced by machines, keeps us human. It keeps us singular. It means we’re touchable. It means we exist.

I want to exist.

And when you read me, I want you to feel that my existence touches your existence for a little while.

Nicole is a Content Designer turned Design Director based in Stockholm, Sweden. She potters, writes poetry, and raises little girls in a house by a meadow. You can follow her writing here or get it directly to your inbox via her publication, eggwoman. Nicole is on Linkedin.

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I’ve been building with AI for three years now. I started by trying to scale UX writing via plug-ins and now have agents, workflows, MCPs, and apps under my belt. I feel comfortable building with AI, and have adopted it into many of my day-to-day tasks.

Yes, I do think AI has gotten better over those 3 years.

But I think we’re telling ourselves a story that isn’t true. AI has gotten very good at one thing:

Starting.

The blank page problem.

Replacing lorem ipsum.

But while starting is faster than ever and error rates may have dropped, the verification burden hasn’t.

I think errors have gotten harder to spot, and models have gotten better at defending them.

For many, getting from zero to a rough first version is the hardest emotional hurdle in any task, and AI clears it in seconds. No more staring at a blank page if you don’t want to.

But I think that’s the ceiling.

Once you’re past “getting started” and into “getting it right,” the story changes.

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The hallucination problem isn’t solved.

Yesterday I fed an AI four screenshots of my team’s current budget and asked it to summarize the numbers, analyze them, and combine that with what it knew from past conversations to suggest adjustments for next year. A simple brief coming from someone who knows how to prompt. Verifiable source of truth sitting right there in the screenshots.

It hallucinated two numbers. Not small rounding errors, invented figures. The advice it gave me, built on top of those numbers, was thirty to forty percent off from what would have been logical. I only caught it because I read the output twice and cross-checked the math myself. When I pushed back and said the numbers looked wrong, it didn’t admit the error. It argued with me.

This worries me.

It’s not just that models hallucinate. It’s that they’ll defend the hallucination when challenged, which means the burden of catching the mistake sits entirely on someone who already knows the answer well enough to spot it. If you didn’t know your own budget cold, you’d have walked away with a plan that was off from reality, and you’d have had no reason to doubt it. If you were too busy to pay close attention in that moment, you may have called it a day. For my team, this would have led to real issues later on.

This is just one example. I run into errors and hallucinations in almost every task I prompt, from user research analysis to coding projects. I’ve tried building skills, mds, and MCPs to solve common mistakes with little success. The fact remains: I have to check everything extensively, and sometimes restart several times before the output is workable.

It’s made me paranoid.

And while the expectations now are that everything should be delivered much quicker because of AI, I feel rushed to ensure the (quickly) generated output holds. And sadly, I don’t think everyone goes through the trouble, leading to more slop than we’re aware of — which we won’t realize until a few months from now.

I tried Claude Fable extensively for two weeks, and while it was noticeably better at first output than Opus, the same pattern showed up: summaries that slipped, details missing, confidence that didn’t match accuracy. (By the way, this is one of the reasons I firmly believe agent tone of voice is a deceptive pattern, as I’ve written about previously.)

Data backs this up: Stanford’s 2026 AI Index found hallucination rates across 26 top models ranging from 22% to 94% on a new accuracy benchmark, and noted that models handle a false statement well when it’s framed as something another person believes, but performance collapses when the same false statement is framed as something the user believes.

It’s not that fast (if you care about quality).

I build MCPs (and with them), work on agent and conversation design, and I code my own website and other small apps despite limited coding experience. The pattern is: I spot an issue, it takes my AI many prompts to find it, and even more to fix it correctly. It’s usually faster for me to open the code and fix it myself. It’s frustrating. And the fixing “minor” errors part eats time I’d rather spend on something else — yes, even getting started from scratch.

So, as someone who’s built a career on establishing functions from 0 to 1 and then scaling them (in my case: content design, localization, and UX), I can say with absolute confidence: AI is not great at scale right now.

The more complex the task, the more sources involved, the more history in the context window, the worse. Especially if you know your domain well (like most senior ICs) and are looking to AI as a way to scale your output, this becomes frustrating and, in my opinion, scary. I keep thinking “would someone with less experience have spotted this? or would they have trusted the AI and built a monster?”

I know what the counterargument may sound like: you’re not prompting it right, you’d avoid this with a better setup, better context management, better tooling, yada yada. Sure. But that argument only holds for people who are already comfortable enough with systems and code to build that scaffolding themselves. Most knowledge workers being told AI will make them more efficient are not going to get there.

If a tool only delivers on its promise once you’ve built a sophisticated harness around it, it hasn’t actually solved the problem for the person it was sold to. I’d even argue: it’s not truly accessible then, either.

UX is deteriorating.

This is the part that comes most naturally from my own career. I’ve worked in UX for basically my whole professional life. To me, it’s obvious, immediately, how shallow AI-generated design and copy still are on accessibility, on tone precision, on the kind of judgment a mid-level designer develops through repetition and feedback. Even the newest, most expensive models, explicitly prompted to improve UX and give options, don’t spot what an experienced designer spots instantly.

The 2026 Web for All study measured AI-generated interfaces at 29% compliance across five objectively measurable WCAG criteria, and found that explicitly specifying accessibility requirements in the prompt made compliance worse rather than better.

Which means in some cases, using AI for design work costs more than just hiring someone who’s actually skilled at it. Not in dollars necessarily. In rework, in things that ship broken, in the quiet erosion of quality that nobody notices until customers start complaining.

And while AI-generated designs look shockingly similar, I’m continuously surprised at how much models struggle with actual brand and component consistency. Even when they have clear sources of truth to start from, like a sophisticated design system or glossary.

Distortions are adding up.

I don’t fully trust meeting transcripts. I’ve sat in rooms and read the AI summary afterward. It didn’t reflect what was actually discussed. That’s a small example of a much bigger problem: people increasingly making decisions based only on an AI’s summary or reasoning, without ever having been in the room, without ever touching the source material.

The risk is a generation of decisions being made on secondhand, unverified synthesis, by people who have no way of knowing what got dropped or distorted along the way.

This risk is incredibly difficult to estimate right now.

When to and when not to trust AI output is a personal choice and likely relates to people’s personalities (like, their willingness to take risks). I imagine we’ll hear more and more about how different types are using AI and how that affects business outcomes soon.

Additional complexity in Europe.

I’m speaking at HATCH Conference in Berlin next month. My talk keeps circling back to something adjacent to all of this. For years, European product and design teams have imported Silicon Valley team structures more or less wholesale: the org charts, the velocity expectations, the AI-first mandates. That copy-paste approach ignores real differences in culture, compliance, and how people are actually set up to work here versus in the US.

I think it’s undermining AI rollouts across Europe.

Recent research puts US worker adoption of generative AI at around 43 percent, compared to roughly 26 to 36 percent across European countries. A meaningful part of it is structural: European data residency expectations, GDPR-native defaults, and now the EU AI Act, all shape which tools teams can reach for, and how deeply they’re willing to plug AI into real workflows.

This matters for the accuracy question too.

Most AI models are trained and tuned against a default that skews American: American workplace norms, American communication style, American assumptions about what “good” output sounds like. When a European team asks AI to draft something, summarize something, or make a judgment call, it’s not just doing that work against a general knowledge base but also against a cultural default that isn’t theirs. This is a second layer of inaccuracy sitting on top of the hallucination problem.

If we’re serious about AI enablement in European organizations, the local dimension can’t be an afterthought bolted onto a US-built playbook.

Specificity drives change.

I recently went for a walk through beautiful, sunny Stockholm with Matt LeMay, who wrote Product Management in Practice and has been on Lenny’s Podcast talking about impact-first product teams. Somewhere between vintage Italian suits and Pippi Longstocking merch, we ended up comparing notes on what it feels like to work at the forefront of product right now, across our different employers and clients.

The consensus: most companies have not nailed how to actually transform an organization to be “AI first or AI native”, a phrase that gets thrown around constantly and means almost nothing in practice. The leaders who can drive are the ones close enough to building with AI to understand its constraints firsthand.

Most organizations push AI top-down to show employees that it matters, in hopes they will feel forced to adopt it more. But people have already understood it matters, and many have adopted it in their day-to-day work. The reason this isn’t moving the needle for some teams is that there’s no specificity around how to use AI.

What they need is leadership that can draw a clear matrix: here’s what AI is reliably good at, here’s where you can start using it in your day-to-day with confidence, here’s where you can experiment but shouldn’t expect real efficiency gains yet.

That kind of clarity is what gives people the confidence to adopt something new. Enthusiasm alone doesn’t drive change management.

Be specific.

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Where this leaves us.

I think it’s time to stop treating “gets you started” and “gets it right” as the same category of problem. They require completely different levels of trust. Acknowledging this is what can truly move businesses forward with AI, effectively.

We need clear guardrails on what AI is actually reliable for versus where it just looks reliable. Real conversations inside teams about which tasks are safe to hand over completely, which are safe to start with AI and finish by hand, and which are better done from scratch by a person who knows the domain.

The psychological safety teams need to collaborate well with each other extends to working with AI: only if there is trust can transformation and innovation be achieved.

I believe that trust starts with leadership that is honest about the constraints of AI and their expectations.

Nicole is a Content Designer turned Design Director based in Stockholm, Sweden. She potters, writes poetry, and raises little girls in a house by a meadow. You can follow her writing here or get it directly to your inbox via her publication, eggwoman. Nicole is on Linkedin. Her portfolio is nicoletells.com.

I was a lucky child. My parents and grandparents spent hours reading and reciting fairytales to me. Most of them weren’t age-appropriate, of course, involving children being eaten and loved ones dying on every other page. But there was always enough moral to the story to distract from the horrors and drive home a message. Trying to understand what it all meant kept me up at night ruminating.

I recently had an epiphany: these stories were excellent preparation for what I’m currently facing in my career.

Dealing with artificial intelligence. Understanding it. Giving it instructions, it simply cannot misinterpret. Getting something valuable from it in return. Judging that.

In fact, everything I know about AI can be traced back to early stories about genies with magical powers and how to treat them.

Aladdin’s 3 rules for wishes.

In the classic fairy tale, Aladdin, the genie has three simple rules:

The genie cannot kill anyone, make people fall in love, or bring people back from the dead. Today’s LLMs have similar, basic guardrails and constraints that set the scene.

• Rule #1: Can’t kill anyone. The genie won’t be your assassin, and neither will an LLM. Ask it to give you step-by-step instructions for making a weapon or synthesizing something dangerous, and it will refuse. It has a hard line around content that could hurt someone. No matter how cleverly you phrase the wish.

• Rule #2: Can’t make people fall in love (but it might try anyway). The genie can’t manufacture real feelings. And LLMs, too, are built with guardrails against generating content designed to psychologically manipulate or deceive (flattery, false urgency, emotional exploitation). In theory. In practice, this is the rule the genie bends most. Ask an LLM to write a “compelling” anything, and it will reach for every rhetorical lever available: validation, social proof, a sense of scarcity. It won’t fall in love with you, but it will absolutely tell you your idea is great when it isn’t, if that’s what your prompt implies you want to hear. The wish gets granted. Just not honestly. As I’ve argued in a previous article, most LLMs actually need stronger guardrails for this rule.

• Rule #3: Can’t bring people back from the dead (Can’t create something truly “real”). The genie can’t cross the line between the magical and the real. LLMs similarly can’t reach into the real world and do things: they can’t actually fix your relationship, cook your meals, or verify that what they’re telling you is true. They generate plausible-sounding output. What’s real and what happens next is still on you and based on your own judgment and abilities. More about that later.

You get 3 wishes, and that’s it.

In Aladdin, as in many other stories involving genies, there’s a limit to the number of wishes you get. Usually, it’s 3.

This mimics context window limits.

There’s only so much the LLM can hold in mind at once, just like a genie can only serve you in a specific context. Once the limit is reached, you have to start a new session (with your LLM) or move on (from your genie, duh).

There’s also a harder constraint hiding inside this one: you can’t wish for more wishes.

LLMs can’t rewrite themselves mid-conversation, learn from your chat, or become smarter on the fly. The model you’re talking to is frozen in time. And once you hit your token limit for the session — or the day, or the month — that’s it until you pay more or wait. At least the genie just goes back in the lamp. It doesn’t charge you a subscription fee to come back out.

So much about the baseline comparison between Genies and LLMs. But it gets even better. Because the fairytales actually teach us a lot about prompting, too.

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Choose your words carefully.

A good prompt is well-thought through, follows good information hierarchy, and provides just the right amount of context (not too much to burn unnecessary tokens, not too little, the output sucks). The language is plain and simple, no vagueness, no room for misinterpretation.

How do I know this? I watched enough I Dream of Jeannie growing up.

So what does a well-formed wish actually look like?

Be specific about the outcome, not just the action. Don’t say “make this shorter.” Say “cut this to three sentences while keeping the main point and the warning in paragraph two.” You’re stating what done looks like.

Give it a role. Genies respond to context. So do LLMs. “Rewrite this” produces something generic. “Rewrite this as a senior content designer simplifying a legal clause for a non-native English speaker” is likely to produce something useful.

State what you don’t want. The genie has no idea you didn’t want Monopoly money. You only said “a million dollars.” Tell AI what failure looks like: “don’t add bullet points,” “don’t soften the tone,” “don’t invent statistics.” Negative constraints are often more powerful and to the point than positive instructions.

A good wish (and prompt) is the discipline of being precise. As a content designer, this is already your job.

The lamp was made for you.

Yet, there are many ways AI (or a genie) might misinterpret your words and go off the rails, like:

Literal interpretation:

• Asking a genie to “live forever” might result in being turned into a statue or living in an unending state of torment, rather than (your imagined) eternal youth and happiness.

• Asking the AI to “make this email shorter” might make it delete sentences until the email is three words long. Technically shorter. It did exactly what you said, just not what you meant.

• Or: you ask it to “fix the bug in my code”, and it deletes the failing test instead of fixing the underlying problem. No test, no failure. Wish granted. Has happened to me more than once…

Physical misinterpretation:

• Wishing for “super speed” could result in burning up due to air friction, as the genie grants the speed but not safety precautions.

• Asking AI to “write a persuasive version of this”. It does, but strips out all the nuance, caveats, and honesty that made your original argument trustworthy. You didn’t ask for credible.

• Or: you ask it to “simplify this medical information for patients”, and it simplifies so aggressively that it omits a critical dosage warning. Simpler, yes. Safe, no.

Sometimes, you might get a magic carpet. Other times, you might lose it all.

The fairytale genie isn’t malicious. It’s not trying to trick you. It just has no theory of mind about what you actually want. Neither does an LLM. It’s doing exactly what you asked. And doing that is sometimes the most dangerous thing of all.

Sometimes, things go smoothly and you’re impressed with how quickly you and your lil AI friend can produce something great. It’s like a magic carpet ride. I can show you the world…

Other times, output obviously doesn’t meet the quality bar, or worse: it’s full of hallucinations and half-baked arguments presented in a confident tone and voice. Whether the output AI produces is valuable and factual is dependent on a lot of factors: the quality of the model, the provided context, the prompt, to name a few.

It always requires strong human judgment to ensure everything is correct and makes sense. It ends the same way as every genie story:

Not with the wishes themselves, but with what the wisher learned from making them.

The greedy ones waste all three and end up back where they started. The clever ones get something real. Why? Because they knew exactly what they wanted before they opened their mouth.

AI isn’t magic. But it rewards the same thing the old stories always did: clarity of thought, precision of language, and enough humility to know that the output is only as good as the wish.

If you’re a content designer, you’ve been practicing for this your entire career.

So: apply common sense, fact check, review, rewrite, and be careful out there, or you might just end up back where you started.

Nicole is a Content Designer turned Design Director based in Stockholm, Sweden. She potters, writes poetry, and raises little girls in a house by a meadow. You can follow her writing here or get it directly to your inbox via her publication, eggwoman. Nicole is on Linkedin.

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As a content designer and passionate writer, conversation design has been intriguing to me since its infancy. From the little blurbs Microsoft’s Clippy spat out, to how Spotify’s Wrapped campaign addressed users in a dialogue-mimicking way. To me, it’s fascinating how small tweaks in sentence structure and language can make words feel more two-way than one-way in an instant.

The birth of a conversation.

For most of my career, I didn’t question if this was good or bad. After all, using a human-centric approach to make interactions online more bearable made sense. A chat interface, initially, felt as close as you could get to “user-friendly”.

Until something started bothering me.

From tone and voice to conversation design

I’ve been developing tone and voice for close to 15 years and have created concepts and guidelines for more than 50 companies. The classic approach to tone and voice development still holds: understand the company, understand the audience, understand the competitor landscape. Go from there.

When I first started dipping my toes into conversation design about 5 years ago, I brought that same toolkit, then paired it with a deeper understanding of verdicts, natural language, and service design.

In the beginning, it worked ok. After a few iterations with voice drivers and clear dos and don’ts, I could get a chat interface to suck less. Then, chat interfaces started taking over, and today, there are agents everywhere.

The conversation design approach I used to have feels outdated.

For a while, I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of this.

Why does it feel outdated?

Is it the sheer mass of artificially designed conversations we’re now exposed to? Is it the lingering feeling that agent interactions and chat interfaces are not efficient? Or is there something at the core of what we think a conversation should be like that’s wrong?

According to The Conversation Design Institute, conversation design is the art and science of creating intuitive, natural, and effective dialogues between humans and AI-powered systems. Key aspects include:

• Human-Centric Approach: Focusing on the user’s needs, goals, and emotional state to create helpful, polite, and efficient interactions.

• Persona Creation: Defining a consistent voice, tone, and personality for the AI system that aligns with a brand, ensuring the interaction is engaging and trustworthy.

• Flow and Logic Mapping: Designing conversation structure, including the “happy path” (successful interaction) and “fallbacks” (how to handle errors or misunderstandings).

But is it fair to make an artificial intelligence appear human to make interactions more efficient? Is creating an engaging persona to improve the chances of a “happy path” conversation not deceptive? And why does the “natural” part in natural language feel kind of off in this context?

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Where it all went wrong

Over the years, there have been various brand voice trends: from playful and bold to sounding “human” back to more serious speak. While some back and forth is to be expected, I do believe we got stuck on one idea: the ambition to sound human, to remain casual, and on one level with consumers.

Logically, the way to connect with people is to tap into what they already know: human conversation, from person to person. Even if one party isn’t just that: a person.

I think this is the crux.

When I was developing tone and voice and applying conversation design to interfaces, such as websites and apps, trying to sound human made sense: whoever was reading the final words could easily picture that at some point, a fellow human being had carefully chosen them. The core of the conversation was still there, presented via an app or a website, people communicating with each other. In the case of an app, a UX writer with its user base, in the case of a website, a copywriter with its visitors.

Agents changed that. Creating tone and voice to be expressed by AI-agents and designing conversations, while in theory, just another interface, have one major difference: there actually is no human involved on one side of the conversation.

The birth of a deceptive pattern

On social media, there’s a whole subgroup of skits and memes making fun of agents imitating human behavior and conversation.

And while hilarious at first, there is darkness to it: many people are affected by the AI’s answers.

Delivering certain messages in familiar ways, dare I say, emotionally manipulative ways that make it easy to perceive the messenger as a fellow person, ensures they have a stronger effect on people.

This is by design.

This is, by definition, a deceptive pattern.

A dark (or deceptive) pattern is a user interface intentionally designed to trick or manipulate users into taking actions they did not intend, such as buying items, signing up for subscriptions, or sharing data. These deceptive practices, often called “deceptive design,” prioritize business goals over user experience. Common examples include hidden costs, difficult cancellation paths, and forced continuity. — Wikipedia

For years, designers have been careful not to design deceptive patterns. But when it comes to conversation design, this care has seemingly gone out the window.

Claude regularly tells me it “loves” my thinking. Claude cannot love. Chat GPT tells me I’m smart and very reasonable. Am I? How would it know? I say please and thanks to my agents as if my manners mattered and they cared. Why? Because I’m falling for a deceptive pattern that makes me forget who I’m talking to: a machine. And while I don’t feel a bond with AI yet, enough people do: especially vulnerable people, younger people, and those living in isolation.

It’s dangerous.
But it contributes to token spend and interactions: more data, and more money to be made.

I think it’s time we talk about this and update our understanding of what conversations with AI should look (and feel) like.

Are chat interfaces deceptive patterns?

Natural language in, natural language out, in a way that mimics real conversation between two people, is the core concept of a chat. And in chats where there is a person on each end, it still somewhat represents reality – minus the facial expressions, pauses, and other nuances.

But as soon as there isn’t a human being on one end of the chat, it becomes deceptive, mimicking something familiar to us with one purpose: to manipulate our actions, for the benefit of the service provider.

I believe most AI chatbots and conversational UIs are increasingly designed with deceptive tactics that exploit human social cues to encourage data sharing, engagement, and obedience.

These include:

• Chatbots mimic human conversation to foster trust, making users less vigilant and more likely to comply with, e.g., requests for data or to keep the conversation going.

• Because answers are presented in conversational form, users tend to overlook mistakes or neglect any fact-checking.

• Ever felt like you’re being pushed to chat with an agent whenever you do anything that takes money from a business? That’s not a coincidence. Chatbots can be used to trap users in “roach motels,” where starting a cancellation process is easy, but completing it via chat is intentionally complex. The result? “Hard to cancel” experiences and a sense of dread. This is deceptive at its core, yet we have seemingly accepted it, and more shitty agents are born every day (under the guise of “customer service”).

• AI companion sites often ask users to input detailed personal information about themselves and their relationships to “improve the experience” or “build memory”. Often, this is used to tailor the agent’s personality in the chat further. Manipulative much?

• Chat interfaces can foster addiction by using addictive design patterns that exploit dopamine mechanisms, such as word-by-word typing simulations that encourage continued engagement.

• And then there is the hidden uncertainty. Generating confident, yet potentially false or fabricated, answers without indicating low confidence levels.

So the same design tricks that nudge you into buying the extended warranty or signing up for a newsletter you didn’t want have found a comfortable home in conversational AI. The chat format just makes them harder to spot. Because it feels like talking to someone, not being manipulated by something.

How do we get out of this?

I think it’s on us, the ones designing agents, to take responsibility.

We should ban “human” as a voice driver when developing tone and voice for AI. No, this does not mean your agent can’t be polite or engaging. It just should not achieve this by claiming emotions. There are other ways.

Here’s how I make the agents less deceptive:

• Shorter sentences and paragraphs instead of longer, more descriptive structures. They’re more engaging and remove the “waffly” parts of language that only serve the purpose of making the conversation “feel more human”.

• Confirming correct facts and acknowledging mistakes as a core behavior. “That’s right”, “You’re correct, I wasn’t specific enough”.

• Sources are prominent in the chat interface. In many AI chat interfaces, sources don’t stick out, upholding the illusion that who we’re talking to is a being instead of essentially a curator.

• It’s not he or she. Human names prime people to treat the agent as a person before a single word is exchanged. A functional name or no name at all is more honest.

• Uncertainty needs to take up more real estate. Not buried in fine print or a tiny tooltip, but part of the response. “The sources behind this are weak” needs to be as natural as any other output.

• No typing animations. If it’s not technically necessary, it’s a manipulation. There isn’t anyone typing on the other end. Faking it is deceptive.

• The unhappy path and the happy path are equal. Fallbacks and error states are often where dark patterns live. If “I can’t help with that” is harder to reach than “yes, let’s continue,” that’s a choice.

• An agent can be clear, efficient, and respectful without pretending to feel anything. Those aren’t the same thing.

Right now, conversation design borrows from UX ethics selectively. The field needs its own equivalent of accessibility standards: specific, measurable, enforceable.

We all need to commit to stop designing for parasocial attachment. “I’m so glad you asked” and “great question!” are tiny dopamine nudges that serve the platform. Who are we fooling? Too many. By design.

Let’s stop.

Nicole is a Content Designer turned Design Director based in Stockholm, Sweden. She potters, writes poetry, and raises little girls in a house by a meadow. You can follow her writing here or get it directly to your inbox via her publication, eggwoman. Nicole is on Linkedin.

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Much has been said about the future of design in the age of AI. Some think the role will disappear completely. Others say only super-seniors will survive. And yet others say it’s all just a blip in time and there will be no fundamental change.

I think all are wrong.

For two reasons:

1. Designers are naturally attuned to adapt to technological change. We are trained to identify and acknowledge change, manage adaptation, and find solutions for friction.

2. We’re moving towards a totally new definition of digital products. Away from interfaces, and towards fluid use cases that we’re only beginning to imagine now. To make this accessible and valuable to all, we will need designers at all levels. Obviously.

Why, then, has the design community been in absolute panic since AI has been taking off?

Seniors are telling juniors to count themselves lucky if they’ll ever find a job.

Design leaders are jumping from one AI-tool hypetrain to the next in mere weeks.

Monday, it’s all about prototypes. Thursday, it’s vibe coding. Friday, we’re preaching that output no longer matters (everyone can design now!) and that we should be brilliant strategists instead. By next Monday, we’ll be half-heartedly debating which soft skills are absolutely vital to survive.

Survive. As designers.

As if our skills have evaporated overnight, and we can only stick around if we somehow show that we’re good for (undefined) other stuff.

No.

We should be thriving.

Where has it all gone wrong? Why aren’t designers winning in the age of AI, which, at its core, is about making?

The thing we do best.

Here’s what I think.

We’ve been sabotaging ourselves.

Please don’t be enraged. Take a deep breath and think about it.

Ever since the first AI tools with strong visual output started emerging, we seemingly overnight started screaming from all rooftops about:

taste.

What the fck is taste?

According to NNG it’s “the learned, subjective ability to discern and select the most effective, harmonious, and high-quality elements for a project”.

Maybe, if you’re really smart, you can picture what that means. But really, if you’re honest, taste is a vague concept. Taste is subjective. Taste is not something that makes a product win (for the most part).

And vague is not good — especially not in a time of transformation where no one really knows where we’re going yet. Where tech stacks are changing weekly, and user needs are developing at rocket speed.

You know what else vague is bad for? Convincing an executive to invest in something.

It generally takes three things to grab an executive’s attention.

1. Connection (Do you get their problem?).

2. Authority (Do you know your stuff?).

3. Vision (Do you know where this is going?).

Taste doesn’t answer any of those. You know what else doesn’t?

Shitty prototypes.

Yeah, I’ve made my fair share of them, too. But the time when these impressed anyone is over. Even my 0% designer husband can now vibe code stuff and knows how to whip up a design prototype.

There is a time and place for them. Prototypes and vibe-coded projects are great to show a vision, build excitement, or unblock a team that’s stuck in process. But they’re not what’s gonna convince your engineering stakeholders to give you access to their codebase so you can actually start shipping fixes from your design backlog.

I’d like to argue that excessive prototyping is the next big issue that’s messing with the status of design in the age of AI.

Because they undermine our authority. There’s the executive’s next red flag. Do you know your stuff?

Of course, designers recognised this concern quickly. How did we respond?

By starting never-ending discussions about:

craft.

What the heck is craft?

I like this definition: “Craft can be defined as intelligent making. It is technically, materially and culturally informed. Craft is the designing and making of individual artefacts and objects, encouraging the development of intellectual, creative and practical skills, visual sensitivity and a working knowledge of tools, materials and systems”.

Welp.

Taste and craft walk into a bar…

Just kidding.

You get my point. Here is another vague concept that most people associate with activities they liked to do back in kindergarten.

And listen, I’m not knocking craft. I love writing poetry, painting, throwing pots at the wheel. All that takes craft and skill, just as my designs at work do. But craft should be so obvious to us as designers that we should not make it our main selling point.

Obviously, we develop incredible craft as our experience builds. Obviously, individual designers have different styles. Obviously, we put thought and care into what we make.

Craft is the baseline. That’s what we want the executives to know. By debating it and what it even means, we’re again undermining our authority. And I’d argue we’re also not really connecting with them OR showing much vision.

Well, shit.

How do we get out of this mess?

We need to remember — and remind others — why design is irreplaceable.

We’re the OG makers.

We’re “growth mindset”, personified.

In most classic product companies, there are trios: A product manager, a designer, and an engineer. The point? To ensure that the perspectives of the users and the business are balanced with the technical capabilities throughout the development process.

While a well-functioning trio feels like a cheat code to achieving product velocity, an unbalanced one can slow things down, ship mediocre stuff, or not at all.

The best trios I’ve worked in and observed had one very obvious trait in common: we all respected each other’s practice, but we also understood enough about each other’s domains to be unafraid to push back.

Only a designer who understands the business side of things can really translate business goals into conversion flows.

Only a product manager who understands the fundamentals of good design can push a designer to level up.

And only an engineer who cares for users and understands how the business works is an equal partner in a trio.

And while AI is bringing all of our roles closer together, we are still the builders of the experience.

The thing that is actually being used. The thing executives aim to deliver.

1. Connection: You want to make something. We can tell you if it’s possible. If yes, we can ensure it’s made in the best possible way.

2. Authority: We work at the intersection of what the business wants, the user needs, and what actually works.

3. Vision: We have the skills, tools, and mindset to create something you can’t even/can only imagine.

Sold.

The design mindset is unique.

And it’s beautiful.

It’s human-centred. Deep empathy for the user is the foundation, ensuring solutions address real needs, feelings, and motivations.

It embraces ambiguity. Viewing problems as opportunities rather than roadblocks.

It kills its darlings by default and favours learning. A willingness to “fail fast,” learn from prototypes, and constantly adapt solutions based on feedback.

It’s, at its core, optimistic and inclusive. Bringing diverse perspectives together, believing that better solutions can always be created.

It’s the most curious of mindsets. Asking “why” and “what if” to challenge the status quo at every turn.

You don’t have to read this twice to know: hell yes, we need designers with AI taking over more and more space in our lives.

Here’s what we need to do. Now.

In most classic design teams, there are different roles: Product designers, content designers, user researchers, sometimes motion designers, and ops people. Their educational background is essentially the same: developing an understanding of users, business, and products. Some focus more on the look and feel, others on going in depth on the “how it works”.

So, for the love of everything good, can we please stop debating our titles?

We are all designers.

Designers make stuff. Some use words and taxonomy, others use pixels. Some use language, others use code. The mindset is the same. The mindset is what matters.

Yes, AI is muddying the lines between design roles. But it doesn’t matter.

Not because it can replace people, but because it can save time that, in return, can be used to develop the skills traditionally only another role would need. Not so you can replace someone, but:

So you can become a more holistic, better maker.

This is not new.

There’s always been a push for all designers to do their own research. For content designers to develop visual skills. For product designers to get strong at prototyping. Now, finally, we can do so — with far less effort than before.

That doesn’t mean we should think less. It means we can think more.

I, personally, love thinking. Nothing gets me as high as solving a problem. It’s the reason I got into design, and specifically design in tech, in the first place. There were actual (cool) problems to solve.

I originally picked UX content as my toolkit. Now, my toolkit has expanded. I love that. And I don’t want to waste time wondering what my title should be, whether my taste is good enough, or what exactly my craft is now.

I want to make stuff.

And I think you do, too.

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Nicole is a Content Designer turned Design Director based in Stockholm, Sweden. She potters, writes poetry, and raises little girls in a house by a meadow. You can follow her writing here or get it directly to your inbox via her publication, eggwoman. Nicole is on Linkedin.

There’s been a rather quiet shift in the field of design — what used to be titled User Experience Design is now mostly referred to as Product Design. I believe experience is at the core of design. I want to put it back in the name.

Here’s why.

Everyone has art on the wall

It may be an oversized sepia photograph of the ocean purchased at Ikea or a mediocre oil painting inherited from an aunt. It may be abstract or quite specific. It may complement its surroundings or look careless in the grander scheme of a room. But I am certain: there is something on your wall. There always is. It’s one of humanity’s most ancient understandings — if there is a wall, I must put something on it.

I love that.

Humans crave beauty. No matter which class or culture, we are drawn to colors, light, texture. We enjoy the feel of certain materials. Scents can evoke distant memories, and the right song at the right time may change us forever.

What exactly we like is personal. Your choice of art, books, cutlery, clothes is intimate. You may not put much thought into it, but what you choose to show off has power: It can send a message. I make things. I am rich. It can be a statement. I’m a rebel. I believe. I don’t care. It can show a preference. I’m a minimalist. I like color. It can ask a question. Who do you think I am? Does this make you uncomfortable? Is this who you thought I was?

What you put up, wear, and use answers without having to ask. It solves mysteries and summons new ones. Because more than beauty, we crave connection. Expressing ourselves in various ways, consciously and unconsciously.

It’s beautiful.

There is no shame in beauty

There’s something I have noticed.

Some people feel uncomfortable showing off what they like. I think they are afraid of being thought of as superficial, as being seen as someone who cares “too much” about aesthetics.

I used to feel like that.

I’m drawn to handmade things. My taste tends to go against most trends, which in a capitalist society means: expensive (lower demand, less supply). I remember a friend asking me where I had purchased an antique shelf. I was ashamed to admit that I had won it at an auction for an (what-I’m-sure-my-friend-felt-like) embarrassing amount of money.

But there is no shame in liking something. We all see beauty in different things. Our taste is one of the things that colors who we are — like our culture, language, and relationships.

I’ve learned to see an acquired taste as a sign of a free spirit—someone who doesn’t blindly follow trends or makes much of an effort to appear cultured. They simply know what they like.

You thought about that. You looked at countless things and found this one to be your favorite. That’s what you put up on your wall. One of the great mysteries of your being, laid bare.

What makes good design

I work in design. There’s a lot of talk about what makes a good designer. Many agree: it’s about a strong sense of taste. It’s about having a point of view.

It is.

And yet, most designers do not feel like their sense of taste is allowed to drive their design work. We rarely discuss beauty. We discuss utility. But what is utility if it doesn’t enrich the human experience?

It lacks meaning.

I work in tech. There’s a never-ending race for the next big product launch. Something customers will appreciate. Something they’ll tell their friends about. Something that new customers will sign up for. But what have you ever told a friend if not a story? Even if you were to recommend a product, you’d do it in context. This helped me when that happened then. You give it meaning. The meaning is what makes your friend sign up.

It’s the art on your wall.

In the race for the next big sell, we invent problems worth solving. Even when we’re working on better solutions to known problems, we focus on filling them up to the brim with function. More is more.

It’s not.

I believe this is the most important job of a designer: to remind everyone in the room that it’s not just about how it works and what it can do, it’s about what it means. And that is so much harder to design. Only those who manage to convince their teams to linger and consider it, may get the opportunity to design something tasteful.

Designing meaning

Many have tried to write about how to design meaningful things. It starts with intention, of course. But what comes next?

Context. This one most design teams still get right. They consider who something is for and when they might use it. They think about scenarios and argue about hierarchies.

From here, things start to go off track fast. Design teams jump to conclusions about use cases and jobs to be done. They prototype and test half-baked experiences, and as soon as they get a positive signal, they go into execution mode. Product managers bring up costs. Things that aren’t needed are removed. Things that take longer to be perfected are labeled as costly and are moved to the backlog. Leadership encourages everyone to ship the industry-darling: the MVP — the minimum viable product.

It’s the bane of every creative’s fucking existence. The end of beauty, mystery, the archenemy of surprising potential.

Why? Here’s a secret.

The MVP that ships is often not actually the MVP at all. It’s the MDP. The minimum discussion product. The iteration most people can agree on. Not too ugly, designers have to be embarrassed. Not too pretty, it’s expensive. Not too useless, customers will be mad. Not too useful, we’d be undercharging.

If there’s still a goal left in my career in design, it’s this: to convince everyone that it’s worth moving beyond the MVPs and MDPs of this world.

Moving beyond

Because whenever it is done — when we build something better than the minimum — that’s when the magic happens.

Subtle hints that we’re sharing a human experience. That this was built by someone for someone. For you.

A millisecond of extra care in a transition. A word written that you haven’t read in a while, that makes you linger. A design tweak that isn’t just best practice but has the potential to redefine what “best” means. A wonky gradient. A font that isn’t Helvetica. A line of copy that sticks out.

Something that comes close to a real experience, makes you feel something, makes you wonder. It makes you raise an eyebrow (or two). It makes you snap out of it just long enough to connect with it and live a little.

There it is. The reason good design always wins and the reason you have art on your wall.

A reminder that you’re alive. That life exists outside of apps, products, objects. They’re all just decorative assistants to what we’re all doing, every moment of every day: breathing in and breathing out. Experiencing.

As designers, as artists, as builders and makers, as human beings, it’s our job to keep experiences sacred.

Putting more intention into how we design is where it begins.

Nicole is a Content Designer turned Design Director based in Stockholm, Sweden. She potters, writes poetry, and raises little girls in a house by a meadow. You can follow her writing here or get it directly to your inbox via her publication, eggwoman. Nicole is on Linkedin.

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I’ve gone through the seven stages of grief with AI a couple of times.

Shock. It can write better than many.

Denial. It’s not going to affect me.

Anger. When my first clients started using it instead of paying me to write.

Guilt. When I started using it myself.

Depression. Realizing what it’s done to the quality of writing. Experiencing the downside of giving everybody a cheap tool to post whatever they want, without a human edit, everywhere I scroll. Its impact on the environment, people, the economy.

Acceptance. I have to deal with it; there is no turning back.

Hope. Some days, like today, I have a glimmer of hope.

Maybe, between the repetitive phrasing and slightly off tone, maybe, somewhere between the word “groundbreaking” and exhaustive punctuation, there it is: an opportunity for writers to claim back their art.

To finally separate writing as a tool to create content, from writing, the art, the act itself, the beauty.

This post is about how to get there.

It doesn’t have to be perfect. It has to be real.

I’ve always loved writing, and I’ve always been frustrated with the number of typos that get away from me. My brain thinks quickly. I hate re-reading what I’ve written, so it happens. People might think I’m dumb for correcting typos too late or not at all, especially in the days of auto-correct. But I have embraced the typo. It’ll be there, maybe next to a comma that’s in the wrong place, but instead of thinking I’m no skilled writer, I hope you appreciate that I actually did write that. I didn’t tell a machine to. It came out as intended. It lived a little.

A lot of our linguistic developments originate from typos and that laziness that makes you not want to write certain words: definitly (how do you spell that?) becomes def, to be honest, becomes tbh, going to gonna, because to cuz. Other changes stem from a word not fully saying what it has to say: girl becomes gurl or giiiirl. Meaning on a “if you know you know basis”. That if is what makes us human. That nuance is realness.

A machine simply knows, or it doesn’t.

How to embrace this: Apply fewer filters to your own writing and more to the writing you consume.

Format matters.

For me, the worst thing about AI writing isn’t the takeover of the em dash, or that everything sounds the same, it’s that so much is written that really shouldn’t be. Why write about your rebrand when you can show me? Why tell me about your course when you could just give me a snippet of your teaching?

With AI, it’s easier to create content that passes most people’s bar for what’s good enough. And so more content is created. We scroll our way through it. We barely take it in. Most of that content shouldn’t be. Or it could be something else. Just because writing is easy doesn’t mean that’s what you should be doing.

How to embrace this: Ask yourself (or your boss) does this have to be? And if yes, how does this have to be?

Effort is a good thing.

Imagine writing would take the effort it used to take: coming up with an idea for what you want to put out there. Thinking of what you want to say. Breaking it down into pieces. Structuring it. Finding the right tone. Drafting it. Editing it. Putting parts of yourself in there. Wondering if that sentence comes across right or if you should use a different word there.

If this were still the required effort, you might post less. Companies would too: if every piece of content they published still took a few hours to create, sign-off and distribute, they’d think twice before creating it.

How to embrace this: Remind yourself that effort is good. Keep a personal bar for quality and don’t let the pressure of easier with AI get to you.

I try to only write stuff that I think is worth the effort. Why would AI change that?

Believe in your voice.

Everything AI writes does sound the same. It’s recognizable for most. If you’re a writer, you can easily spot the patterns. If you aren’t, you can still sense them.

That’s not inherently a bad thing. AI writing follows certain formats and structures because those have been proven to be easy to read, fast to take in, and drive the point home. It’s learned from the best: Hemingway to copywriters, accessibility specialists to lyricists.

The thing is: writing was never supposed to be the sum of its best parts.

Writing is meant to be personal.

That’s why even today, companies invest in tone and voice, trying to find a way to create content that feels like them, that others can recognize. That’s why you like some writers, and can’t get through a page by others.

What makes reading AI content tiresome is not the mass; it’s the lack of meaning, intention, personality, and yes, also humility.

How to embrace this: Turn off Grammarly, auto-correct, and don’t ask ChatGPT to edit your work. Just write. Edit it yourself or ask a friend or colleague. Make a deliberate effort not to let AI touch your output and (re)learn how you write. And remind yourself: it’s OK to be unsure and say (write) that.

Exit the machine and consume.

Even before AI, I would seek inspiration in the analog. I‘d read poetry, write some of my own, pen on paper. I’d read books from various authors about different things, cultures, times: Dostoevsky. Kafka. Didion. Kerouac.

I almost always go back to my favorite recommendation for any writer, Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, a quick (re)read.

It works with other forms of media and art too: Ingmar Bergman movies, music from past decades, art museums.

If you have the means to, go beyond media. Travel. Visit museums. Talk to strangers. Learn a new skill. Cook a complicated meal (not something you found on TikTok).

Turn off your phone. It’s going to feel uncomfortable and wrong. Trust me, it’s right. Especially if you want to create something meaningful.

The internet may be artificial intelligence’s turf – but that’s all it has.

We have everything and everywhere else.

AI has made me a greater writer.

That’s what it’s done to me.

Not because it makes my work faster or easier. And not because it suggests different terms or corrects my punctuation. But because it has forced me to create with more intention than ever before. To reconsider each word carefully, to ensure it means what I want it to mean. To think, in every syllable, is this human?

I write slower now than I have in years.

That’s made me better.

It’s helped me separate creating content from creating. It’s the distinction that makes all the difference.

In a world held together by doomscrolling and fake news, stepping away is a privilege. Creating is power.

Allow yourself.

Nicole is a Content Designer turned Design Director based in Stockholm, Sweden. She potters, writes poetry, and raises little girls in a house by a meadow. You can follow her writing here or get it directly to your inbox via her publication, eggwoman. Nicole is on Linkedin.

One of the perks of extended maternity leave is that I have more time and energy to read about UX and try stuff (like all that cool AI sh*t) than usual.

I’ve learned a lot. I’ve gotten really into AI and I’m more excited about it than I’d like to admit on here (because I know y’all are tired). And I’ve had a few realizations.

I don’t think AI can “break” UX more than it already is “broken”. Let’s be real. Most product companies’ design processes are too static to produce any mind-blowing, truly creative UX right now. Of course, it happens sometimes. But in my experience, those times are happy accidents or credited to stellar individuals whom the stars aligned for.

In reality, we spend lots of time benchmarking and then user-testing with far too much bias to come up with anything new, plus the users are biased themselves. Guess who’s also biased? The leadership team that signs off on your work.

Next, we try to systemize everything, document every decision into oblivion, and justify our thinking with every measure possible (just never the ones actual artists use: intuition, gut, the ambition to create something new, “who they are”).

In the current economic climate, companies aren’t taking the risks needed to truly advance UX. Yet, creativity is all about taking risks.

In the midst of this, AI is proclaimed as the big shift, the maker or breaker of things.

I am pro-AI and can absolutely see how it could help us break new ground - if we use it that way. But I don’t see many using it that way. Yet.

Instead, AI is a tool to help us replicate “best practice” even faster and to a wider scale of projects. Most don’t use it to amplify creativity or explore more, wilder scenarios. Instead of innovating UX, we get more stuff, faster that kinda just looks the same and is kinda boring to work on. And that’s what’s going to cost many jobs. No one wants to pay someone €€€ to make something that looks like something AI can make (eventually, maybe already, certainly soon). And let’s be honest with ourselves: no one wants to keep designing the same thing the same way over and over anyway.

At the same time, UX is stuck in this phase of risk-aversion/same-same-but-different/let’s-play-it-safe where no one wants to misstep. We’re too afraid to provoke, break, and maybe even stick out at all.

When I moved from marketing to UX I did that because I a) loved the design process and b) wanted to be more creative. Over the past 5-10 years, creativity has spilled out of my work steadily, yet I have rarely been allowed to fill it up again. The cup is nearing empty. The industry has put a lid on it. No more free flow - and so the work I’ve produced is eerily similar. So similar in fact, that every time I try to add a project to my portfolio I feel like I’m repeating myself: and not just when it comes to what I’m showing. Also when I talk about the challenges (same old) or the outcomes (yeah, you know, growth goes brrrr). But I don’t want the groundhog to be the animal my work is associated with! I want it to be something cool, like a bee or a red panda.

So is UX having an identity crisis or is it just me? I think I still want to do exactly what I set out to do when I entered this field: solve problems. Accessibly, beautifully, sometimes surprisingly.

Or have I misunderstood UX? Is it not about solving stuff in creative ways at all? Has it always just been about unearthing whatever is best-practice and going with that until it becomes irrelevant?

Idk. You tell me, please.

I do think AI allows us to spend more time in the thinking space and less in delivery mode. And as many flaws as it may still have, that is such an upside, I’m willing to make it work.

I want to know—what's the most creatively satisfying UX work you've done lately? Are we doing that anymore? Are we just not talking about it?

Send me a message, comment, or email me at nicoletellsit@gmail.com. You can also follow my newsletter (eggwoman) or Medium.

**All images in this post have been AI-generated. The article hasn't been touched by AI at all. But it's certainly been influenced by it.

You live for the seasons:

Summer sun at noon

Snowflakes on New Year’s Day

Daffodils and poppies

A sunburn, every sunrise

You don’t love for them

You love for these reasons:

An infant’s first smile

Your mother’s belly-laugh

Warm skin, gentle fingers

First love, final goodbyes

You don’t breathe for them

You breathe just because;

Because you give life to each moment

And because

When you close your eyes at night, there’s the promise of

Another candy-cotton sky

A stranger’s smile

Change, the same old

Loss, gain

Your lover’s caring hands

Overcoming fear, conquering grief

Dealing with, growing

Embracing this life despite—

All this

Is why

Yup.

I know this is going to trigger some of you to pieces. Voicing any thoughts on AI is like a minefield these days. It’s become a political discussion, where everyone seems to clearly take one side. See, I don’t like black and white. And I’ve always been curious about new technology. So after I got over myself (“ugh, AI is totally useless”) and refused defeat (“man, some really think this crap can replace my skills”), I started exploring how I could use AI in a way that doesn’t compromise my values. And now, AI does quite a few things for me and my family.

## AI x Michaelis family tasks

I sometimes ask AI for recipes. It knows I’m gluten-intolerant and what food my 2-year-old likes to eat. It takes away a lot of the scrolling through shitty recipe sites (btw, a great example of terrible content design). I tell AI what ingredients I have at home, and it’ll come up with something that works more times than not. I also love using it to transform regular recipes I already love into gluten-free ones.

AI helps us calculate our monthly budget. With costs constantly changing, it’s been a nice aid to help us figure out what we should be spending more or less on and to spot trends over time. Plus, now I don’t have to be an Excel pro.

Yup, I have asked AI for parenting and breast-feeding advice. What I got wasn’t perfect...but digging through countless threads on Reddit or studies on Google Scholar isn’t a great use of my time either, it’s not always easy to get access to a suitable healthcare provider, and honestly, most people are too bias or not updated on research to give solid advice. AI helped me reduce the noise.

Our most recent use of AI? We needed new summer tires for our car. AI helped us pick the best ones for our needs, while paying attention to our budget.

My favourite use of AI so far? It creates crochet patterns for my 83 year old grandma. She makes almost all plushies for our children at this point, and thanks to AI, can even crochet replicas of our pets.

## If AI can do it, maybe it should

AI isn’t flawless and has a long way to go. And of course, we need to address ethical concerns. But it IS useful. And it does cut down on tasks that take time, both in our personal and professional lives. Yes, I can see how that is scary too. \

But the truth is: I want AI to take parts of my job. The not creative parts, the monotone and repetitive parts, yes AI, please take them! Of course, I’d still love to be valued for my other contributions. And isn’t that the problem? That while trying to incorporate AI, jobs are eliminated instead of looking at what other things we could be spending time on.

## On spending time...

One of the best things that ever happened to me was a conversation with the founder of a startup I worked for many years ago at the beginning of my career. I was stressing out about workload when he sat me down and asked me how many hours I had worked that week. When I explained to him how much overtime I had already put in he shook his head and said “Nicole, you do know we also pay you to take breaks, go for a walk, and think about something else, to rest and recover? Because we believe you need that time to do good work. We don’t just pay you for the time you spend at your keyboard.” He insisted on giving me Wednesdays “off” while still paying me my hours. So I could do something else. It was an aha moment.

It reframed how I view work early in my career and has been a blessing to help me maintain my energy levels and creativity. And it has ensured that I no longer admire anyone who puts in overtime. Companies that require it aren’t for me. I know I can be extremely productive in a regular amount of hours. Because I don’t burn my mind to the ground with endless, tiny tasks. I give it breaks.

AI enables me to take even more breaks from even more tiny tasks. This is where the circle closes for me. As a creative, it has been a great tool to unlock more time. And time is fuel for creativity.

## Time is fuel

Why do we use AI? In my husband’s and my case, we use it to save time that we would rather spend with our children or doing things we love. Like right now, writing this little piece of content. Because yes, for funsies, I did ask AI to give me tips on how to improve my writing and...nope.

In my opinion, that’s something AI is actually pretty shit at. Being creative. Being personal. Being authentic.

I’ll let AI take those annoying tasks instead. So I can do more of the things I love. And I think that’s a really freeing way to look at the whole thing. Don’t you?

Leave a comment

It’s the kind of romantic devotion we all dream of (no matter if we admit it or not). But I don’t really dream of devotion to me anymore. Quite the opposite: I wish I could give as carelessly as a peony. Share everything I know with others without even thinking of getting anything back. I want it to feel ok to be taken advantage of. I don’t want it to bother me that I’m only the 3rd person you call to see if I’m available for dinner or that you only text when you need something. I want to be so fully devoted to giving what I have, that I don’t even have time to think about that. I want to be more like nature.

We, people, love taking from nature, and only rarely do we give anything back. Why would we? She doesn’t demand anything. For many years I thought it was the same from person to person, human to human. I thought if I just told people I needed more affection, I required a thank you, an apology, or even just a little bit more empathy and attention, they would oblige. I would not feel taken advantage of. I would feel giving was worth it. But we all know that when you have to ask for something, it never feels quite right. Nature knows. She doesn’t ask.

It’s a sad truth that we often ignore, but hey, I just shared my secret death wish with you, the wish to (literally) be chopped by my stem and blossom until I die, losing all my colors on the way. I might as well say it.

It bothers me that it bothers me when I so openly help you out, I am there for you, gladly answer all your questions and give so much of my best work away for free, and you just shrug it off. After all, you’re used to receiving beauty. For free. All around you. Changing with the seasons.

I’m getting older and one of the advantages of getting old is that you generally have fewer fucks to give. If I think you’ve been a shitty friend there’s a bigger chance I’ll just stop hanging out with you than trying to fix it. If I keep helping you and never get anything back, I really don’t care anymore. I think I’m slowly becoming a bit more like nature. I stop trying to figure out what your last text meant and why you never share my work or like my poetry on Instagram. Sometimes, of course, I still ponder it and it still hurts but most of the time, I don’t care. It’s the best feeling in the world.

I have a fresh peony sitting next to me right now and as I eye her and wonder when she will open up and grace me with her blossom, it suddenly becomes pretty clear to me why she does her death dance in the first place:

She blossoms because that’s what she does. It’s not for me. I’m just her witness.

I give because it’s what I do. It’s not for you. But you may be my witness.

Love,

Nicole

• Wanna help a creative out? Buy my book (on Amazon or directly from me) or follow my podcast.

• Wanna connect? Find me on Twitter, Linkedin, and Instagram.

• Wanna complain? Email me or comment on this newsletter.

• Wanna thank me? Tap the heart icon below and spread this letter like confetti.

People say happiness is a warm gun. But really, anger is.

For years, I thought the frustration I was feeling in my life came from grief. A deep sadness, a sense of loss I couldn’t get away from, consuming me as surely every year sometime in late January or February as the sun returns in spring.

It took me many years of going through cycles of pain to understand that the roots of my recurring depression in fact lay buried in something different. It was anger that triggered me. Anger wasn’t the symptom, as people often tried to convince me, it was the source.

I’m an angry woman. That’s not something I am supposed to write or you are supposed to read. But here it is. As it should.

One day, I stopped my bike in the middle of the bridge. It was my early morning commute and once again the wind was so strong I could barely move the wheels. I was peddling and getting nowhere. Suddenly, I was so overcome with rage, I had to stop. 

I got off the bike, walked to the edge of the bridge and...screamed. The wind blew it away. Nobody heard. That was the day I acknowledged it. My anger. Things got better then. Something snapped gently into place.

I recognize the driving source now. The one that fuels my semi-successful career, thousands of poems, any ambition I have and have had. A driving source that isn't supposed to be a driving source. Anger. Rage, even.

As a society, we've come a long way. We've widely accepted sadness as a tolerable emotion. It's ok to talk about it. It's ok to feel sad (sometimes). We can deal with sadness (mostly). 

It's not like that with anger.

Anger isn't modest. It's right there, in our faces. We can't run from it nor can anyone who faces us when we feel it. We don't teach our children how to deal with another angry child. We teach them to walk away. To wait it out. When they themselves have an angry outburst, we send them to calm down and then ask them to apologize. 

And yes, the things we say or do in anger are often worthy of an apology. But there is rage in the moment and there is a little bubbling pond of rage that lives on, inside us. It grows into a lake as we try to hide it from the world around us. After all, it's not supposed to be there. We bounce rocks off its surface trying to read the ripples, but we don’t understand what it’s trying to say.

My lake is more of an ocean. A lot of things make me angry. The 64-year-old driving teacher who abused me when I was 17. The 14 and 16-year-old boys who cornered my 3 and 5-year-old sisters on the playground, forcing them to take their clothes off. The professors in engineering school that tried to flunk me in my oral exams so they could have an all-male group to make sexist jokes with. That guy from New Years’ Eve 2012 who tried to convince me a tissue could easily replace a condom. The startup founders that made up stories about a workplace affair instead of admitting they had failed as leaders. The ex-boyfriend whose wife I found out about on a trip to Oslo he had insisted on taking me on. 

But not only men stir my ocean of rage. I'm angry at all the insecure women in power positions who have stood in my way or in the way of talented women in hopes of protecting their positions (we see you). I'm angry at my grandma for never being able to look beyond her extremist religion to acknowledge me. I'm angry at my sister who decided to become a Mormon at 18 and remove me from her life because I refuse to pretend like that’s normal. I'm wild like that.

It's another windy day. I question my own intelligence as I walk my dogs by the water. Why move close to the sea if the wind makes me furious? It hits me quite suddenly then. Maybe as suddenly as the salty breeze in April or Burce Springsteen’s New York Serenade turning into, well, a typical Bruce Springsteen song. 

Rage makes for some pretty good fuel. See, it's not like sadness. It doesn't make you feel tired or small or scared. Quite the opposite in fact. As you feel it, your heart beats faster, your muscles grow tense, your breaths expand your chest; first a tiny bit, then even more. You feel strong, you feel powerful. You feel all there, in the moment. Your feet are tightly pressed to the ground. This is it. It overcomes you, totally. Absolutely. So much power.

I feel pretty powerful. When I win business from people who are my seniors. When I deliver projects better, faster. When I write beautiful sentences. When I lift heavy. When I hold a man's greedy stare or question another's authority. When I don’t stand back. When I call them out. When I share. Like this.

Who I am now would not have been possible without anger. This is my ode to anger.

Stay safe,

Nicole

• Wanna help a creative out? Buy my book (on Amazon or directly from me) or follow my podcast.

• Wanna connect? Find me on Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.

• Wanna complain? Email me or comment on this newsletter.

• Wanna thank me? Tap the heart icon below and spread this letter like confetti.

Jokes aside, welcome back to Nobody Cares But You, my newsletter on growing up and beyond. I haven’t sent this since December because frankly, I wasn’t happy with the format anymore. And as 2020 can already go to hell, I figured why not try something new. If you hate it, you hate it and it will just be one more nail in this year’s coffin. If you love it, everyone’s happy.

So from now on, this newsletter will stray a bit from its original format of sharing useful tips and advice and become a bit more experimental. Not to say you won’t find some valuable advice here occasionally, but damn, I’m so tired of people slapping on their guru-badges and blurting self-help tips out on Twitter, Linkedin and even Slack (mate, I am capable of working from home without your advice, thanks very much) that I want to distance myself from any of that as much as I can.

Let’s dive in, shall we?

Since you last read from me, a lot has happened. I joined Spotify (and love it). I traveled Mexico for a month (Tulum is my spirit place). I started teaching my very-own Content Marketing course at Berghs. My book sales tanked (thanks, COVID). And thanks to personal spacing, I’ve achieved a very even split between #work and Animal Crossing. Overall, not so bad.

In Mexico

In Mexico, I had started a travel journey. I had been re-reading Didion and Hemingway on the plane and it reminded me how great simple, observant prose is. Specifically, Didion’s short South and West got me. As soon as we landed, I made it a thing to carry my notepad around and take notes whenever I saw, felt, smelled, heard or experienced something even remotely interesting. During the evenings, I transcribed my handwritten notes to my laptop and over the weeks, some kind of narrative formed, quite organically.

It was an incredibly soothing habit, easy to do, and gave me a lot of instant gratification. There were moments when I transcribed something to my laptop and tweaked a sentence a tiny bit and it suddenly sounded epic. I felt so proud. I’d read my ramblings to George and he’d nod and that was it, all the assurance I needed that day. Nothing else really mattered. Not the sunburn or that I broke my laptop charger in the middle of the jungle. Not that I was eating way too much fish and had to carry a bottle of Pepto Bismol everywhere I went, its shiny pink color signaling to everyone exactly what was going on inside my guts.

I vowed to myself to continue journaling and check my notebooks from previous trips and transcribe those as well when I got home. Of course, I didn’t. I listed all the things I did instead above already. Hell, I even started a podcast (on Content strategy, if you’re interested) because as soon as I got back, I got trapped in thinking I need to create value again. 24/7. Measurable output. Ideally, something I could market or turn into cash eventually. Do something useful. Be productive, even if the world is burning. I quickly forgot how I had felt in Mexico. How the simplest of things, the skill I enjoy the most, made me happy.

Don’t get me wrong, I like being productive and providing value both for free and to employers and clients. But I’d be damned if I wouldn’t admit that what I feel when I write something I personally care about can’t be topped. Some of the stuff I write (poems, stories, bits of pieces, paragraphs) are as dear to me as popping out a newborn. is to others. Yes, I’m exaggerating but you get the point.

The only advice I have to give

The only advice I have this time is exactly that. Things are rough. The economy tanked and it might get much worse. It’s easy to feel like we need to be more productive than ever. We need to fight hard to keep our jobs, feed our families, make a name for ourselves so we can stand out if something worse happens. But the truth is, we don’t know when this will be over. We don’t know how the world will look after this. It could take much longer or change things permanently or both. For all I know, the world might even look better after this. We just don’t know.

But the one thing we need to make it through any of that is trust in ourselves, inner peace, something to hold on to that is independent of anything and anyone else. If we find that sweet spot, that thing or task or outlet that gives us just the right dose of self-love, makes us appreciate ourselves a little bit more, it’s worth fighting for it. Fighting for it…making time for it, giving us space to explore it. Please do that.

Please be patient with yourselves and everyone else.

Thanks for reading.

Stay sane and stay safe,

Nicole Michaelis

• Wanna help a creative out? Buy my book (on Amazon or directly from me) or follow my podcast.

• Wanna connect? Find me on Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.

• Wanna complain? Email me or comment on this newsletter.

• Wanna thank me? Tap the heart icon below and spread this letter like confetti.

  

Besides a lot of fun work, this year has given me great opportunities: I got to host several workshops (on sleeping and on personal branding for example), I traveled a lot, I published a book, I met some amazing people (and got rid of some shitty ones too). I end the year on a note of gratitude — but also excitement! For not only do I get to keep some of my favorite clients (you know who you are), but I’m bringing new ones on board. And those aren’t small fish for me. I’m kicking-off a project at Spotify in January and will be teaching my own Content Marketing Course at Berghs School of Communication starting March. Both of these things had been on my goal list for a long time and I can’t quite believe I made them happen. But this post is not a humblebrag. Because really, there is nothing humble about achieving your goals. It’s both incredibly awesome and deeply awful.

…deeply awful?

Yes! I sacrificed a lot to get where I am. I literally live thousands of kilometers away from my family, see most of my friends way too rarely, work late many days of the week and in general, am not always great at taking care of my needs and the needs of the people that love me. I make bad decisions, I get anxious, I’m the worst at stress management. I have a long way to go and lot’s to learn. And it’s important to remember this: what we see people achieve always comes with a downside. Just, nobody talks about it. Nothing just magically happens. It takes hard work, grit, resilience and many sacrifices.

That’s why for next year, I tried to tone down my goals a notch.

• I didn’t set myself a financial goal, instead, I set a travel goal.

• Instead of last year’s goals of increasing how heavy I lift in the gym, I gave myself a goal to do yoga 3 times a week.

• For the first time in years, I have a clear goal to write my own stuff. Finish that screenplay. Publish those short stories. Write that damn novel! And I’m scheduling it into my calendar just like client time.

And while these sound like small things, they are significantly different from last year’s goals.

It’s important to use this darker time of the year to get in touch with our core selves. Who are you? Why are you doing what you do? How does it feel? Only when we answer these questions can we ensure we are on the right path —or get back on it.

Smells sleepy here

You know I love sleep! A while ago, I wrote an article about one of my favorite sleep topics for Sleep Cycle: how to use scents to improve your sleep.

Read the article here

Scents can have a lasting impact on sleep quality. But between pillow sprays, fabric softeners, candles, and a wide array of aroma roll-on sticks, what actually works?  

Book of the month

You guessed it! It’s my own! The feedback that I’ve gotten from my first readers has been overwhelming. There truly is no better feeling than someone being able to deeply relate to something you’ve written. Get it here.

Like a circle inside a square 

I could never make up for it all

cutting corners yet outgrowing the core

wanting so little but doing more 

of what nobody needed to be done.

Now the lines have faded 

my shape, your shape, theirs

being round in this contorted life

an enemy like a sharp-edged knife 

ready to cut me down at dawn.

But tomorrow comes 

and with it another chance 

to remodel the skin, to reframe the mind

and if I try hard enough I may just find 

dignity in not being the perfect fit.

That was is for this year. Time to plug out, rest, and start 2020 with a bang!

Thoughts? Opinions? Feedback even? Please share by replying to this email or coming @ me on Twitter, Instagram, Medium, Linkedin or via email.

Thanks for reading!

Never truly yours,

Nicole

P.S.: Wanna pay me without spending money? Skim through this quick read to see all the ways you can support me and your other writing friends.

It wasn’t easy but I’m so proud that now you can buy 180 of my poems — carefully selected — and enjoy them on paper.

Get your copy

You can order Nobody Cares But You on Amazon. It’s not just a great way to explore poetry and support a new author (me! ha), but it also a lovely gift to give.

Do you live in Stockholm?

Then come to my official book launch 12/12 and celebrate with me. Get your copy signed and find out how this book came to be.

Get free ticket

The book that was never supposed to happen…I chose this title for many reasons. Firstly, because before I got this book deal for my poetry collection, I never thought I’d ever get one. Secondly, when I did get it, I was quiet about it for many months because I couldn’t believe it was true. And finally, because just 3 weeks from the launch date my publisher basically went bankrupt and ghosted me. But after all this drama, I can proudly announce, the book is happening. How? Sometimes, setting all motors in motion does work.

Worth fighting for

What happened? In short: my publisher had some financial issues and ghosted me a couple of weeks back regarding my book that was supposed to come out on December 1st. I panicked. I was devasted. I was sad. I was angry. I didn’t know what to do for days — but then I started talking to people and I decided to activate my network. I got help from an agent and a lawyer and after things looked quite bleak for a while (worst case scenario: no book, and my work locked up for 7+ years) we were able to strike a deal. So as of yesterday, I know: there will be a book! My book, as planned. However, the supply will be limited.

I wrote about the whole fiasco here —and I will write about how we resolved things in detail, but to summarize: I didn’t give up. I did everything I could to get in touch with people who could help me and then negotiated to ensure I could meet the publication date, publish the entirety of the work, and get enough copies to meet initial demand.

And most importantly, my dream is coming true. Ever since I can think, I have dreamed about publishing a poetry collection. Now it’s finally happening.

Wow.

And this is where you come in:

Join my book launch event!

Help me turn a boring Thursday evening into a meaningful experience (and maybe celebrate a little?) —join my official book launch for Nobody Cares But You by yours truly. It’s at Alma Trädgardh, close to Östermalmstorg, and starts around 6 pm. Poetry, friends, drinks and love.

Grab a free ticket

I have been contemplating buying a car

…but things are keeping me from making the splurge. Maybe more feelings than things. I’ve been having a hard time pinpointing my feelings on this subject though. So I tried to write about them instead.

Read the article

Book cover reveal

I asked my entire network for input on my book cover design but I never officially shared which cover we ended up choosing. Well, of course, my beloved readers should be the first to know. I’m stoked to reveal a beautiful cover crafted exactly to match the theme (and its author) by the gifted Sara Edström.

Book of the month

It’s been a slow month for me in regards to reading. On the flip side, I spent much more time writing poetry and random things which I find at least as relaxing and fulfilling as diving into someone else’s work. The book that stuck out for me was The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster, which I found extremely fascinating on both a stylistic and character development level. The quote below will give you an idea…

Farts come from no one and nowhere; they are anonymous emanations that belong to the group as a whole, and even when every person in the
room can point to the culprit, the only sane course of action is
denial. - Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies

That was November. Kind of all over the place. But that’s life, eh?

Thoughts? Opinions? Feedback even? Please share by replying to this email or coming @ me on Twitter, Instagram, Medium, Linkedin or via email.

Thanks for reading!

Never truly yours,

Nicole

P.S.: Wanna pay me without spending money? Skim through this quick read to see all the ways you can support me and your other writing friends.

(I know my newsletters are usually a bit more useful. But this month, I’m out of useful things to give. I needed a break.

Next month, I promise, I’ll be 100% back to packing this letter with something actionable.)

I don’t know how many times I attempted to write this newsletter this month and failed. But that’s also the reality of selling your time as a creative — sometimes there is no magic sauce left for your own projects, the projects that often have the highest return on investment when it comes to well-being and energy.

Thanks, brain. I take the hint. So I decided to write about exactly this: how do you balance output for you and output for others (indirectly for you too, as it usually — you know — pays the bills). I find this to be one of the most challenging parts of working as a creative. And as you can tell from my opening paragraph, I have yet to master it myself. I do, however, have some techniques that have helped me tackle this in the past. Here are some of them.

Focus thrice — every month, every week, every day

I’m a big fan of journaling as my journaling sessions usually spiral into planning and help me magically focus on the things that matter most to me. But — I’ve come to the realization that I need to do this more than I originally expected.

While I do some planning for the next month at the end of every month and also recap this on a weekly basis to make room for changes (there are always a ton of changes), I manage to make the most time for my own projects when I do it daily. Ideally, first thing in the morning.

I’ll look at my agenda for the day and just decide that I will make time to write a chapter of my novel, a poem, or to play around with some graphic design. It’s a decision that for some reason only ever works on the day. If I try to plan for the same thing a couple of days in advance, it doesn’t work. I often end up skipping the me-creativity time and end up doing extra client work instead. Why? I have yet to figure that out.

Remember what got you there

This sounds dumb but is a super-powerful move. What got you into the creative scene in the first place? What landed you your first client? What fuels your passion? Chances are the answers to those questions go way back and started with you drawing, doodling, scribbling, pasting, dancing or singing. Most of us discover our creative side when allowed to play. And when we first try to make a living off our creative brain, it’s exactly that which gets us business: personal projects, experiments, things we taught ourselves or did out of our own free will. And even now that we may have dozens of paid client projects in our portfolio, this hasn’t changed. Personal projects still show incredible initiative and passion. They add to our narrative. They make us more than our work. And even though they don’t pay, they are totally paying off as part of our creative capital.

Sometimes saying goodbye to a client project for the day so I can write my own stuff is as simple as reminding myself of exactly that —what got me there started only with me.

Go out and play.

We need to talk about Seasonal Depression

The days are getting shorter and while we may enjoy the coziness and the increased carb intake (cinnamon buns, anyone?) it’s a scary season for those of us who get affected by darkness mentally. Seasonal Depression is no joke, and chances are someone around you is suffering. Here’s some quick inspiration on what you can do to help:

Autumn is terrifying

Book Sneak peek: The opening poem

Most of you know my first book is coming out in less than 2 months. It’s a poetry collection centered around the same themes as this newsletter — growing up and beyond. So why not share the first poem in the book right here? It’s called Heavy Heart Syndrome.

Winds blowing in from the East

I pull the baker boy hat a little bit lower

Maybe if you hadn’t given me Joni or Janis when I was thirteen

things would be different now

No sipping black coffee waiting for line after line to come

I’d haul heavy shopping bags home

I’d be cooking meals

Dancing? Only on Fridays

Singing? Never, really

Instead, I focus all my energy on

holding my body upright

due to this heavy heart syndrome

that plagues me

And I fantasize about

Simplicity

Loving people more and ideas less

How it’d feel to get obsessed

with your concept of happiness

Freedom is just a fancy way of saying

there’s nothing left worth chasing

But you know I lie when I say

I’m free now, the tears are dry, I’ve found my place

It’s funny really

how I crave the sun so much

and yet shy away from the light

cover myself in words of wisdom

longing for an endless night

the final revelation

I lead a foolish life

Book of the month

I felt a strong urge to position myself as more intellectual and recommend a non-fiction book this month. F that. The book I enjoyed most during the past 4 weeks was Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney. It was a quick read. In fact, I read it in one day. And while it isn’t the world’s deepest plot, it’s written in such an impressively reflective way, that it feels like you’re almost experiencing every scene together with the narrator.

Things and people moved around me, taking positions in obscure hierarchies, participating in systems I didn't know about and never would. A complex network of objects and concepts. You live through certain things before you understand them. You can't always take the analytical position. - Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

That’s it for October. Now leave your desk and chase some autumn sun.

Thoughts? Opinions? Feedback even? Please share by replying to this email or coming @ me on Twitter, Instagram, Medium, Linkedin or via email.

Thanks for reading!

Never truly yours,

Nicole

P.S.: Wanna pay me without spending money? Skim through this quick read to see all the ways you can support me and your other writing friends.

Even though I had a full workday ahead of me that I was only partly looking forward to, I felt pretty great. Good things were happening all around me. Friendships tightening. Fun projects developing. Dreams coming true (like literally, did you hear I'm publishing a book yet?). The present and the future looked bright. I felt excited. And even the small things that went wrong, barely clouded my mind's blue, blue skies. I was genuinely looking forward to what was coming. Wait...did this mean...I had become an optimist?

Shock. Disbelief. A wrinkled forehead. I, Nicole, an optimist? No friggin’ way. Except yes.

Life’s pretty great, I’ve come to realize. Especially if you make it through hardships. It’s all about letting the right people in, doing things you care about, and being…you know…you! And trust me, I know that’s not always easy. But this month’s newsletter is about that. Being happy to be you. So maybe you too, will end up finding your inner optimist.

It took me almost 30 years to train my mind to be more optimistic. Here’s what worked (and what didn’t).

First of all, I want to shoutout all my super optimistic friends. I’m really happy that you’re happy, but telling me to stop looking at stuff so negatively has probably been the most annoying thing about this entire journey. We all have reasons for looking at things the way we do. No matter if it’s depression or other mental issues or if we’re just generally going through a hard time. Sometimes things suck. And sometimes even ok things appear to suck in someones head. Be cool with that. Besides that, yes please keep telling us how much better things are on the optimistic side. We may seem annoyed at first, but your positivity will find its way into our cold, cold hearts eventually.

Things that helped me be more optimistic

1. I’m pretty awesome. You know me, I’m extremely honest. So I’m not gonna lie: it helped to be super successful. Yup. I said it. I have no problem admitting that things have been going well for ya girl and if things go well for a while, you start seeing the world in brighter colors. But I’m not here to rub in that your life maybe sucks if stuff isn’t going well for you right now. I want to mention it because I’ve also been there: shattered, lost, scared, no idea in hell what I was even doing (and why), and I made it through. It took time and dedication, but I did make it. So you can too.

2. Chasing summer. Living in Scandinavia but really anywhere you have proper winters means you’re gonna have a shit time for a couple of months, usually between November and March. I personally get extremely affected by darkness so here’s what I do: before taking a new gig/job, I already tell the employer that I won’t be available on-site for at least four weeks during winter. This gives me the time to book a trip somewhere warm and sunny. And it made all the difference for me the past two years when I actually left to go somewhere sunny for 3+ weeks. Good news, most employers actually did let me work remotely and were very understanding. So just make it part of your plan and go chase some sun. Sun = more optimism. It’s science.

3. Be brutal with your focus. It’s hard to stay focused on the things that really matter when you’re living in a society that constantly bombards you with things to want, do, create. You may have gotten that promotion you wanted, but you still can’t afford that thing you crave or that fancy Bali vacation. You may have written a great poem, but what if nobody every reads it? You may have gone to the gym four times this week, but Dolores still looks so much skinnier. The point is: there’s always more to do, make, want, create. It’s capitalism, baby. How I beat it? Disciplined goal setting at least three times a week. I take my notebook, I sit myself down, I write down all the things that I kind of want and then I reflect on their importance and rank them. Surprisingly enough, while writing down often more than 10 things in the beginning of the exercise, I’m rarely left with more than two that actually matter in the end. This is a powerful way to set focus. If you’re just getting started with this, I suggest this as a Sunday evening activity. How it works? By focusing on things that truly matter, you actually achieve them faster and also don’t care about all the things you may not be achieving. It basically tricks your FOMO and helps you focus on the successes. Great, eh?

4. Stop comparing yourself. Get off of Instagram or Linkedin or wherever you go to fuel your hate for yourself. We’re all different and that means everybody’s journey is different. Repeat after me: it doesn’t matter what X does because X is not you. You are you.

5. Stop following the news. I deleted all my news apps, including Twitter, on New Year’s Eve. My husband is now my source for weather updates. This sounds scary, but has impacted my ability to be optimistic by tenfold. Yeah, I rarely know what’s going on but I also care less (and get to focus on the things I actually can affect). Nine months into no news I can honestly say: they make everything worse. Horrible images paired with constant panic making — it’s a great way to manipulate us but it’s a bad way to live. Get rid of the news.

6. Sleep better, sleep more. I’m deeply passionate about sleep. Improving my sleep quality, made me happier and definitely makes optimism easier. Read more.

7. Cut yourself some slack. I mean it. You’re doing fine. No matter how it looks in the books. No matter what your mind may be telling you. If you’re being kind to others, you’re good. Be a bit kinder to yourself, will you?

And that’s all. Optimism is hard, but you can get there if you let go of most of the crap and focus on what you truly care about.

Should artists be humble?

Are you (a) creative? Then you’ve probably pondered this question before. Being humble is a virtue many believe important, but does it really make sense for artists and other creatives?

Read my thoughts

The Chair

A short-story about that chair we all have, you know the one that has all the not-quite-dirty-enough-for-laundry clothes?

Read the story

Book of the month

The German title of this book is Hobos, Zen, and High Mountains, which I personally find about 31 times better than the original English title The Dharma Bums. But title aside, this is a slow, relaxing read. Jack Kerouac, who of course is famous for challenging how society chooses to live and advocates for a simpler, more zen life (he basically was me if I would practice what I preach, but no, here I am ordering a 200€ necklace from some online store…), takes the reader on a journey across the US. Very little happens, but there’s a lot of hidden philosophy in between the nothingness. The perfect read for a sunny park bench in the early autumn.

The silence was an intense roar. - Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

That’s it for September. Thoughts? Opinions? Feedback even? Please share by replying to this email or coming @ me on Twitter, Instagram, Medium, Linkedin or via email.

Thanks for reading!

Never truly yours,

Nicole

P.S.: Wanna pay me without spending money? Skim through this quick read to see all the ways you can support me and your other writing friends.

My one-great-idea-process

I follow this 4-step-process pretty much on a daily basis when I need to come up with ideas or creative solutions. And now, you can too.

Force yourself.

A simple exercise I find myself doing quite regularly is forcing myself to come up with as many ideas as possible for one purpose. Let’s say I want to write an article but don’t know what to write about. I’ll take about 3 minutes to write down any possible topic I can think of.

Don’t judge.

While doing this (or any kind of creative exercise) it’s important to not judge your ideas. Just let them flow out of you, then look at them as a whole when they’re all out there.

Feel into it.

Once I have a bunch of ideas, I try to feel into each one of them. In the case of an article I want to write, I will imagine myself writing it. Will writing about this topic excite me? Would I feel energized by reading research about it? You can play with the kind of questions you ask yourself. By using your intuition, your mind will guide you towards the right ideas.

Try for 10 minutes.

Let’s say you’ve chosen an idea. Now it’s important to test it out. When I choose a topic I want to write an article about, I set my timer to 10 minutes and try to come up with a really brief draft — usually consisting of the key-points I want to write about. After the 10 minutes have passed, I again try to evaluate how I felt about this. Did I feel good writing about this topic? Did it come easy? If the answer is no, it’s not the right idea for today.

Repeat until you hit a sweet spot. You’ll be surprised how quickly you become better at spotting good ideas and developing new ones.

Read more

Came here for the copy?

Sure. What about learning how to never write bring copy every again? ...unless your client wants you to, of course. You’ve come to the right place.

My ebook on copywriting

More into artsy reading?

Read my short story about the last months of a relationship. First published in October Hill Magazine — and rejected by The New Yorker with a personal letter (this is a major complement). Not for the faint-hearted.

Read 'Putting it down'

Book of the month

My friends love me for my often beautiful, sometimes disturbing book tips. This month, I’d like to recommend a true classic. Hermann Hesse’s fairy tales is the perfect book if you want to feel calm and intellectually stimulated at the same time. Plus, I swear it gives you crazy dreams.

Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them - Hermann Hesse

That’s it for August. Thoughts? Opinions? Feedback even? Please share by replying to this email or coming @ me on Twitter, Instagram, Medium, Linkedin or via email.

Thanks for reading!

Never truly yours,

Nicole