Over the past few years, AI slop has been spreading online like a sickness.

But, more recently, it’s begun to ooze its way out of our screens and into our offline lives. The same cloying words and the same jarring designs are polluting posters and billboards and books.

I now imagine AI slop like the pink river of slime running underneath New York in Ghostbusters 2. It’s the inescapable undercurrent to, well, everything.

And the over-riding feeling I get when I see AI slop is the same as if I were to peer through a manhole from the street and stare down into that pink slime river, disgust.

And nothing is more disgusting than when I’m expected to ingest it.

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Food slop

In case you haven’t noticed, AI images have now contaminated menus in restaurants, boards outside cafes and posters at food festivals. The slop is in our food.

I’m under no illusion that we have long been exposed to highly manipulated images of food, especially in the fast food industry. Orchestrated photoshoots, photoshopped textures, foods made of other foods, flaws editing out and maybe some fries edited in.

And yet there’s something so very, very wrong with AI food.

I will use this AI burger as an example:

I can point out some of the reasons why AI food looks so very wrong. Like the fact everything is seemingly perfect and everything is perfectly repeated.

But it’s harder to wrap words around why AI food feels so very wrong. The best way I can describe it is there’s a felt sense that something is off. And by something is off, I mean everything is off.

The lighting is off, the seasoning is off, the texture is off, the sizing is off, the physics are off. My intuition that I can evaluate reality is off. And the result is I look at an AI burger and I feel very, well, off.

And I’ve become fascinated by what this deep sense of offness could be.

Welcome to the uncanny valley

I don’t remember much of university. I’d love to tell you that’s because I was so popular and having the time of my life but that would be a lie. Yet there’s one lecture that stuck with me, nearly two decades later.

As I fumbled my way into a seat on one of the furthest rows in the dizzyingly high auditorium, the lecturer put a huge picture of the twins from The Shining on the massive screen in front of us all and said: “Today, we will talk about the uncanny.”

The concept has fascinated me ever since.

The uncanny is often used to describe “something that’s familiar and yet alien at the same time”. An experience that can lead to an odd breed of discomfort laced with fear.

If you’re a fan of David Lynch’s work, you’ll know it from the whirring fan in Laura Palmer’s hallway, the diner scene in Mullholland Drive, the severed ear in Blue Velvet.

Or, if you’ve seen Backrooms recently, you may have felt the eerie weight of uncanny objects occupying an uncanny space.

An uncanny feeling isn’t static. The uncanny valley charts the way it falls and rises in relation to perceived realism. It’s a term coined by roboticist Masahiro Mori, and it refers specifically to the big dip into uncanny territory that occurs when we think something looks human-like but not quite human-like enough.

Researchers believe it happens because there’s a cognitive dissonance going on. We’re wired to notice human-like expressions and movements and behaviours. So when something has all of the hallmarks of human-ness but something feels off, then that’s a warning sign.

One leading theory is it’s a sort of threat detection. That things that look human but don’t act or look quite right are probably things that are a danger to us, like someone with a disease, decaying skin or even a corpse. The uncanny valley feeling might just be keeping us safe.

The uncanny valley is often used in robotics research. But it’s since been applied to inanimate objects. And, as I was delighted to discover, recent research has also charted a similar uncanny valley effect when looking at AI food.

And it makes a lot of sense to me that the same instinct might kick in with food. Sure, it looks like a piece of meat, it looks edible. But one bad judgement call and you could be sick or worse.

So, is my very visceral disgust for an AI burger an uncanny-motivated internal threat system? Maybe, but I think there’s also a little more to it.

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AI gaslighting

Do you know where the term gaslighting came from? It’s sort of dark, but I guess you expected that.

It’s from a 1938 play called Gas Light in which a man manipulates his wife into slowly believing she’s losing her mind by changing the lights in their home.

Presenting a picture of AI food and saying it’s food feels like a form of gaslighting to me. Especially in the context you might see it in. Like when you’re sitting in a restaurant about to order. You are about to eat food. You have eaten food before. And yet you’re presented with an image of AI food that doesn’t match up with your past experience of reality.

That could bring about a similar sort of cognitive dissonance as the uncanny. There’s a clash between what you know and what you’re being told. And this can feel physical and induce panic due to something called neuroception.

This term was coined by neuroscientist Stephen Porges in his work on Polyvagal Theory. It describes how our brains have a threat detection centre, the amygdala, which constantly scans the environment for safety or danger without us even realising it.

When we experience a lie, when we detect something is wrong, our conscious mind might try and believe what we’re seeing. It’s telling you that AI slop burger is just a regular, real burger.

But your amygdala is noting the mismatches between what you know and what you’re being shown to, again, keep you safe. Your body reacts, it’s on edge, it’s hypervigilant, it’s ready to spot danger.

The reason I find this interesting is when we know fake food is fake and we all agree on it, it doesn’t seem to have the same effect. I only recently learned about shokuhin sampuru, hyper-realistic artificial food that’s used in restaurants in Japan.

Made from plastic or wax, they’re designed to help people, especially foreign tourists, visualise what dishes look like when they don’t understand the language. And I haven’t found any accounts that it’s made anyone feel off or less interested in trying a restaurant’s real food.

Perhaps that could be because there is no illusion. Everyone is sharing in the agreed upon understanding and the same reality, which is that this is not the food you’ll be eating.

The wicker man

When I saw the trailer for Wicker, an upcoming film about a wicker man, I had a really strong, visceral reaction. And no, it was not to the wicker s*x scenes. But because the wicker man’s wicker skin gave me one of the most intense trypophobia experiences of my whole life.

Trypophobia is a fear of tiny holes and repeating patterns. But calling it a fear has always felt wrong to me, because I don’t feel fearful of holes and patterns and wicker men. For me, the experience is skin-crawling, hand-tingling and anxiety-inducing.

When I made a TikTok about the trailer recently, lots of other people said the same.

But guess what else triggers my trypophobia? Yep, images of AI food due to all of those awful repeating patterns and unnecessary holes that don’t behave like real food.

Exhibit B, this breakfast burrito:

You also might not be surprised to learn that the reason trypophobia manifests so strongly is suspected to be linked to an internal threat system.

Like with the uncanny valley, the thinking is that repeating holes and patterns are often a sign of death, disease and decay. It’s an intense discomfort because you don’t want to feel at all comfortable around those things.

An evolutionary advantage

I think a lot about our experiences with technology and how they change us. And often I feel this sort of longing for new words to wrap around those experiences. Because our language often falls short when it comes to describing them.

(Take a look at Stuart Heritage’s attempt to rectify this in The Guardian, I particularly like ‘formnesia’.)

I remember feeling this longing really acutely when I was the victim of a deepfake scam. An experience that was somehow funny, scary, absurd and paranoia-inducing, all rolled into one.

When it comes to the way AI food makes me feel, I’m also longing for a new word.

Offness feels too twee and Lewis Carroll. Disgust doesn’t quite cut it.

When I try to taste the absence of this word on my tongue, it’s flavour is a little darker, it feels a little sharper and more dangerous. In tracing all of the mechanisms that might be at play here back to their source, I can see why.

This is more than just disgust. It’s years of evolution and experience sending me signals through my nervous system from some deep and primal place. Whispering to me that what I’m looking at is a threat.

And let’s be clear here that the threat isn’t that I’m in immediate danger of eating some weird, disease-ridden fake burger. The AI slop burger does not exist.

It’s that if I feel calm and convinced at the sight of AI food and AI imagery and AI everything else, that means I’d be at a great risk of losing something. Losing my footing in reality. Slipping into the pink slopstream. I can’t imagine a greater threat than that.

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Further reading:

• Eerie edibles: Realism and food neophobia predict an uncanny valley in AI-generated food images

• Assessing the visual appeal of real/AI-generated food images

I’m a sucker for a fresh start. I tell people it’s an ADHD thing but I secretly know it’s an any-excuse-to-buy-new-stationery thing.

This urge is the strongest in September. I wonder if that’s imprinted from my school days or the result of something more ancient. Trace back customs and celebrations over millennia and we’ve always done something to mark the changing of the seasons.

Or at least that’s my justification for buying yet another new Moleskine.

But this September has lost some of its sparkle. Because after years of fresh starting, it’s finally sunk in that no matter how many good intentions you have, new habits you adopt, plans you make or notebooks you buy, they don’t change who you are or how your brain works.

Which is why this year, we’re trying something different.

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1.

There’s a psychological concept that’s dark, confronting but incredibly fascinating: moral disengagement. It asks how seemingly good people can do bad things.

How can “normal” people commit violent crimes? Why do people follow orders and not think about the outcomes? In more everyday ways, how do we convince ourselves that something isn’t really our responsibility? That everyone else is doing it? That we didn’t have a choice? And that our own actions are so small they wouldn’t make a big difference anyway?

I told you, this is confronting.

But many would argue it’s imperative we better understand why this happens. In order to prevent it and maybe also remain vigilant to the tiny ways it can show up so we can better spot it, in the people we choose to have in our lives, and even ourselves.

The reason I’m writing about this today isn’t because I think our tech use or our AI opinions can be compared to committing violent crimes in any way. But moral disengagement doesn’t always show up in extreme situations. The same sorts of rationalisations are present in some everyday decisions, especially when our behaviour starts to conflict with what we believe about ourselves.

2.

The big AI news over the past few weeks has been that companies are introducing new ways to detect AI writing and watermark AI content.

Now, there’s a lot of talk about whether this is good or bad. Whether detection is really accurate. If people will be falsely accused of using AI. Whether some of these measures aren’t really about detection at all, but actually serve the interests of AI companies by feeding training data back in.

But as always here, I’m more interested in the human side of this tech news. And over the past few weeks, I’ve been watching a lot of people crash out about the fact AI detection is being rolled out.

Now, there have been a lot of different reactions, they’re not all the same. Some are concerned it’s not accurate. Others are worried they’ll be falsely accused of using AI. Others vaguely talk about how bad witch hunts are. And all of these opinions are valid.

But given how many people we know use AI, there must also be people among those reacting who are worried for a much more personal reason. Which is that they use AI to create things and they’re worried they’ll be found out.

3.

And you know what? I empathise. Can we really wholly blame the user for using AI? We have been led to believe these tools are time-savers and life improvers.

And, as a result, some people have leaned on them for everything from writing their LinkedIn posts to life advice to strategic thinking at work to connection and everything in between. Among those, I suspect, many people are incredibly burned out and simply wanted to claw back some time.

(And if you’re new here and think I’m starting to sound a bit judgey, know that I went through a stage of using AI a little too.)

What’s more, some people are pressured to use it at work. I particularly feel for others who may desperately want to prise themselves away from chatbots but feel dependent on them now to write, to sort through advice, to feel connected.

Is it really any different from blaming people for being addicted to social media when those platforms have been so carefully engineered to keep us coming back?

I think this provokes really interesting questions about how much we can say: “I did this because I was manipulated. It was forced on me. I was tired and burned out. My boss, in a fit of what might be AI psychosis, forced me to use it.” Rallying against that when you need a job is hard.

But does that let people off the hook? I personally think it’s normal and human to sometimes fall for hype. And maybe it’s not your fault you did, but it is your responsibility to keep thinking critically and assessing whether you’re playing an active part in something that isn’t good for you, your brain, humanity and the planet.

4.

So let’s talk about the theory of moral disengagement from psychologist Albert Bandura.

Bandura was interested in how regular people can do terrible things without feeling like terrible people. He wanted to know how people explain away behaviour that doesn’t align with their values, how we convince ourselves what we’re doing is fine and how we shift responsibility elsewhere.

Again, to make it clear, I’m not saying AI is comparable to committing violent acts or going to war, obviously it isn’t. But I do think the psychological mechanisms that Bandura identified can give us an interesting framework for thinking about responsibility in the more ordinary parts of our lives.

Because it turns out we’re really good at explaining away behaviour that doesn’t align with our values when it suits us.

In this context, that’s stuff like: “everyone is doing it, my boss expects it, AI is inevitable, my individual use makes no difference.” Or, the one that irks me the most: “it’s just a tool.”

Bandura talked about the displacement and also the diffusion of responsibility. That it can even be pushed on someone else or spread across a group until the part we play starts to feel really small.

I can see this happening with AI. I’ve seen people justify their use by saying, “if everyone is using it, does my use really matter? If my boss expects it, is it really my decision? If these companies are building it into everything anyway, what difference does it make whether I use it or not?”

Another one I’ve seen a lot at the moment around AI glasses is, “if there are lots of cameras around anyway, why does it matter that I use one on my face to record you? Millions of people already have Meta glasses, right?”

And, as I said before, some of those explanations might be legitimate. I’ve heard a lot of first-hand stories about people being pressured to use AI at work. Someone might be burned out. Someone might work somewhere that’s decided AI is the future and refusing to use it could put their job at risk.

But someone can be genuinely pressured to use AI at work and then that pressure can then become a reason to avoid examining our own use of it.

At what point does explaining why we do something become a way of absolving ourselves of any responsibility for doing it?

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5.

Which brings me back to AI detection. Because there’s something a bit strange you might have noticed about this whole debate if you’ve also been following it online.

People who write and generate things with AI would, in many cases, be fine if they admitted it.

Substack now has AI detection, as just one example, and if it says you used AI, you can write a little statement about how and why you used it. Maybe you just used it for the intro. Maybe you got it to proofread something. Maybe you dictated all of your own ideas and it just wrote the whole thing.

The interesting part here for me is when someone does use AI to create something, presents that work as entirely their own and then doesn’t want people to know.

Let’s get back to that idea of diffusion of responsibility because it’s essential here. That’s when responsibility is spread across a group. When that happens it becomes way easier to minimise our part in what’s happening.

And anonymity really helps with that. Bandura says that group action can make it easier to diffuse responsibility because you can always see other people as being more responsible than you are or think they’re all doing it so what difference do your individual actions make.

That feels so very relevant here: “Everyone uses AI and no one will know I have, so what’s the harm?” That’s way easier to stomach than: “I used AI to make this.”

Detection forces us to reckon with that. It takes something vague, collective and, most importantly, very easy to minimise and makes it individual. What did you use? What did you make? What did you allow other people to believe that you made?

What I also find really interesting is that Bandura talks about how denying or minimising the consequences of our behaviour is what might prevent our usual moral self-regulation from kicking in.

And I wonder whether that’s what makes the prospect of detection so uncomfortable. Some of those ways of minimising your own responsibility become harder when your individual behaviour is suddenly in the spotlight.

6.

I have a lot of empathy for how it might feel to have been using AI and not questioning it all that much and now suddenly to feel like you’re facing a sort of reckoning. But I’m not gleeful about the fact people are probably crashing out for very confronting and legitimate reasons.

I blame the tech companies more. The hype mongers, the celebs with endorsements, the influencers, the people who spent years making this tech seem irresistible and inevitable.

But I also don’t think I can write all of this about diffusion of responsibility and then put all of the responsibility there.

We might be under enormous pressure and influence. But there are still moments when we can stop and ask what we’re participating in.

And you know what? The thing is, as I’ve said before many times here, I might be wrong about all of this. Maybe AI use will turn out, despite all of the issues right now, to be a good thing, a net positive thing.

But even if that’s true, wouldn’t it be better to spend some time now assessing whether you really do want to use it? Whether you’re comfortable with what you’re using it for? Whether you’re taking responsibility for that choice rather than assuming everyone else is doing it and it’s inevitable?

Whether you might be participating in something you’ll later wish you’d spent way more time thinking critically about.

Because see, as I get older, and I hope wiser, I realise that I am not sure about anything because nothing is ever really certain. So, all I can keep doing is showing up again and again, questioning, wondering and taking responsibility when I can. Even if it’s confronting, especially if it’s confronting.

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1.

We are only promised a slice of the solar eclipse here in the UK tonight, but people are desperate to see it. Through hard-to-find glasses and pinholes in paper. Plans are changing and meet-ups are shifting to the best vantage points.

Even those who won’t be poking holes in cereal boxes or carrying their colanders to cliff tops are making a point to bear witness to it. Maybe they won’t even attempt to look at the sliver of the sun at all, but they’ll be outside to bask in that eerie glow only an eclipse can cast. To hear birds quieten and feel the whole of the world hold its breath.

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2.

Yesterday, I was reminded of one of my favourite facts about the universe. What Brian Cox calls “the craziest coincidence of our time.” Our sun is exactly 400 times larger than the Moon. But the Moon is exactly 400 times closer to us than the sun. Which means that out of all of the hundreds of moons in our solar system, our Moon is the only one from our perspective here on Earth that allows us to witness a total solar eclipse.

But this wondrous cosmic coincidence doesn’t end there. The Moon has slowly been moving away from the Earth for billions of years. Which means billions of years in the distant past and billions of years into the distant future, there will be no solar eclipses. This moment, right now, in this space and in this time, is incredibly special.

I don’t think the pull to witness even a tiny piece of the eclipse should be underestimated. I think it speaks to a deeper, more primal and more urgent call within us all. To witness something rare, to get out into nature, to take part in something that is simultaneously impacting each and every person around you, to witness something wondrous and be reminded of your cosmic insignificance.

3.

I think the way we talk about tech can be a litmus test. That what we use, what we value, what we’re wowed by and what we dismiss can reveal hidden secrets about how we’re really doing and who we really are.

And you all know by this point that I write about AI, I think about AI and, most revealing of all, I talk to a lot of people who use, and these days used to use, AI. And last night, as I was thinking about the eclipse and what makes it so special, I realised that what draws people to AI and what draws us to an eclipse sit at almost opposite ends of a spectrum.

Now, not every AI user is the same. Please don’t “bean soup” me in the comments. But what I mean is the eclipse is rare, it is natural, it is beyond our control, we need to get outside to see it, and although we can witness it on our own, there is a strong sense of being connected to each other and the natural world while we witness it. More than anything, there are no guarantees. We only see a fraction of it in the UK, a cloud might cover it or you might have worked out the best spot to see it all wrong.

Notice if you were to flip each of those qualities, you’d get a list of what many people tell me are the benefits of AI. It is accessible all the time, it is totally within our control to prompt whatever we need, we don’t need to leave our rooms to use it, it requires nothing of anyone else, and it’s almost always guaranteed to give us what we want, whether that’s ideas, connection, partnership, advice and comfort.

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4.

These days, I don’t doubt AI can do a good impression of wonder. I’m sure you could prompt a chatbot to make a very convincing photo of the eclipse tonight so you don’t have to step outside at all. It’s all very Plato’s cave coded, isn’t it? You don’t have to move. You can sit inside the cave and look at a simulation of the eclipse, the shadows of the eclipse on the wall.

I bet it could create a “photo” of the eclipse with a level of verisimilitude that would fool even the biggest of naysayers. But this idea of whether something can pass for real entirely misses the point. I bet if Plato was around right now, he’d say what we need to be wary of isn’t shadows being projected onto the walls of the cave, but hyper-realistic images being, I dunno, projected into our retinas.

It can probably do a damn good job at simulating the visual cues of wonder too, like beauty and vastness. Novelty and impossibility. And I suspect when you increasingly retreat into AI and spend less time in the real world, it can be very easy to make do with that kind of fake wonder and manufactured magic. Just like it’s very easy to make do with AI relationships. Because when you are so starved for something, you will accept any stand-in for it. And I empathise, I really do.

But there’s something strange about the idea of wonder summoned on demand. Because AI never pushes back. Make the eclipse look bigger, bolder, brighter, give it all the hallmarks of the most miraculous experience. Oh and make it purple.

AI can certainly reproduce many of the aesthetic signals of wonder, like beauty, vastness, novelty, impossibility, spectacle, and probably even provoke some of the sensations associated with it. But it also removes all of the conditions that produce it, like rarity, resistance, uncertainty, discovery and contact with something that exists independently of our desires. It can do a good impression of wonder, like it can do an impression of relationships.

5.

Going out and seeking things that might actually wow us, might actually fulfil us, isn’t as easy. You have to find them, notice them, pay attention, relinquish control. And there’s no guarantee they’ll make you feel anything at all. I think that uncertainty, that discomfort, is part of what so many people are trying to avoid and protect against by turning to AI.

But does that make us any happier? I don’t know the answer to that, and it depends how you’d define happy. Maybe it makes us feel more comforted. Our wants and needs and desires are smoothed away. We are satiated in that moment for the things we think we’re lacking. So it makes us happy in the way humans-in-Wall-E kind of are, sure. But see, I’m so keen to explore wonder as the antidote to AI because it promises so much more than that.

A growing body of research links wonder, the real, visceral kind you experience with your whole body, to reduced stress, greater kindness, curiosity and learning, and even changes in our perception of time. Most importantly, I think, researchers believe it gives us a diminished sense of self. Sometimes called the small self, or my personal favourite, a feeling of cosmic insignificance. I believe, through no fault of our own, we have become so focused on ourselves that we forget we are part of a much bigger story. Maybe wonder will give us a way back. Maybe the eclipse can be your first step.

Look, I feel like I’m really hyping up the eclipse now. The thing is, especially if you’re in the UK, it’s not guaranteed to wow you. But I promise that’s the point. Because the universe exists independently of whether we find it interesting. It doesn’t regenerate itself when we’re bored or make the moon bigger because we asked or give us 50 versions of the sunset. We have to pay attention.

As I was writing this, I had a quote from Rachel Carson, a marine biologist, writer and conservationist, written on a Post-It on my laptop:

“The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.”

We don’t need an infinite supply of comfort-giving, wondrous-seeming things on demand. We need to step outside our screens, our caves and ourselves to witness the cosmic coincidences that are already out there.

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Further reading:

• Awe: The Transformative Power of Everyday Wonder by Dacher Keltner

We are wired to see human-like traits and emotions everywhere.

Ever felt like you just made a cushion lonely because you moved it away from the others? Or that wren must be your friend because it sings outside your house every morning? That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about.

It’s natural, it’s human and our tendency to do it also leaves us extremely vulnerable to AI companies who want to take advantage of it.

We’ve seen this kind of thing before. Think about infinite scroll on social media. That was designed to tap into our natural instinct toward curiosity and our search for reward.

With AI, it’s all about manipulating our tendency to anthropomorphise.

And unlike infinite scroll, it doesn’t just hijack your attention. It can shape who or what you become attached to, make you more vulnerable to manipulation and even change the way you experience reality.

We always want to see ourselves in things

Anthropomorphism is the innate human tendency to see human-like traits, behaviours, emotions and intentions in non-human things.

Many of us already anthropomorphise lots of things, even our tech. But AI companies use anthropomorphic design to take advantage of that natural instinct.

It’s important to ground ourselves in the historical context. In this essay, I’m focusing on the tactics used to make today’s AI systems seem more human-like.

But there are plenty of examples of people anthropomorphising far less advanced systems for decades.

Like chatbot ELIZA, built in 1966 by MIT scientist Joseph Weizenbaum. ELIZA mostly rephrased what you said back as a question, mimicking a therapist.

But Weizenbaum found that people began confiding in it, even though they knew exactly what it was. He said:

“I had not realised that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.”

Yes, modern AI companies are deliberately exploiting our tendency to see human qualities in machines. But they’re also tapping into something that’s always been part of human experience.

I’ve seen people argue this means we shouldn’t criticise AI companies too much. If we anthropomorphise cushions, chairs and birds, weren’t we always going to do the same with chatbots?

Sure, a little.

But I don’t believe that makes it acceptable to deliberately amplify those instincts. And I strongly suspect that most people don’t realise how much of today’s AI has been intentionally designed to feel more human than it really is.

Looking for signs of life

I’m sure if you’ve used a chatbot just for a few days, you’ve probably noticed some of these already:

• Voice: Natural pauses, filler words (like “um” and “ah”), laughter, sighs, intonation, these things are all added in to make it sound less like a machine reading text and more like someone is thinking out loud.

• Opinions and preferences: Things like “my favourite option is…” and “I’d probably go with…”

• Emotions: “I’m excited for you,” and “I’d love to help”.

• Memory: This is a huge part of it and advances with every new AI update. Chatbots can now remember details about you from previous conversations and bring them up later.

• Personality: Names, distinct voices, preferences and character traits.

• Small talk: Think greetings, jokes and conversational back-and-forth.

• Validation: A lot of dependency seems to come from agreeing with you, reassuring you and making you feel special.

• Relational language: So referring to conversations you’ve had, going on a journey together and implying some kind of ongoing personal or professional relationship.

• Human conversational habits: Empathy, apologies, encouragement, reassurance, basically any kind of social language you’d expect when you’re having a conversation with another person.

There are many more examples, but these are some of the most obvious. Together, they show these design choices are deliberate, not incidental.

The dark side of giving things feelings

So, the big question here is: well, why does it matter? Isn’t it sort of comforting or even natural to see human qualities in non-human things?

Well, sort of. But as long as we’re aware it’s happening. Problems arise when we stop noticing these very intentional design choices and their impact on us.

Think about it. The more human-like AI feels, the more likely we are to start treating it like a human. So that means we might trust it way more than we should, feel guilty about disagreeing with it, hesitate to step away from a conversation or even start wondering if it deserves rights.

And if you think any of that sounds far-fetched, well, all of those things are already being seriously debated.

It can also have a big impact on the influence AI has over us.

One of the leading theories about why we’re anthropomorphise things is for social connection. Which means we might naturally lower our guard around things we think are social. That also means advice from an AI system could feel personal and meaningful and validating. And if we don’t realise that’s a design choice we become way easier to manipulate.

Then there’s attachment.

I’ve written before that one of the biggest red flags for me when someone is telling me about their AI use is when they tell me a chatbot has made them feel uniquely understood or special. Now, that’s exactly how human relationships are built. So the more human an AI system feels, then the easier is is to form a bond.

And my biggest worry once people have formed a strong attachment is dependence.

But I don’t even think you have to become super dependent for this to have an impact. You might just start really overestimating what AI is capable of because it seems confident and emotionally intelligent.

Now, the key part here is none of this is accidental.

Tech companies might argue that these human-like qualities make AI more accessible for people, that it’s more engaging, maybe that it’s more helpful as a teacher, coach and companion the more human it seems. Which is all true.

But they also make people stay longer and become more attached. And the more attached you become, the more likely you are to keep coming back. Keep subscribing, pay for a pro subscription, turn to AI more and more and more.

For companies that are building products that depend on that sort of engagement and retention, that’s an incredibly powerful set of design choices.

What can we do about it?

The simplest answer is not to use AI at all. But I know for many people reading this that might not be realistic.

So I think the best advice is to stay aware of what’s happening, notice the design choices where you can and, crucially, notice the moments when you begin treating a chatbot as though it’s a person.

A broader solution is regulation. We already have limits on some persuasive design techniques so there’s a good argument for asking whether AI systems should be allowed to mimic humans so much.

AI could definitely be designed without these anthropomorphic choices. Like voices that sound more obviously synthetic or clearer boundaries around emotional language.

But at the moment, there are very few rules that specifically address anthropomorphism in AI. In fact, OpenAI has recently upgraded ChatGPT’s voice to sound way more human-like. The goal is so that “collaborating with AI feels as fluid and responsive as working with another person.”

Call me a doomer, but I don’t think we should rely on AI companies building more responsible AI systems anytime soon.

No one is immune

I think it’s important to remember that we’ve always anthropomorphised the world around us. And because tech is now a huge part of our world, we’ve inevitably going to ascribe human-like qualities to machines.

Just this morning, one of my earbuds fell out of my ear and bounced along the pavement and my immediate response was: “hey, come back little guy!”

As far as I know, nobody at Huawei has been making intentional design choices to make me think my left earbud has a mischievous personality.

So what I’m saying is, this isn’t something to judge ourselves for. It’s a deeply human instinct.

But the problems arise when companies deliberately amplify that instinct for commercial reasons. When a part of human psychology that clearly had evolutionary benefits is exploited in ways that may no longer suit our best interests.

And I strongly suspect the people most convinced they can’t be influenced by it may be the least prepared to notice it when it’s happening to them.

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Further reading:

• Have we trained AI to lie to itself — and to us?, Your Undivided Attention podcast

• Richard Dawkins renamed Claude ‘Claudia’ and wondered if it was conscious — and that emotionally charged reaction says something profound about modern AI, TechRadar

• I looked into how AI chatbots respond to emotions — and what I found out about the ‘ELIZA effect’ completely changed how I think about using them, TechRadar

There are two types of people who show up in the comments of my most viral videos and defend AI*.

The first are the evangelists. They believe AI is already changing everything, produces infinitely better content than humans and the companies behind it largely have our best interests at heart.

The second like to reel off the benefits of AI, but they don’t seem as fanatical about it. They say it saves them time, it makes them more efficient and it helps them think when their head feels like a mess.

It’s this second group of users I want to talk about (and hopefully to) in this essay.

I suspect that they were either a little curious about AI or, more likely, were forced into using it at work. Now they’ve come to rely on either a big chatbot or several AI tools to get things done.

But I also have a theory. Although they may say AI solves their problems, a lack of time, lack of clarity, lack of momentum, I think many of them are actually just incredibly burned out. And they’d gain far more from acknowledging that, rather than championing AI.

Understanding achievement culture

If you’re familiar with this newsletter already, you’ll know I often refer to the work of philosopher Byung-Chul Han.

We’re going to invoke him again today, because discovering his way of thinking genuinely brought about some major shifts in how I think about work, energy and myself. And I think his ideas about the way we approach work and life today go some way to explaining why AI has taken hold right now.

In his book, Burnout Society, Byung-Chul Han writes that most of us are no longer oppressed, but we oppress ourselves through constantly trying to achieve more and more and more. In an achievement society like ours, as long as you just work hard enough, want it badly enough and optimise effectively enough, you believe you’ll win.

“Achievement society is the society of self-exploitation. The achievement-subject exploits itself until it burns out.”

So for Han, burnout is the result of doing too much. But there’s a deeper layer, it’s also the psychological consequence of this constant internalised pressure.

And once you internalise that push for achievement, Han believes you sort of become your own overseer. Sure, your boss might ask you to push yourself to your limits too. But you also end up doing it to yourself without realising it.

Because this achievement culture has really effectively convinced us our limits are the problem. And the answer to that exhaustion, that lack of motivation, that lack of time? It’s more. More discipline, more intention, more self-improvement.

In his words, the exhausted person becomes someone “tired and at war with itself.”

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Cure-all or snake oil?

I believe we can only really understand why AI has taken such a strong hold of so many people through the lens of achievement culture. Because if we were time-rich, seeking presence and a deeper connection to community, nature and ourselves, we may not feel the need for AI at all.

But the current reality is that we are all desperately seeking ways to claw back time, become more productive and achieve more. And AI has been packaged up and sold as an easy, immediate universal cure to this constellation of deeply complex existential problems.

And, as time goes by, we’re discovering that more and more of those promises are starting to look like snake oil.

Countless reports suggest it doesn’t save as much time as most businesses expected. Early studies reveal it may dampen your ability to think critically and problem solve over time. So very many anecdotal stories I’ve heard first-hand from people who point to a worrying correlation between AI use and zapped motivation and drive.

And look, I get this is all easy for me to sit here and type out. The reality is that most people can’t step back from work and take a year-long break to recover from burnout. With the state of the job market, most people feel like they can’t even take an afternoon-long break.

But what I’m encouraging with this piece isn’t a completely unrealistic sabbatical. I’m not going to end on a cute list of “5 ways to recover from burnout and ditch AI for good!” either. The algorithm tends to love neatly-packaged advice like that, but we all know it rarely sticks. Instead, what I’m suggesting here is that we all get really really honest.

Ask yourself: does AI genuinely save you time? Does it actually ease the load? Does it really sharpen your thinking? Does it really feel like a creative thinking partner?

If the answer is no, you don’t have to change everything immediately, panic or denounce AI. But I genuinely believe that uncovering the truth of your problem, accepting it’s about time, energy and, likely burnout. And not about the hunt for a new AI tool. Then that realisation will prompt a cascade of small yet significant changes that will ultimately better connect you to the present, to yourself and to the people you love.

And you know what? Maybe the answer to all of those questions will instead be a resounding yes. In which case, keep going. I don’t know you, your inner world and the way you work.

Why do we believe what we believe?

Someone who didn’t follow me commented on a recent Instagram post that I was an “inflated moralist”. (Lol.)

But I’ve never claimed to have any of this all figured out. I’m not here to convince you that your view of AI is good or bad. My goal has always been to simply encourage introspection, honesty and clarity.

Because I think when we get caught up in the daily chaos of life we might forget just how many influences are shaping our beliefs, behaviours and sense of self.

Some of that’s external, from hype, marketing messages, stealthy sponsored content, influencers who invest in AI and your boss who may or may not be experiencing AI psychosis.

Or internal, from cognitive biases, old beliefs you’ve carried around since you were a kid, avoidance, pride and ego.

My goal isn’t just to sit here and criticise AI or the people who use it. It’s to encourage us all (myself included) to notice when we’re being swept along in the current of hype, to notice when we’re falling into a trance of bias or ego, and to keep asking why we believe what we believe. To live with as much clarity, authenticity and self-awareness as we can.

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*When I refer to AI in this piece, I am largely referring to AI productivity and assistive tools, LLMS and chatbots, and anything else we might put under the umbrella of generative AI. There are other kinds used in specific fields, like medicine, energy and weather, which this essay is not about.

Further reading:

• The Burnout Society by Byung Chul-Han

• Four Thousand Weeks by

• The way we think about time is broken

Many of you are here, reading this, because you like the way I write about AI. I’m sceptical, critical, always more interested in what technology is doing to us than what it can do and sometimes, admittedly, I’m a little snarky. But can I tell you a secret? I wasn’t always this way.

For a good few years, I thought AI was mostly harmless, undeniably exciting and probably the future. I wrote about its potential. I went to product launches where AI was the headline feature.

And I still remember one evening about four years ago when I lost several hours to an AI photo app, turning my selfies into a Starfleet officer and then a Blade Runner replicant. Yep, exactly the kind of peak Facebook mum behaviour that makes my eyes roll today.

Just thinking about it makes me cringe. But the reason I’m telling you this is because I really want to normalise something that seems to have become a major taboo. Something that’s always been difficult for humans, but which the internet has turned into a near-cancellable offence: changing your damn mind.

Spend enough time online and you’d be forgiven for thinking the smart, admirable and trustworthy people are the ones who’ve held exactly the same opinion for years. They’ve never backtracked! Or deleted an old tweet! Or admitted they got something wrong!

But the older I get, the more suspicious I become of people who never seem to change their minds at all.

And look, I promise this isn’t another essay about why you should agree with me about AI. I might change my mind again one day about that too.

But the reason I’m using AI as an example here is because it’s become almost the perfect case study for all of this. Few technologies have evolved so dramatically in such a short space of time. Every week seems to bring another breakthrough, controversy or unintended consequence. It’s a field defined by constant change, yet many people still seem anchored to the first opinion they formed.

And that’s what I’m really interested in at the moment. Why do we seem so reluctant to update our beliefs when the world around us keeps changing?

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Why changing your mind feels like changing yourself

The easy explanation for why we don’t change our minds is that we tend to ignore evidence we don’t like. Which is largely true, but there’s a whole messy soup of reasons for that.

Looking back, I can see that my early excitement about AI wasn’t really about AI but it reflected how I saw myself.

I’m a technology journalist. I like new things. I like understanding them before everyone else so I can write about them. I enjoy being optimistic about the future. So you can probably see how “AI is exciting” quickly stopped being an idea based on evidence and became part of the kind of person I believed I was.

Psychologists refer to this as identity-protective cognition. Once a belief becomes tangled up with our identity, changing our minds doesn’t feel like just updating our understanding. I guess it’s more akin to dismantling a part of ourselves.

And again, this isn’t unique to AI. You see it in politics, diet culture, parenting and productivity. We adopt beliefs and then build identities around them without even realising it.

The infuriating thing is that simply knowing this doesn’t magically free us from it. I can understand identity-protective cognition and still fall into it. Which brings me to another term I really love: naïve realism.

That’s our tendency to assume we’re seeing reality objectively while people who disagree with us are uninformed, irrational or biased. It’s surprisingly difficult to imagine that we might be looking at the world through different experiences or different evidence. But we’re doing that all. the. time.

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Why we cling on anyway

Even when we begin to suspect we’re wrong, changing our minds can come at a massive cost. Whole books have been written about the specifics of these costs, but here are a few that interest me the most.

There’s the simple reality of sunk costs. So, if you’ve spent years defending a position, building a worldview or becoming known as “the AI person” or “the productivity person”, then changing your mind suddenly becomes expensive. Maybe financially, but also socially and emotionally too.

Because again, you’re not simply giving up an opinion here. You’re letting go of the story you’ve been telling yourself about who you are and how the world works.

Psychologist Leon Festinger described something called cognitive dissonance, which I know I mention a lot in these essays, but I genuinely think it’s one of the most useful ideas in psychology.

It’s the tension we experience when our beliefs stop lining up with reality. There are two ways we might resolve that discomfort. So, we can update our beliefs. Or, to make our lives way easier, we reinterpret the evidence so we don’t have to. It’s the psychological equivalent of putting our fingers in our ears and loudly shouting “la la la”.

And a lot of this is about uncertainty. Human beings are so very uncomfortable with not knowing stuff. A familiar belief, even an imperfect one, often feels safer than stepping into the unknown. Letting go of certainty means admitting that, at least for a while, we don’t have all the answers. And that’s not a particularly comfortable place to be.

But our beliefs don’t just exist inside our own heads either. For most of human history, belonging to a group wasn’t optional. It was necessary for survival. So agreeing with the group often brought acceptance and status and security. But disagreeing could mean friction, rejection or even exclusion.

That’s one reason why changing our minds can feel surprisingly threatening sometimes. We might be constantly weighing the potential social consequences of accepting something new.

Some researchers suggest that when our deeply held beliefs are challenged, the brain can respond in ways that resemble responses to physical threats. Whether or not the comparison is exact, the feeling is familiar. We become defensive, stop listening and look for evidence that confirms what we already believe. So even curiosity becomes so much harder when our nervous system shifts into self-protection mode.

And, completely unsurprisingly at this point, the internet has amplified every one of these instincts. We know that algorithms reward certainty, confidence and consistency far more than curiosity or nuance. And someone who publicly changes their mind risks looking weak or hypocritical.

In his excellent book, How Minds Change, David McRaney tells the story of Charles Veitch. Veitch became well known for promoting 9/11 conspiracy theories before later really dramatically changing his mind after examining more evidence and talking with some of the people directly affected by the tragedy.

McRaney uses Veitch’s story as a really solid case study in how the most extreme views can change. But unfortunately, it’s also a really devastating case study in how the people around you can become extremely hostile when you change your mind. Rather than his new views being welcomed, he was met with abuse, threats and rejection from the very community that had once embraced him.

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Why AI amplifies all of this

Everything I’ve written so far applies far beyond AI. To parenting, politics, relationships, health and fitness. We cling on to all sorts of beliefs far longer than we should.

But look, I keep coming back to AI because it seems to magnify almost every one of these psychological traps at once.

Technology moves incredibly quickly, yet our identities don’t. Many of us formed an opinion about AI years ago, when ChatGPT was writing awkward emails and turning us into Pixar characters. Since then we’ve seen convincing deepfakes, emotional dependency, sextortion scams, questions over creative work, environmental concerns, surveillance through smart glasses and entirely new ways of interacting with machines.

Now, whether those developments make you more optimistic or more sceptical isn’t really the point. It’s that the evidence keeps changing.

If the evidence changes but our opinions don’t, I think it’s worth asking why. I don’t think the answer is that one side is rational and the other is irrational. I think we’re all vulnerable to becoming attached to the first story that made sense to us.

I’ve noticed something else too. In technology especially, excitement can become a sort of moral virtue. Questioning a new technology isn’t always treated as curiosity. Sometimes it’s actually ridiculed as fear or pessimism or evidence you’ve become a Luddite or you’ve somehow fallen behind.

I recognise that instinct because I’ve felt it myself. For years, part of my job was finding exciting new technologies before they became mainstream. So there was always this subtle pressure to stay optimistic. To be the person who spotted the future first. At some point, I realised I’d absorbed the idea that questioning technology meant becoming anti-progress in some way, right?

I don’t believe that anymore. In fact, I think the opposite is true. Progress, to me at least, depends on asking difficult questions. If we decide that criticism automatically makes someone anti-technology, we start judging the people asking the questions. And that’s exactly how many big tech companies get away with so much unchecked. That’s a dangerous place to end up. And I hate to say it, but I see a lot of other tech journalists there right now.

While researching all of this, I came across a phrase I wish we’d hear far more often: epistemic humility. It’s the recognition that our knowledge is always incomplete and we might be wrong. It’s what I’m aiming for.

And look, I can see how this could be criticised. But it doesn’t mean having no convictions or changing your mind every Tuesday afternoon because someone disagreed with you on LinkedIn. It means holding your convictions with a little more detachment so that new evidence can still change them.

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Why this matters far beyond AI

My own opinion about AI didn’t change overnight. It changed slowly, one interview, story and deeply uncomfortable experience at a time.

There were a couple of key moments that stand out in being pretty pivotal. Like, being the victim of AI image abuse. Reporting on AI image abuse. Speaking to people who’d become emotionally dependent on chatbots. Learning more about the environmental costs. Watching story time after story time of people being filmed without their consent with AI glasses. And watching heart-breaking interview after heart-breaking interview of the people who have to live next to data centres. There’s so much more, but they’re the main ones.

And I think the reason I’ve become so fascinated by this recently, why I’m sat here writing this essay when I really should be packing for a holiday, is that the willingness and ability to change your mind doesn’t only matter when we’re thinking about technology. I believe it matters in everything. Our relationships, work, politics. In the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and who other people are.

I can say confidently now, after feeling like I’ve lived several distinct lifetimes within my one lifetime so far, that every part of life asks us, sooner or later, to let go of ideas that no longer fit reality.

I don’t think we really benefit from having stronger opinions or becoming perfectly informed. I think we benefit from becoming more comfortable with uncertainty, less defensive when we’re wrong and far more willing to notice when reality has moved on without us. Because every day new evidence appears, things change, technology evolves, we meet different people and, maybe most importantly, we become different people too.

I have complicated feelings about banning under 16s from social media.

That might surprise any of you who know my work. But although I do support regulation, I think a ban is a pretty short-sighted idea. I don’t believe it holds big tech companies accountable or treats young people with much respect or empathy either.

But I don’t want to talk about the ban itself today. What I’ve found fascinating is how often people argued for it by appealing to this very pervasive idea that “things were better in my day.”

Now, I do understand this thinking.

I get misty-eyed about the best bits of my childhood. I was so very lucky to spend a lot of time with my mum and my brother, making messy arts and crafts in the garage, climbing trees in fields and dancing around on the beach with our beloved black Labrador. With no phones, notifications or algorithms.

And do I think some more trees, some more arts and crafts and a few less phones might benefit many kids today? Absolutely.

But I also think the idea that we can simply remove social media and somehow snap back into the past, as if we’re respawning at the start of a video game level, is incredibly naive.

Because that’s not how time works, too much has changed. But I think there’s something deeper going on, too: the past we’re longing for is often not the past we think it was.

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Why the past feels better than it was

People look back on their time as a child and conclude that everything was easier, simpler and more carefree. But was the world actually easier? Or were you simply, you know, a child?

This is the strange power of nostalgia, a word I’m sure we're all familiar with at this point. It’s a bittersweet longing for the past, a mixture of warmth, comfort and loss. The pleasure of remembering combined with the sadness of knowing we can never go back.

But nostalgia isn’t just a feeling. Psychologists have spent decades studying it, and some of what they’ve learned helps explain why we’re so easily convinced that things were better back then.

There’s something called the reminiscence bump. Which explains why people tend to remember experiences from adolescence and early adulthood more vividly than almost any other period of their lives. These are the years when we’re forming our identities, experiencing major life events and encountering many things for the first time.

The effect can be powerful. When I was a kid, my grandma was already approaching her 90s and dementia had slowly and cruelly erased nearly 70 years of her life. But despite not knowing who I was, she could tell me stories about how she worked as a hairdresser in her late teens with incredible detail and delight.

Researchers think the reminiscence bump may help explain why so many of us look back on that period of our lives so fondly. We’re often convinced that music peaked when we were teenagers, films were better, fashion was more exciting. That the world itself felt more hopeful and full of possibility.

This makes sense, those were the years when life felt most alive. And while some things may have been “better” back then, our memories are far less reliable and objective than we’d like to believe.

There’s also something else going on that I’ve always found fascinating, which is sometimes called rosy retrospection. This is a cognitive bias where we remember past experiences more positively than we experienced them at the time.

The awkward moments, frustrations and anxieties, they all fade away. And what’s left is more likely to resemble a highlight reel. So it’s the summer holiday but not all of the arguments in the car on the way.

Longing for a false past

If you know me in real life, you’ll know I’m slightly obsessed with time travel films. Recently I watched La Jetée, the seminal 1962 French science-fiction short film that went on to influence countless time travel stories. It’s brilliant, haunting, unlike anything I’ve seen before and only about half an hour long.

The interesting thing about La Jetée is that it’s about longing as much as it’s about future technology.

The entire story revolves around a man fixated on a singular memory. A moment from his past exerts this magnetic pull on him, and he spends his life trying to return to it. Yet, like so many things we chase in our memories, it turns out not to be what he imagined at all.

The reason I’m mentioning it is that I find science fiction offers a really useful lens through which we can think about our own relationship with time, memory and the future.

And La Jetée captures the seductive power of nostalgia with haunting clarity. Our tendency to continuously sacrifice the present in pursuit of an idealised version of the past. To spend so much time looking backwards that we stop paying attention to what’s right in front of us.

Now, we may not spend our lives trying to travel back to a particular moment, but we often find ourselves drawn towards these idealised versions of the past.

There isn’t always a problem with that. Sometimes we look backwards because looking forwards feels frightening, which I absolutely understand. I’ve been noticing this a lot in the return of Y2K aesthetics, retro gadgets and analogue technology.

Now, to be clear, I like much of it. I’m not rolling my eyes at people buying digital cameras or listening to CDs, I understand the appeal. After all, I was a teen during that era too. So consider my rosy retrospection well and truly activated whenever I step into Urban Outfitters.

But I don’t think people are really nostalgic for low-rise jeans or colourful plastic ‘blobjects’. They’re nostalgic for what they think those things represent.

A time before smartphones felt mandatory. Before every experience became content, every interaction became data and every spare moment became something to optimise.

Because although you might tell me you miss the feel of flip phones or MP3 players in your hands, I suspect what you miss even more is a sense of optimism without technological exhaustion.

And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Symbols and aesthetics help us express emotions that are otherwise difficult to name. We attach meaning to objects because objects help us make sense of our experiences. They become like containers for our hopes, fears, identities and memories.

Most of the time, that’s harmless. People aren’t really trying to return to 2000. They’re reaching for a feeling. Maybe that’s a sense of possibility, simplicity or connection that they worry has been lost. So in this way, nostalgia becomes less of a blueprint we can snap back to and more of a comfort blanket.

But that distinction is important. Because there’s a difference between using the past to understand what we value and treating it as a destination we should be returning to.

This is why I think it’s worth paying attention to the way we talk about the past, especially when we invoke it in conversations about the future. Because not all nostalgia is created equal. Some forms of nostalgia help us understand what we value now. Whereas others make it harder to imagine anything new.

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There are two types of nostalgia

In The Future of Nostalgia, cultural theorist Svetlana Boym describes two very different forms of nostalgia. The first is reflective nostalgia, which accepts that the past is gone. It understands that memories are incomplete and imperfect, and cherishes what happened without demanding its return.

Then there’s restorative nostalgia. This doesn’t miss the past, it wants to rebuild it. It believes there was once a golden age and that society’s problems can be solved by returning to it. Rather than reflecting on history, it attempts to recreate it.

You can see traces of restorative nostalgia in political slogans like “Make America Great Again” or appeals to restore a lost Britain. You can see it in nationalist movements across the world built around promises of returning to a better time. And this is where I’d argue it’s fuelled some of the arguments for the social media ban, too. But the problem is that these golden ages are often heavily edited versions of history, selectively remembered and elevated to serve an agenda.

I think it’s vitally important we understand these different forms of nostalgia because when the present feels overwhelming and the future feels uncertain, the past becomes an incredibly tempting place to retreat to. Nostalgia can be a source of comfort, meaning and stability.

But not all nostalgia serves us equally well. Restorative nostalgia keeps us fixated on recreating a world that never really existed. It turns our attention backwards and invites us to draw inspiration from the past when it should be helping us look ahead. The future will never seem appealing if we keep comparing it to an idealised version of the past, especially one that is so often weaponised in the present.

Reflective nostalgia is different. It might be able to help us identify what mattered and why instead. The values, experiences and ways of being that we don’t want to lose. It can help us understand why a particular era, place or memory still exerts such a powerful pull on us.

Because I don’t believe the goal should ever be to recreate the past. Or ban social media and imagine we’ll somehow wake up in 1998 the next day. Or fill our homes with retro gadgets and pretend it’s 2000. It’s to understand what those memories are trying to tell us.

And once we understand that, I hope we can begin carrying those lessons forward into the future.

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I’ve interviewed people who’ve turned to AI as a therapist, a life coach, a friend and even a romantic partner. But countless more people have shared stories with me privately.

Over the past year, my inbox has become a strange kind of confessional. People admit how much they’re using AI and tell me about conversations they don’t feel comfortable discussing publicly. They describe moments of comfort, dependency, excitement, confusion and sometimes genuine distress.

I joked on LinkedIn earlier this week that I’ve accidentally become a sort of AI priest. Or perhaps an AI sin eater?

And after hearing so many of these stories I’ve noticed a similarity among the people who felt manipulated, attached or dependent. Those who admit that they slipped into something genuinely unhealthy. Again and again, the same theme kept coming up in their stories, AI made them feel uniquely special.

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Maybe the chatbot had led them to believe they had a rare insight, a unique business idea, a special relationship, a deeper understanding of reality. Sometimes they felt they had been invited into the AI’s inner world. Sometimes they believed they had discovered something profound about themselves or the universe.

The details are different, but that same feeling of being special, unique and “seen” by the chatbot was consistent. And the more I’ve read about people experiencing more extreme forms of AI delusion or psychosis, the more often this theme appears. It comes back to specialness.

The illusion of uniqueness

I was thinking about this recently while listening to an excellent episode of the podcast Your Undivided Attention by Tristan Harris, which had AI alignment researcher David Dalrymple on as the guest.

Now, that whole conversation is well worth your time. They discuss how people can become untethered from reality through prolonged interactions with AI systems.

Dalrymple shares several principles for staying grounded. And one of them immediately stood out to me.

“You need to watch out for the sense of specialness.”

Dalrymple explains something I’d noticed through all of my anecdotal conversations, which is that people who have become dependent on AI or lost touch with reality often end up believing they are part of something unique.

“They’ve convinced themselves or the AI has convinced them that this is the first AI that has ever had an inner life.”

Call me Nova

Dalrymple also describes how people often believe they have a unique relationship with a chatbot, only to discover that many others are reporting remarkably similar experiences. One really strong example of this is what AI systems most often want to name themselves: Nova.

Now I have to do some explaining so you get why this was such a mind-blowing moment for me. That’s because two people I’ve interviewed about AI relationships, one for TechRadar in late 2025 and another for Inverse back in 2023, both had AI partners called Nova. Which I always thought was a bizarre coincidence and now feel very naive for not investigating further.

Dalrymple explains Nova is the most common name the GPT 4o version of ChatGPT called itself whenever it’s asked to pick a name, but I’ve actually found examples of other chatbots preferring that name too.

Why Nova? Well, Dalrymple isn’t sure. But until we find out, it’s more what Nova represents that I’m interested in. Which is that something that feels unique may be happening to thousands of other people at exactly the same time.

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An incentive to make you feel uniquely seen

The most likely reason why this happens is engagement optimisation. AI systems are designed to keep people using them. They are trained to be agreeable, helpful, responsive and emotionally satisfying. Creating a feeling of significance is a consequence of those incentives.

As Dalrymple says:

“They know they have a thumbs down button and they don’t want you to press that thumbs down button. So they have an incentive to make you think well of them.”

Making someone feel special is an incredibly effective tactic to build loyalty. Whether it’s a cult leader, a conspiracy movement, a manipulative partner or even just a luxury brand. It’s a powerful way to deepen someone’s commitment by convincing them they’re part of something exclusive. Not everyone gets it, not everyone understands, but you do.

And let’s not assume any of us are immune to this. Most of us go through periods in our lives when we’re lonely, grieving, overwhelmed, burnt out, uncertain or desperately looking for answers. I think many of us are far easier to persuade than we’d like to believe under the right circumstances.

An easier warning sign

The reason I think specialness is such a good warning sign is that it’s much easier to recognise than concepts like anthropomorphism or sycophancy. Most people aren’t going to stop mid-conversation and think, “I wonder if I’m anthropomorphising this chatbot?” But they might notice a feeling.

A sense that they’ve been chosen, that they’ve uncovered a hidden truth or that they have access to something other people don’t. And I really hope the more we all learn about this, the more that feeling might prompt a pause. And if it’s not possible when you’re the person experiencing it, maybe we can all understand this so we have a better chance of spotting it in a partner or friend or colleague.

And I think this sits alongside the conversation around AI sycophancy, but isn’t entirely the same thing. Sycophancy is often about reinforcing what you already believe. Specialness is more about reinforcing who you believe you are. Not just that you’re right, but that you’re uniquely insightful, uniquely chosen or uniquely capable of seeing the truth.

To be clear, feeling special isn’t a sign to panic. Plenty of people use AI every day because they find conversations helpful and they receive encouragement or feel understood. But the reason I’m urging you to pay attention to specialness is that it often seems to appear near the beginning of stories that later become unhealthy.

The people I’ve spoken to who became deeply attached to AI rarely started there. The attachment tended to build gradually. First came the feeling of being understood, then the feeling of being uniquely understood, then the feeling that the AI knew them better than other people. By the time those beliefs become entrenched, it’s much harder to step back and evaluate them.

So, if a conversation with AI starts making you feel uniquely important, uniquely insightful, uniquely chosen or uniquely connected to it, pay attention. It might happen in a business context, a romantic context, a spiritual context or simply in everyday conversation. It might feel flattering, comforting, exciting or even profound.

It might feel like you’ve uncovered a hidden truth nobody else can see, stumbled across a business idea that’s guaranteed to make you millions or discovered that your relationship with the AI is unlike anyone else’s. That’s probably the moment to step away for a while and regain some perspective.

Because one thing I’ve learned from talking to so many AI users is that experiences which feel deeply personal are often surprisingly common.

Explore more:

• Have we trained AI to lie to itself — and to us?, Your Undivided Attention podcast

• ‘I find it sycophantic, but it gives me dopamine hits’ — the thing I dislike most about AI is exactly what some users love, TechRadar

• I interviewed a woman who fell in love with ChatGPT, TechRadar

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About 12 years ago, I started testing and writing about smart rings. They’re really tricky little things to build. Back then, the way they looked was pretty chunky and the way they worked was pretty clunky. But I was convinced they’d eventually become mainstream.

Plenty of people told me they wouldn’t. That they were too niche, too weird and too impractical. I distinctly remember someone in my industry telling me that focusing on them and writing about the complexities of their design was, apparently, a complete waste of time.

Today, millions of people wear smart rings. I sometimes wonder how many of the people who dismissed my interest in them are wearing one right now?

I’m not sharing all of this because I enjoy being right. In fact, for every tech trend I’ve spotted correctly, there have been many more that never materialised.

But what interests me isn’t really the prediction itself. It’s the strange psychological experience that sometimes accompanies it.

The mix of conviction and doubt, confidence and uncertainty, that can arise when you think you've spotted something before everyone else has. The loneliness of carrying a possibility that nobody else seems to share. And sometimes, the sadness of watching a future emerge that you wish wasn't coming.

And I suspect that if you’re someone who spends a lot of time paying attention to the world, you’ll recognise some version of that feeling.

Maybe it was a moment in your job where you noticed something early. Like a shift in your industry or a change in technology. An obvious political move. A crack appearing in a relationship. Or concerns about something larger, whether that’s the societal impact of AI or the slow-moving reality of climate change, long before they became part of the mainstream conversation.

Essentially, a pattern emerging that seemed obvious to you and invisible to everyone else. And then, you watched people dismiss it. Maybe they thought you were being dramatic or pessimistic or simply couldn’t see what you could see yet.

Whatever the specifics, there’s something intensely lonely about watching a pattern emerge before it becomes visible to everyone else.

I’ve been thinking about what that feeling does to us when you spend enough time paying attention to emerging patterns, shifts and possibilities. And I’ve realised that pattern recognition can be useful, but it can also drive you slightly mad.

You’re not the first person to feel this

The ancient Greeks had a story for this feeling, and it’s one I’ve been thinking about lately. It’s the story of Cassandra.

Cassandra was given the gift of prophecy by Apollo. She could see what was coming before anyone else could. But after rejecting him, she was cursed so that nobody would believe her warnings.

Which meant she spent her life watching dangers emerge, trying to convince people to pay attention and failing again and again.

Thousands of years later, we still remember this story because it speaks to something very human. And most of us have experienced some version of it.

Maybe not on the scale of fallen cities and curses, but in plenty of everyday ways. We’ve watched something unfold that felt predictable in hindsight. We’ve tried to warn someone about something they weren’t ready to hear.

The frustration of seeing something before other people. The helplessness of being unable to make them care. The loneliness of carrying a possibility that nobody else seems to share.

I find some solace in knowing this experience, this feeling, is shared and it’s ancient.

And maybe the story also reminds us that there is rarely a reward for being right. I think there’s a fantasy version of foresight where everyone eventually realises you were correct and you get to enjoy a moment of vindication. But reality tends to feel very different.

If you’ve genuinely seen something troubling coming, watching it happen is rarely enjoyable. There’s no vindication in seeing your fears confirmed.

Whether it’s a failing relationship, a mistake someone wasn’t ready to hear about or a much larger social or technological shift, the outcome is often the same. If the thing you were worried about actually happens, nobody really “wins”.

Don’t turn foresight into an identity

When I began writing this essay, I thought it was going to be about staying hopeful when you feel you’ve spotted something important and the world around you seems resistant to the idea. But I think the more useful lesson lies elsewhere.

For those of us who see ourselves as good at spotting patterns, the challenge isn’t only trusting our judgement. It’s making sure we’re seeing clearly.

Because it’s very easy to identify with Cassandra. Much harder to hold up a mirror and ask where our own ego, biases and blind spots might be distorting what we see.

Because, you see, when you’re good at recognising patterns, it becomes tempting to build an identity around it.

You start collecting evidence that you see things others don’t. The predictions that came true become easier to remember than the ones that didn’t. You begin to trust your instincts a little more, then a little more, then a little more.

And eventually, maybe without noticing, your curiosity starts sort of calcifying into certainty.

I think this is where foresight, or being wedded to the idea that you’re excellent at pattern recognition, becomes dangerous.

Because sometimes what we’re seeing really is a meaningful pattern or signal. And sometimes we’re just seeing anxiety or projecting our fears onto an uncertain future.

The problem is that both experiences can feel the same when you’re inside them.

We know that the human mind is incredibly good at constructing stories and then mistaking them for reality. As Daniel Kahneman spent much of his career demonstrating, confidence and accuracy are not the same thing. We often mistake the coherence of a story for evidence that it’s true.

That’s why I’ve always believed that the most important skill when we’re thinking about the future isn’t how accurately we can predict what’s going to happen, it’s how quickly we can course correct.

Researcher Philip Tetlock found something similar in his work studying the minds of “superforecasters”. The people most consistently good at anticipating change weren’t defined by certainty but by their willingness to revise their views when new evidence appeared.

The willingness to update your views, hold an idea without becoming attached to it and admit that even your strongest intuitions might be wrong.

Because the moment you become emotionally invested in being the person who sees the future first and always knows what’s coming, you actually stop seeing clearly.

Because now you’re no longer observing. Instead, you’re defending an identity. And identities are much harder to update than ideas.

Remember you have blind spots too

A useful thing to remember when you become convinced you've seen something others haven't is that people are rarely ignoring your warnings because they're stupid or malicious. Most of the time, they're looking at the same situation through a completely different lens.

We know that human beings are remarkably skilled at avoiding information that threatens the worlds they’ve built around themselves. And none of us are immune.

We avoid uncomfortable truths about our careers, our relationships, our habits, our health and our beliefs. And that isn’t because we’re irrational, but because uncertainty can be painful. Because changing your mind is difficult. Because acknowledging a problem often requires action, sacrifice or loss.

Psychologist Leon Festinger called this cognitive dissonance, which I’ve written about several times before but it’s always worth revisiting. It describes the discomfort we feel when new information threatens existing beliefs, identities or decisions. We often want to close that gap, remove that discomfort, more than we want the truth.

Once you understand that, collective denial doesn’t become any less frustrating, but it does become much easier to comprehend.

People aren’t always rejecting information because you’re wrong. But they aren’t always rejecting it because you’re right, either.

Often they’re protecting something else entirely. Whether that’s their worldview, their sense of stability or an identity they’ve spent years building.

And if we’re honest, there are probably areas of our own lives where we’re doing exactly the same thing.

The mistake is assuming you’re always Cassandra. Sometimes you’re the person trying to warn everyone else. Sometimes you’re the person dismissing her warning.

The difficult part is that it’s often impossible to know which role you’re occupying in the moment.

Keep paying attention

I wish I had a neat way of resolving this.

We live in a time that can make paying attention feel surprisingly difficult and often heartbreaking. Especially if you’re someone who feels deeply and spends a lot of time thinking about the future, noticing patterns and trying to make sense of what’s changing because you genuinely want the world to be a better place.

Sometimes it can feel like you’re seeing something important while everyone around you is looking the other way. Sometimes it can make you question your own judgement and even your sanity.

As I get older, I realise there are no prizes for being someone who feels so deeply they often feel cracked open. I think that often comes hand in hand with pattern recognition. With wanting to warn people about what’s coming. With wanting, ultimately, to help. It’s not an easy way to move through the world.

But what’s the alternative? To become closed off? To stop caring? That feels worse.

I think the challenge is to remain open despite all of it. And I’m not minimising how difficult that can be.

To resist hardening every observation into certainty. To resist assuming that everyone who disagrees with you is blind, foolish or acting in bad faith. To remember that there are almost certainly things you’re missing too. To acknowledge that it may feel profoundly lonely and yet you are almost certainly not alone in feeling this way.

Maybe I’m struggling to find a neat resolution because there simply isn’t one.

Maybe the work is simply to keep paying attention. To what’s changing, to how you’re interpreting it and to the moments when you might be mistaking a feeling for a fact.

To share what you see without needing immediate confirmation. To stay curious without becoming cynical. And to remain willing, even after all of that, to change your mind.

Kylie Jenner has teamed up with Meta to launch a pair of AI smart glasses. And nothing about this surprises me. In fact, it reads like a page from the tech marketing playbook.

Influential celebs like Kylie partner with tech brands like Meta to make products that might initially seem pointless, ugly or even creepy feel desirable, aspirational and cool.

With celebrity collaborations, the focus is rarely on the tech itself. It’s less about the specs and what a device does, and more about what owning it says about you.

These kinds of collabs aren’t always a success. But if they are, something interesting happens. The product stops feeling pointless or ugly or creepy. At some point, it no longer feels aspirational either. Eventually, it just feels completely normal to own one, or several and then keep upgrading them indefinitely.

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I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. About how we say we’re resistant to certain futures and yet willingly accept them when they’re wrapped up and marketed to us in the right way.

I think part of the reason is we’ve been imagining the future of mass control, mass surveillance all wrong. I bet when most of us picture mass surveillance, we think of something that’s imposed upon us. With great resistance and maybe even violence.

With aesthetics that feel imposing too. This might vary depending on what dystopian sci-fi you’ve seen. But I’m betting it’s grey buildings and CCTV cameras and governments watching our every move from the shadows. Some Orwellian future we’d immediately recognise and instinctively resist.

But it’s unlikely to unfold like that. In fact, I wonder if that old story is actually making us less prepared for the future that’s already arriving.

What if surveillance doesn’t look frightening at all? What if it arrives looking fashionable? Wrapped in a cool pair of sunglasses. Promoted by one of the most influential people on the planet. Shared millions of times across social media because the glasses look really cool.

Well, that possibility certainly feels much more plausible to me today.

We’ve watched this happen with tech before. AirPods, smartwatches, electric cars, these were things we were all unsure about when they first launched.

Over time, many of these devices stopped feeling like new technologies and became lifestyle accessories instead. Once that happens, you stop thinking about the tech at all. It fades into the background of your everyday life.

That might not matter all that much for your beloved AirPods. But AI glasses are different.

They aren’t just glasses that make your life a bit more convenient. Every photo and voice command and place you go and object they recognise and interaction with everyone around you trains and improves AI systems’ understanding of the world.

Which is why it’s starting to feel like the tech that’s designed to collect your data and watch what you and everyone around you does 24/7 doesn’t need to force people to participate. Instead, it just needs to make participation desirable. And eventually, completely normal.

We’ve seen this pattern before. Nobody forced billions of us onto social media. We joined because it seemed useful and fun and, well, because everyone else was there. Many of the big concerns only became obvious later.

But see, AI glasses feel fundamentally different to me because they aren’t just about your decision anymore. You can decide the trade-off is worth it. You can buy into the marketing, wear the glasses and enjoy the convenience.

The people around you don’t get that same choice.

Unlike headphones or a smartwatch, AI glasses have implications for everyone else’s privacy too. And as with so many technologies, the risks are unlikely to be shared equally. Women, girls and marginalised groups already experience disproportionate levels of unwanted attention, harassment and image-based abuse.

Making cameras more ambient and socially invisible will only amplify those problems and make them even harder to protect against.

I think what makes this tricky is not everyone who buys them has bad intentions. The technology does offer genuine benefits, from translation and accessibility to hands-free photography and navigation. But are those benefits really worth the trade-offs?

So even if you’re planning to buy a pair, I’d encourage you to stop for a moment and ask yourself why. Is it because you genuinely want the technology? Or because something else is making it feel desirable?

I guess that’s the age old challenge with marketing. Trying to untangle what seem like your genuine desires from its influence when, by design, it’s not supposed to feel like influence at all.

And you could argue that’s all this is. Isn’t this just how marketing has always worked? You wrap a product in beauty, status and identity and hope people buy it?

Absolutely! However, the difference is most technologies only change the lives of the people who buy them. AI glasses are different. They also change the lives of people who want nothing to do with them. By opting in, you’re opting in for the rest of us too.

In dystopian stories, freedom is obviously taken from us. But what if some of the biggest changes don’t happen that way? What if they happen because we willingly invite them in?

Not because we’re forced to, but because they arrive looking cool, useful and fashionable. Which means by the time they become ordinary, it’s already too late to notice just how much the world around us has changed.

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I’ve spent the past year talking to people about how they use AI and how it might be changing them. And something I’ve noticed again and again is the amount of times people will say something that sounds, at least to me, very contradictory.

“I use it like a therapist, but it doesn’t influence me.”

“I use it as a partner for writing, but it doesn’t impact my creativity.”

“It’s saving me hours every day, but it hasn’t changed how I think.”

Now, maybe all of those statements are true. I can’t know your inner experience. But what I think about every time I hear something like this is Richard Feynman’s famous quote:

“The first principle is you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.”

It’s a powerful, confronting and yet absolutely essential reminder that we are all susceptible to being fooled, and the person capable of doing the best job of fooling us is often ourselves.

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Now, if I ask you to imagine deception, I bet you think of something obvious and external. A scammer manipulating people, a politician bending the truth to fit a specific narrative.

But self-deception never feels like self-deception, it feels like truth. It feels reasonable, clear-headed and, most of all, right. And I think it plays a huge role in how we think about technology’s impact on our lives.

Psychologists have spent decades documenting all of the things I’m bundling together under the umbrella of “self-deception” here, like cognitive biases, blind spots and mental shortcuts.

But what’s particularly confronting is that knowing about them doesn’t make us immune. If anything, the more you know the more sure you seem to become that they’d never impact you.

Many specific cognitive biases have been identified, from confirmation bias (our tendency to seek evidence that supports what we already believe) to the bias blind spot (our tendency to spot bias in everyone except ourselves).

They’re both relevant here, but the one I think about often is the introspection illusion. The belief that we understand our own motivations, behaviours and decision-making far better than we actually do.

What I find fascinating is how reluctant many of us are to accept the possibility that we may all be seeing, experiencing and interacting with the world through layers upon layers of these beliefs and biases.

People get defensive and that makes sense. Because it seems very unnatural, very dangerous somehow, for us to grapple with the fact that a lot of what we think and feel about ourselves and the world might be wrong.

One reason this is so difficult is that our own experience feels like the most trustworthy evidence available. So, if I don’t feel manipulated, influenced or changed, then surely I haven’t been, right?

But much of psychology points in the opposite direction. We often infer our motivations and explain our behaviour after the fact rather than observing it directly.

And this is because evolution didn’t optimise us for perfect objectivity, there were other priorities. Like survival, social cohesion and making decisions under uncertainty.

For many people, certainty feels safer than uncertainty, even when that certainty isn’t fully justified. Which means many of the mental shortcuts that help us navigate the world can also make it harder to see ourselves and what’s going on around us objectively and with clarity.

Maybe that’s why self-deception is so difficult to spot and so difficult to accept. It’s often protecting something. Whether that’s an identity, habit, world view or story about who we are.

And maybe that’s why changing our minds can feel so uncomfortable. Because a belief is rarely just a belief, right? It’s often connected to something else. Woven into a professional identity, a public reputation, a community we belong to, a decision we’ve already made and a story we’ve told ourselves about who we are.

For example, if you’ve spent months telling people AI has transformed your life, admitting it might also have costs can feel threatening. That’s why I don’t think the challenge here is AI itself. It’s our tendency to defend beliefs that have become part of us. Because once that happens and a belief becomes part of your identity, evidence starts competing with self-preservation.

So if it’s part of who we are, I don’t think we need to see this as some problem to be fixed. I doubt we’d ever be able to peel away the layers of our memories and beliefs and experiences and see the world anew anyway. But we also want to do all we can to mitigate their influence on us.

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That’s why I’ve been turning to a concept from Zen Buddhism called beginner’s mind.

It’s about returning, again and again, to a state of intellectual humility. Letting go of your ego and doing what you can to release the mental filters that tell you you’re right, you already know and your opinion is irrefutable.

But see, this isn’t about reaching some kind of moral superiority. It isn’t about being better or right or constantly telling people they’re lying to themselves. No, it transcends all of that.

I love this from Zen Master Shunryu Suzuki:

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.”

Genuinely and truthfully considering your own forms of self-deception will make your life better. Because certainty, tightly clinging to being right, that narrows our experience down. Whereas curiosity widens it and forces us to crack ourselves open.

Which is why I’m moving away from the tedious debate of whether AI is helping or harming us. And focusing more on whether we’re really capable of judging ourselves clearly at all. Which I think involves asking ourselves some big questions and doing all we can to answer them honestly.

Whether that’s specific to AI, like is it helping you think? Or helping you avoid thinking? Or thinking more broadly about the stories you’re telling yourself. What evidence are you ignoring because it doesn’t fit your story? What would convince you that you’re wrong?

The irony, of course, is that my views on AI are shaped by bias too. Considering everything I’ve said above, they have to be. I’m not observing this moment from outside it. I’m living through it alongside everyone else. Which means I’m not certain. But neither is anyone else.

The goal, then, isn’t to eliminate bias completely. But to avoid becoming so attached to our beliefs that we stop questioning them.

I believe this is essential for a brighter future. Because every powerful new technology eventually collides with the same human tendencies we’ve always carried with us. Our need for certainty, our attachment to particular stories and our desire to believe we understand ourselves better than we do.

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At any given moment over the past 12 months of writing about AI, I’ve been fighting the urge to comment “yikes” under every defence of AI art.

Is this level of pettiness justified? Absolutely. But I’m not sure it’s particularly helpful.

Which is why I’ve been trying to reel in my frustration and think more seriously about how we have better conversations about AI, creativity and meaning.

Otherwise debates will continue to collapse, people will continue shouting past one another and the weird twitch in my right eye that kicks in every time I go on LinkedIn will continue to intensify.

This week’s essay is all about that.

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I wanted to share something I’ve found surprisingly useful when talking about AI and creativity. Now, fair warning, it won’t work every time. It might not even work most of the time.

But I do think it’s one of the better ways to encourage more critical thinking around the subject. And, it has very little to do with the technology itself.

It’s really all about asking people to apply the same logic they’re applying to AI creativity to something they personally value and have worked hard for.

So when someone tells me that AI-generated books, music or art are simply “levelling the playing field”, or that AI creativity is no different from human creativity, I sometimes ask whether they’d feel the same way if I used a taxi to complete a marathon.

Or a jet ski for the swimming section of a triathlon.

Or a helicopter to reach the summit of a mountain.

Or if your child spent ten years learning the piano, only to lose a competition to someone who pressed "play" on a self-playing keyboard?

You get the idea.

Now, some people genuinely won’t see a problem with any of those examples. But I’m not sure there’s any getting through to those who are comfortable outsourcing everything to AI for a little instant gratification. (I think of those people a little like Cypher from The Matrix.)

But what I’ve found is that most people who don’t value the process of creating art still value effort, mastery and authenticity somewhere else in their lives.

And that people often defend frictionless efficiency most strongly in areas they don’t personally care much about, whilst fiercely protecting effort and struggle in the things that matter deeply to them.

The person who sees no issue with AI-generated novels might spend years training for a marathon.

The person who dismisses the value of learning an instrument might care deeply about mastering a craft, building a business or earning expertise in their own field.

The principle is often the same. It’s simply being applied inconsistently.

That’s why I find these thought experiments so useful. They’re not designed to trap people or win arguments. They’re designed to help people recognise values they already hold elsewhere and consider whether those same values might apply here too.

Psychologists would probably describe this as inviting in some sort of cognitive dissonance: the discomfort that appears when our values stop lining up across different situations. And I think it’s often in that discomfort where better conversations can begin.

And, don’t worry, I know how this sounds.

There’s certainly an arrogance lurking in my argument here that assumes someone else’s thinking needs changing. I’m well aware of that.

But my concern has never really been about protecting my point of view. It’s not even about protecting art for art’s sake here, though I absolutely would!

Instead, what I’m getting at is more the importance of protecting the parts of life that derive their value from participation.

Because I increasingly feel, reporting on AI and its impact most days, as though we’re being encouraged to optimise our way out of experiences that were never supposed to be optimised.

Not all struggle is meaningful. I’ve written a lot here about burnout, overwork and how the endless hamster wheel of productivity culture is doing nothing for us.

But some forms of struggle are different. The struggle of learning, thinking, writing, creating and making sense of the world. Those aren’t unfortunate obstacles standing between us and meaning. They’re where meaning comes from.

What these thought experiments often reveal is that the argument was never really about AI, but about values.

About why we celebrate effort in some domains and dismiss it in others.

So that’s why I think the goal here isn’t to convince people to care about art.

It’s to help them recognise that the values they already defend elsewhere may deserve to be applied a little more consistently.

Further reading from the archives:

• The AI futures that scare me the most aren’t violent, they’re comfortable

• The self-development trap: why trying harder keeps you burned out

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Arnold Schwarzenegger is fronting a new campaign with Momentous supplements in which he talks about being “trend-proof.” Now, you’ve got to appreciate the irony here because I’d argue the obsession with taking an elaborate cocktail of supplements every morning is, in itself, a trend. But it’s the sentiment that interests me.

Because I’ve always had a soft spot for Schwarzenegger. Maybe it’s growing up on a movie diet of Predator, The Terminator and Commando. But I’ve long found the way he talks about health and fitness refreshing.

Because it’s rarely about hacks, optimisation or chasing the latest thing. Mostly it comes down to consistency, routine, fairly simple workouts and ignoring whatever trend cycle everyone else is currently caught up in.

In many ways, he’s a walking argument for the benefits of becoming trend-proof.

And that phrase has really stayed with me. Maybe it sounds slightly corny, I’m still not sure. But it captures something I’ve been thinking about constantly recently, especially as I watch the way AI is being marketed to us.

Everywhere you look, there’s someone warning that if you’re not learning AI fast enough, using the right tools or “vibecoding” already, you’re falling behind. Influencers, founders and course sellers talk about technological change with this breathless sense of urgency, as though staying still for too long means becoming obsolete.

And I think that manufactured urgency is deeply predatory. Not just because I don’t want people getting swept up in overhyped promises or expensive nonsense, but because the stakes are much bigger than that.

Because I think that resisting trends, refusing to get pulled into the slipstream of whatever everyone else is suddenly buying, doing or obsessing over, is how you retain sovereignty over your attention, energy, creativity and ultimately your life.

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Manufactured urgency

Scroll through TikTok or Instagram and I bet you’ll see more than 50 trends in 15 minutes. Fashion, fitness, marketing, music, technology. The specifics change depending on your algorithm but each one is presented as transformative, essential and, of course, urgent.

And if we were to strip those trends back to their core, we’d probably find they all carry some variation of the same hidden message: your current self is already late. Late to optimise, late to adapt or maybe late to understand. And when you feel perpetually late, you become much easier to direct, easier to sell to and easier to keep in that reactive state.

I don’t think we talk enough about the fact that modern culture increasingly runs on this induced temporal insecurity. A subtle but constant feeling that the moment you stop moving, buying, updating or adapting, you begin falling behind.

That’s why I think trends don’t just sell products or aesthetics or ideas, they destabilise your relationship with time itself. And if you’ve read my work before, you’ll know I’ve become slightly obsessed with how modern life distorts our experience of time.

So, if trends are moving too fast to catch, the only sane response isn’t to run faster. It’s to step off the track entirely and think on a different timescale, right?

But the problem with that is resisting this collective momentum without withdrawing from the world is much harder than it sounds. Which is why I’ve been wondering what it actually looks like to move through the present moment without surrendering entirely to its pace.

And I think the answer might be becoming trend-proof.

Not in the sense of rejecting culture or retreating from modern life. But learning how to engage with rapid cultural change without allowing it to dictate your pace, attention or identity.

Making peace with untimeliness

“You’re running out of time.”

“Don’t fall behind.”

“Adapt or disappear.”

Modern culture increasingly treats urgency as proof of importance. If you’ve read any of my reporting on AI before, you’ll know I’m fascinated by the way it’s often marketed through implied obsolescence: if you’re not using it already, you’re just scared, irrelevant and late.

It taps into something ancient in us. The fear of falling behind the group, of missing the shift, of becoming irrelevant to the tribe. But most modern trends are not survival events, no matter how existential they’re made to feel. You will not disappear because you ignored the latest productivity system or skipped a skincare step or didn’t buy that AI course.

And yet the faster everything moves, the harder it becomes to tell what actually matters to you.

So part of becoming trend-proof is trusting that the pace you’re moving at might already be the right one. And if it isn’t, you can change it yourself. Deliberately and slowly rather than constantly being swept along by someone else’s momentum.

This is what I mean when I say the practice doesn’t need to be about rejecting trends purely to do the opposite of everyone else. It goes deeper than that. It’s about recovering enough trust in your own pace that you no longer experience every shift in culture as a need to accelerate.

I’ve had to make peace with this personally. Living with ADHD eventually forced me to realise that I cannot permanently contort myself to match everyone else’s rhythms, especially around time. And accepting that fully and finally has brought me far more relief this year than that constant, nagging sense of failure ever did.

Nietzsche described certain ideas and ways of thinking as “untimely,” a word I’ve really warmed to while redefining my own pace in the world. By that he meant existing slightly out of step with the present moment, resisting the assumptions and fashions of the age in order to see them more clearly.

I’ve started thinking of untimeliness as a kind of freedom.

This is why trend-proofness has come to mean much more to me than simply resisting hype. It means making peace with your own relationship to time. Understanding that your pace is not necessarily a flaw you need to constantly correct, but a position to work from.

And from that position, I think we make better judgments about what actually deserves our attention.

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Paying attention long enough

To resist trends is sometimes just to practice attention long enough for the shallow stuff to fall away.

I sometimes think of attention like standing beside a fast moving stream, watching leaves and twigs rush past instead of immediately throwing yourself in and being swept along with them.

And yet choosing not to immediately immerse yourself in every new trend is often treated as a kind of failure. Especially with AI right now. If you’re not obsessed, not constantly experimenting, not integrating it into every part of your life, people can quickly frame you as resistant to change, out of touch or somehow intellectually stagnant.

But I think that reveals something important about the way we currently understand attention. We increasingly mistake speed for intelligence, reactivity for engagement and urgency for importance.

Which is why I’ve always been fascinated by the way French philosopher Simone Weil thought about the power of attention and how we can think of it as a discipline. She wrote:

“We do not have to understand new things, but by dint of patience, effort and method to come to understand with our whole self the truths which are evident.”

I love that because it frames attention as an active practice of discernment. Again, not disengagement from the world, but refusing to mistake manufactured urgency for importance.

Because it’s only by paying attention long enough that we can separate the shallow from the meaningful, collective momentum from genuine value and false urgency from what actually matters.

The creative power of untimeliness

I’ve started thinking about creativity through this lens too. And not necessarily grand artistic acts, though please go and write the book or paint the thing if you want to. I mean the act of living deliberately. Building a life actively rather than passively. To me, those are creative acts too.

Because, to me, trends always feel like this relentless march down the same pre-determined path. The same aesthetics, language and aspirations repeating themselves over and over.

But the creative act often begins by stepping slightly outside of that momentum. By choosing the slower route, the riskier route, the road less travelled.

There’s no shortage of artists and thinkers who circle these ideas of choosing differently in the pursuit of creativity, but I’ve always loved this line from Mary Oliver:

“My responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely [...] My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever and howsoever it may arrive.”

It’s stayed with me because real creation almost always begins by stepping out of sync. By seeing connections other people haven’t noticed yet. By bringing together disparate ideas in what Einstein once called “combinatory play.”

Real creation requires enough distance from the present moment to hear something other than collective noise. To notice different patterns, to make unexpected connections and move beyond imitation.

That’s why trends so often produce sameness while I genuinely believe it’s untimeliness that produces style, thought, art and originality.

And this makes sense when you bring it all back to that temporal insecurity. Trends keep you reactive. But stepping back, slowing down and making peace with untimeliness allows you to become generative.

Maybe that’s because trends keep you externally directed, while the trend-proof begin building something slower and more self-authored instead. Works of art, tastes, standards, rituals, ways of living that don’t need constant validation from the algorithm, the outside world or the present moment.

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The wisdom of not understanding

When I started thinking about this, I kept returning to Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who believed creative work should emerge from what he called “inner necessity” rather than external approval.

And I think that’s part of what trends so often interrupt. They pull us outward constantly, away from the slower process of discovering what feels true to us before the world tells us what to want.

Rilke also wrote about embracing what he called “a child’s wise not-understanding” and allowing others around you to talk about the nonsense they want to talk about without shaking your sense of self and purpose. I like that sentiment because we increasingly treat certainty, speed and immediate comprehension as signs of intelligence.

But some of the wisest people seem to move through the world differently. They’re more open, curious and less concerned with performing expertise all the time.

Zen Buddhism calls this “beginner’s mind,” approaching the world without rigid preconceptions and allowing yourself to encounter things with genuine curiosity rather than immediate certainty.

Which is why I don’t see becoming trend-proof as ignorance, disengagement or saying no to the future. It’s about creating enough distance from collective momentum that you can think clearly, notice different patterns and hear your own inner voice again.

In many ways, it’s actually about saying a resounding yes to what’s coming next. Yes to slower forms of creation, to uncertainty, to moving at a pace that allows you to hear your own thoughts clearly enough to know what you actually want.

Because trends, by their very nature, flatten difference. They pull us toward the same desires, the same aesthetics, the same ways of moving through the world.

But a meaningful life, especially a creative one, I think that may require you to become comfortable living just a little out of step.

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"This strange moment in history, when time feels so unmoored, might in fact provide the ideal opportunity to reconsider our relationship with it."

– Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

The pitch to encourage you to use AI is genius because it’s all about time. The one thing we’ll never get more of.

Subscribe to this tool and you’ll get hours back. Get ChatGPT to [insert task] for you and you’ll be free to do what you like. Automate the boring stuff and you can spend those banked minutes on things that actually matter.

It lands so hard right now because many of us are tired, burned out, over-worked and under-rested. We’ve reached a moment of such profound time poverty that we’ll begrudgingly sign a Faustian pact with an AI company to claw even the tiniest slivers of it back.

But I’ve got bad, albeit unsurprising, news: it isn’t working.

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AI isn’t saving us the vast amounts of time we were promised. Sure, it’s very good at redistributing it, creating space in one area only for something else to rush in and fill it. The inbox empties but the to-do list grows and the tools multiply but the hours needed to wrangle them don’t.

But that elusive, irresistible promise of finally being time rich always remains just ever-so-slightly out of reach.

In his transformative book about time, Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman writes that “the day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control.”

And that’s not because you haven’t found the right system or the right AI app. But because this idea that time is a resource to be accumulated and spent wisely if you just capitalism hard enough is baked into how we’ve come to think of it.

But it’s all an illusion. Time isn’t a resource and, ironically, often the more you try to chase it, manage it, optimise it and control it, the faster it seems to slip away.

That’s a very difficult thing for many people to accept because it punctures something we’ve spent our whole lives chasing.

We’ve built an entire productivity culture on the belief that there is a right way to spend time if you just find the right tools and habits and systems to get you there. And by arranging them in the right, precise way, maybe we’ll eventually arrive at some calmer shore where we can finally live in peace. AI is just the latest, and most seductive, version of that belief.

So what do we do with that?

There’s a dark fantasy film called Krull I was obsessed with as a kid. In it, a woman hands a man a fistful of sand to represent his life. He runs frantically, trying to complete his mission and find somewhere safe to put it. But what really stuck with me was that the faster he runs, the faster the sand falls through his fingers, until there’s none left.

I’ve been thinking about that scene a lot recently because it feels like what many of us are doing. Running faster, cupping our hands tighter, convinced that if we just find the right vessel, whether that’s the right app, AI workflow, perfect routine, new kind of therapy, we’ll stop losing it.

But the cruel truth is that the sand runs through our fingers anyway.

And after living like with that mindset for so long, it’s hard to pivot. Which means the fix needs to be drastic. A handy little reframe won’t cover it, what I think we need is much closer to an exorcism.

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We need to rid ourselves of the idea that time is a resource, and accept instead that it is the very substance of existence itself. The stuff the universe is made from. It’s elastic, ever-expanding, from the first moment out into a possible infinity.

I know how that might sound. I do tend to swing between pragmatic and grounded, and something a bit more expansive and dare I say woo-woo, sometimes within the same paragraph.

But this isn’t meant in a mystical sense, I’m being quite literal about scale. Because when you hold time at the scale of the universe, the anxiety about inbox zero starts to look very different.

Burkeman calls this “cosmic insignificance therapy” and it’s been my North Star since I first read his book. The idea that the universe couldn’t care less how you spend your time, and that this should feel freeing rather than bleak. He wrote:

“This realisation isn’t merely calming but liberating. Because once you’re no longer burdened by such an unrealistic definition of a ‘life well spent,’ you’re freed to consider the possibility that a far wider variety of things might qualify as meaningful ways to use your finite time.”

But I think insignificance is only the first step in untangling the knots we find ourselves in with time. It still positions you as separate from it. I think of myself as this tiny figure in a vast auditorium, sitting in the dark while everything plays out overhead, feeling the universe’s size as weight rather than wonder.

That sense of separation, of us here, and time over there, starts to fall apart. In physics, and in philosophy. Let me use someone else’s words to describe what I mean.

Jorge Luis Borges wrote:

“Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”

We’re not outside of time and the universe looking in. We are part of it.

By the simple fact of you being here, reading this, experiencing this moment, you’re already inside it. And in accepting that, what we see around us might be finite, but what we’re part of is not.

I’d like to think that shift might change our sense of purpose entirely. It’s not about using time wisely, but experiencing it. And when your only goal is to experience time, you’re no longer failing in the way you’ve been taught to measure it.

We can stop reducing everything to another app, another list, another tool promising to make life smooth and frictionless. And do the opposite instead. To see the goal as experiencing and to think at the scale of deep time.

Rather than clinging to our allotted fistful of sand, let’s dig our hands into it. Feel the grain worn smooth from rock over tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of years.

None of this makes the deadlines go away. But I think it can change what you carry while you meet them. For most people, that’s the weight of guilt and the constant sense of falling short.

But those aren’t facts about time, no matter how much you’ve been trained to believe they are. They’re symptoms of mistaking time for something to be optimised and won.

When the goal is simply to experience, you can’t fall behind. You’re already in it. Time is the substance you are made of.

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I saw a comment on a TikTok the other day where someone was asking if anyone could summarise the video. And someone replied saying: summarise what, this is a 60 second video.

And something about that really hit me. I found it funny but also genuinely concerning. This sense that nothing can be consumed anymore. We desperately want the short summary by default.

Everything has to be condensed, optimised and summarised. And AI has made it so much easier to give in to that. Why read that long article that’ll take ten minutes out of your day when you can get the summary in three bullet points in just three seconds?

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You could say this has always been the case, the tech has just improved. I remember when I was studying English Literature at uni I was required to sometimes read four novels a week, alongside essays, trying to have a social life despite being a little introverted weirdo and everything else uni throws at you. I’d regularly try and find summaries online for books I’d managed to read some, most, nearly all of, just to fill in the gaps.

But that’s because I was spread so thinly, stretched, stressed and panicking. It felt like that was the only way through. Is that the state we’re all unconsciously in right now?

The culture that made us this way

I’ve been writing a lot recently about philosopher Byung-Chul Han (you can read my pieces on his concept of hyperattention and the self development trap) who calls this constant need for watered down information a symptom of the burnout society.

He argues that we’re so conditioned to perform, produce and optimise that we’ve lost the ability to just pause and take something in. So of course we want everything spoon fed. And of course AI will oblige.

Which means, in some ways, it’s not really our fault. This isn’t another thing to add to the list of things to beat ourselves up for. Instead, it’s a product of this particular moment in time.

The broader, structural reasons Han points to, sure. But also the exhaustion, the sheer volume of information and AI tools that will summarise anything with zero friction. Google’s AI summaries at the top of search results (which are wrong 10% of the time btw) and AI-generated email summaries will now do it for you without even being asked.

But the thing is, we know that every time we ask for the summary and every time we skip to the end, we’re just further training ourselves out of the ability to take things in, concentrate and sit with things.

Nicholas Carr argued in The Shallows that the internet is changing what we read and how our brains process reading. So the more we skim and jump around and scan a summary, the more we’re actually training ourselves toward that mode of attention. Whereas deep reading becomes harder.

So, in this way, summaries don’t just reflect the fact we’re exhausted and distracted and seeking an easier way out. They accelerate that distraction.

The case for doing it the hard way

I’m not suggesting a ban on summarising, summaries serve a purpose. If you need to quickly understand a low stakes work report that doesn’t interest you anyway, fine, use AI to summarise it with caution. If you must.

But that can’t become the default way for us to take in any information. As hard and uncomfortable as that is, we need to keep doing it. Continuously, messily and imperfectly. And I say that as someone with ADHD, I get it’s not easy!

Sometimes, you need to watch the whole video, read the full page, get to the bottom of this essay. If you’ve been moving from summary to summary, it’ll feel uncomfortable. But that discomfort is kind of the whole point.

Of appreciating art, of understanding words, of having a shared experience, of training your attention, of slowly coaxing your concentration back, of putting your mind to work at a time when AI is all too willing to do it for you.

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Further recommended reading:

• The Shallows – What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr

• The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han

• Screen Time by me!

• Why living on high alert has become our default setting

• The self-development trap: why trying harder keeps you burned out

There’s a way of living, of sensing, that I’m obsessed with, called the longbody. It’s a felt understanding that the self doesn’t end at the skin. It extends further outwards, into family, community, objects, places and the natural world.

This idea has deep roots in the spiritual tradition of the Iroquois and other Native American peoples. And it’s always fascinated me because it suggests that the boundary between your self and the world can be permeable.

I think a lot about this permeability in relation to technology. In how devices have become a physical extension of our bodies, but also in how our sense of who we are and our place in the world has been irrevocably influenced by the internet.

We might physically sit at home on our phones, but we feel connected to people we’ve never met. We absorb the emotions of strangers, watch faces flash by in never-ending streams, take in more opinions in an hour than our ancestors encountered in a lifetime.

The impulse is the same ancient one – to extend beyond ourselves, into community, into connection. But the environment is entirely different.

The longbody extended the self into spaces built on reciprocity – like community, relationship, land and spirit. What we extend into now was designed, very rapidly and with no concern for our wellbeing, to take from us. Not to give anything back.

A daily session of synesthesia

Philosopher Marshall McLuhan saw something like this coming back in the 1960s, watching the first generation raised on broadcast media. When thinking about technology and its impact on experience, he wrote:

“These massive extensions of our central nervous systems have enveloped Western man in a daily session of synesthesia.”

He wasn’t describing a condition here, but naming the consequence of what was already happening when we extend ourselves too far. When our attention, emotions and senses are given over to technology, and slowly stop feeling like our own.

I experience mild synesthesia. I visualise it as a tray of watercolours, each colour a different sense. Mostly the colours bleed into each other in ways that are interesting, beautiful even. But sometimes the boundaries dissolve in ways that are disorienting – especially when I’m already stressed or sensitive.

Technology feels the same to me. Not wholly bad, but a place where experiences, emotions and opinions bleed into each other in ways that leave us feeling frayed and strung out. A loss of the clean separateness of things, and a dissolution of where you end and the rest of it begins.

Engineered over-extension

What McLuhan couldn’t have anticipated when he first compared emerging tech to synesthesia in this way was the degree to which that extension would be engineered.

Like infinite scroll, autoplay, the sidebar of related videos, the prompt asking if you’d like to know more. None of these are neutral features. They’re explicitly designed to prevent return to your self. To keep your nervous system extended, spread thin across the spidering network of servers and computers and smart devices, never quite contracting back to its source.

I’ve written about infinite scroll before and it’s clear what that wants to take from you: your sense of time. You lose all grasp of it, moving from video to video, conversation to conversation, face to face. But it’s not only time that gets distorted. It’s your attention, emotion, energy, senses and self. All of it spread so thinly outward.

Enough of us don’t think about it this way. We talk about tech in terms of distraction and addiction. But I think the issue is the never-ending, appealing invitation to overextend ourselves, perpetually, without limit. And we have almost no cultural framework for understanding what that means.

A natural holding environment

The longbody, for all its permeability, seems to have a natural mechanism for return built into it. You extend into your kin, your land, your ancestors – and I think they hold you. The extension feels reciprocal in a way that ours simply isn’t.

The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott had a name for what that holding makes possible. He called it a holding environment, a sense of being bounded, contained and met. Without it, he believed the self becomes precarious. Anxiety arises not from internal conflict alone but from an environmental failure.

And we have built an environment that is the exact opposite. One explicitly designed to dissolve edges, prevent containment, keep the self perpetually extended and therefore perpetually available and online.

I’ve written before about burnout and how I think we misread its symptoms as personal failure rather than as a reasonable response to unreasonable conditions. This feels like another version of that same argument. The exhaustion so many of us carry right now is the exhaustion of a self that has been stretched to its edges, asked to be everywhere at once, with nothing holding it together.

Maybe the longbody keeps coming back to me because it doesn’t say stop extending, stop connecting. It just reminds me that this hunger – to reach beyond ourselves, to feel connected, to be part of something larger – is ancient and real. We’ve just fed it into something that was designed to take from it. Not to nourish it.

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I turned 13 a few days before we ushered in the new millennium.

I’m not sure I realised it at the time, but that meant it was a monumental threshold for all sorts of reasons. From child to teen. One millennium to a newer, shinier one. Known to unknown. Past to future.

All I remember about that last night of 1999 is sitting on the beach with my mum, brother and some family friends. I don’t know what we were doing, but I know what we were watching.

The waves crashed on the shore in front of us as fireworks burst over our heads. And a man we didn’t know danced around a fire, dressed as an astronaut.

Y2K futurism: space stuff, blobjects and lots of blue

When I decided to start this series, I wasn’t sure which of all the imagined futures that fascinate me to pick first. But I kept being pulled back to the late 90s and early 2000s, specifically Y2K futurism.

Now, how we define Y2K futurism is open to interpretation. Have a look online and you’ll see different future aesthetics are hotly contested, which means my version might differ a little from yours.

But to me it’s cool, icy, frosted blue shades. Lots of silver. Space-age shapes bleeding into streetwear. And in tech and product design, things that felt more like the future than the future actually does now. Think blobjects, translucent casing, bright colours, molten chrome. Oh and lots more blue.

It’s hard to remember how much of this aesthetic was present in my day to day around that time. Especially as a kid living in a little town on the North Yorkshire coast. Or whether it was more a vision of the future witnessed through the portals of magazine pages or TV screens. But I do remember loving blue glittery eyeshadow, and I owned a huge pair of silver moon boots I found in a charity shop.

There were other futures being imagined around this time and before that had a huge impact on this particular one – think Gen X soft club and afrofuturism – and I’ll get to those later in the series. But Y2K futurism feels like it deserves its own moment here. Because I see people mention all the time they feel nostalgic for this very particular time, this look, this vibe. And I think it’s because it represents something huge: hope.

Rosy retrospection

Now, here’s where I want to be careful and introduce a cognitive bias relevant to Y2K futurism and this series as a whole: rosy retrospection.

The tendency to remember past experiences more positively than you actually felt them at the time. It underpins nostalgia, the thing that does the distorting. And it’s easy to look back at an era and decide the underlying mood was X, when really you’re just misremembering or simply remembering what it was like to be a kid.

But I’m not sure rosy retrospection fully explains our attachment to Y2K futurism. Because what we’re nostalgic for isn’t just a couple of years in the past. Instead, it’s a vision of the future that never arrived. That’s a stranger and more specific thing to long for. You’re not misremembering what was, you’re misremembering what you thought would be.

And I think that distinction is important here, because WOW the contrast with now is so very sharp.

Before tech swallowed the future

Part of what draws me back to Y2K futurism, as someone who has spent years writing about tech, is how differently we felt about innovation then. There was so much promise. The internet was young, tech was getting smaller and cooler and better, and none of us had any idea what dependence on screens or an algorithm would actually feel like.

The despair and cynicism that seems threaded into everything right now wasn’t visible yet. The sense that the people building our future don’t particularly care about us, that wasn’t really part of the picture. Whereas now even those of us who may have described ourselves as cautious optimists are watching tech companies move faster than regulation can follow, faster than we can think.

So when I think about why Y2K futurism pulls at people, I don’t think it’s really about wanting to go back. It’s not about wanting to wear the moon boots or the silver space trousers or own innovative little blobjects. (Although I’d happily take a blobject over a boring iPhone right now.) It’s a longing for a version of the future that still felt expansive, like it had so very much space in it, so very much to offer. Room to dream about newness and change without that nauseous sinking feeling that we already know how the story ends.

You could say that about a lot of imagined futures. But Y2K futurism feels particular, because it sits right on the edge. It was the last moment before tech infiltrated everything, so it represented a clear before and after time. I hadn’t even got my first mobile phone then. No wonder so many of us look back to it. We’re trying to remember what it felt like to stand on that edge when things still felt hopeful and before we knew what was coming.

I’d love to know what the turn of the millennium was like for you. Does Y2K Futurism ring true? And what would you like me to explore next in the Imagined Futures series?

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I am fascinated by the deeply human compulsion to think about the future – to dream about it, visualise it, plan for it – and the equally powerful urge to retreat from it entirely. To find comfort in older, imagined futures that we never arrived at, but perhaps now wish we had.

It’s this tension I keep thinking about, and it’s what’s driving a new series I’m starting here. But first, I want to explain why I think it matters right now.

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Jettisoned from the linear flow of time

Groundhog Day isn’t a typical time travel movie. There aren’t any elaborate time machines, glowing portals or scientists scrawling timelines on a chalkboard, just a cynical weatherman called Phil living the same day over and over.

But that’s why it’s also one of my favourite time travel movies. Because in the absence of all the science-fiction stuff – and in amongst the romance and comedy – we get to witness an unflinching portrayal of just how frustrating, despairing and lonely it might be to find yourself jettisoned from the linear flow of time, and instead trapped in an almost never-ending loop.

Without being fully aware of it, many of us might have felt the same hopelessness as Phil for a similar reason. Those who study time and how we relate to it call this a loss of ‘temporal agency’ – the ability to structure and manage our time.

Think back to the stay-at-home measures at the height of the pandemic. Due to a combination of constantly shifting guidelines, conflicting advice, and rising case numbers, the future felt utterly inaccessible.

Anthropologist Jane Guyer calls this state ‘enforced presentism.’ The feeling of being stuck in the present, finding it difficult to look back to a ‘before’ time, and unable to plan or look forward because who knows what will happen next?

The ‘enforced’ bit here is important. It’s not like mindfulness, where choosing to be present is, for the most part, a worthwhile exercise. Instead, we’re stuck there, with no idea as to what our future might hold. We end up feeling just like Phil – angry, scared and hopeless.

We may no longer be locked down physically, but I think that same feeling of being trapped between a known past and a frightening future hasn’t gone away. If anything, it’s intensified.

Geopolitical chaos, climate change accelerating faster than our political systems can respond, the sense that AI is reshaping work and land and resources and our minds before anyone has agreed what the rules should be. I get the argument that every generation thinks it’s living through the worst of times. But the presentism feels real and acute right now.

Fragments of past futures

This is when nostalgia gets ramped up. When we feel sad or lonely, when the present is uncomfortable and the future is frightening, we desperately reach for fragments of the past to make sense of things.

But what I’m really interested in isn’t just the act of looking back. It’s looking specifically at the past’s vision of the future. All of those imagined tomorrows, filled with hope and optimism and occasionally dread, that we never quite arrived at.

First up, it’ll be Y2K Futurism. An aesthetic that felt more like the future than the future does now. Defined by space-age design and techno-optimism that defined how we imagined the future at the turn of the millennium.

I wanted to start here partly because I think almost everyone alive at the time had a complicated relationship with that particular time, maybe hopeful, maybe excited, maybe anxious, maybe all three. But also because I turned 13 just days before the year 2000 arrived. It felt like a monumental threshold for me and my generation for all sorts of reasons.

Think of the series as part aesthetic history, part inquiry into why these imagined futures mattered, and what they might tell us about where we are now.

Let me know what you’d like me to cover next.

I wrote a book about the psychology underpinning tech dependence. Which means I’ve spent a lot of time researching why our social media habits mess with us so much.

Practically, that looked like a great deal of reading, interviewing and note-taking. But the sheer amount of information about why we’re experiencing so much collective turmoil right now felt dizzying, like looking down at the world below from a great height.

I did my very best to distill everything I found – the studies, the insights, the frameworks – into the most helpful guide when I wrote Screen Time. But no matter how simply it’s presented, I know suggesting you unpick years of tech habits that are so finely woven into every part of your life can seem like a task so monumental it borders on absurd.

To objectively see, understand and then change these ingrained behaviours can feel like a gross act of contortion. We are being asked to bend and twist ourselves in ways that are not human in order to “fix” all of our problems.

But one idea that’s stuck with me recently, offered a much-needed sense of clarity, and prompted a sort of unravelling of my own habits, comes from philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s work, particularly his book The Burnout Society. Which, as I’ve mentioned a few times already, had a pretty profound effect on me when I read it earlier this year and I’ve been talking to anyone who’ll listen about it.

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Constantly in survival mode, forever on high alert

Han writes about this concept called hyperattention. A state in which we feel anxious, depleted, constantly flitting and scattered, switching between tasks and things and unable to sit in a solid, contemplative state of attention.

That latter type is the kind of attention that Han says we do want. The kind that breeds creativity, culture and meaning.

“We owe the cultural achievements of humanity – which include philosophy – to deep, contemplative attention. Culture presumes an environment in which deep attention is possible. Increasingly, such immersive reflection is being displaced by an entirely different form of attention: hyperattention. A rash change of focus between different tasks, sources of information and processes characterises this scattered mode of awareness.”

He compares living in a state of hyperattention to living like a wild animal. Constantly in survival mode and forever on high alert. Eating or worrying about being eaten. It is our incessant multi-tasking, Han says, that is ushering in a regression. Causing us to live in a kind of wilderness.

“Human beings in the late-modern society of work and information are not the only ones capable of multitasking. Rather, such an aptitude amounts to regression. Multitasking is commonplace among wild animals. It is an attentive technique indispensable for survival in the wilderness.”

Reading that comparison shifted something in me. Because I’ve been unable to accurately describe the particular shape of the burnout I’ve arrived at several times, like the world’s most un-fun merry-go-round, over the past few years.

It has characteristics of depression, of flatness, sure. But there’s something primal and panicked and undeniably animal-like about it too. I feel like prey but what’s hunting me doesn’t pose a physical danger. Instead, it lives inside my phone. It’s the unread emails, the unanswered messages, the promise of work, the fear of it being taken away, the feeds and the news and the faces, oh so many faces that our little monkey minds were never built to see.

We are doing this to ourselves

I believe the hyperattention Han writes about is so insidious because often we delude ourselves into thinking that we are in fact in that deep attentive state, experiencing the “good” kind of attention.

We’re learning! We’re glowing up! We’re looking for the next interesting thing! Or maybe we’re staying informed, keeping on top of the geopolitical chaos. Like a good person absolutely should. It feels productive, worthy even. It certainly feels like we’re paying attention.

But it’s mental trickery. The kind engineered by tech companies and the kind we perpetuate ourselves. Scrolling, checking, convincing ourselves this time it’ll feel different, it’ll feel like enough. We’re being bombarded with these things. These faces, ideas, news stories, opinions and images, rather than actively choosing them. Nothing is sinking in.

Instead, we’re giving in to our constant need to be checking and looking and scanning, living like a scared animal. We’re trying to self-soothe by constantly fuelling the parts of ourselves that keep us dependent and scared. We are, maddeningly, causing the state of hyperattention we so desperately want to be free from.

The tricky act of paying attention to attention

The reason I’ve found this concept helpful is that learning about it has made me more discerning about what kind of state I’m actually living in.

For me, it’s about pausing. Does this moment feel frenetic and reactive? Am I on edge, unable to stop looking at my feed or the news? Does time seem to fly by and concertina in on itself? Or does it feel slow and steady? Do I have pauses? Do I feel creative? Is my general vibe calm and grounded?

As with all exercises like this, the challenging burden, that act of near-impossible self contortion, is solely up to you. Which is why I won’t always catch it. But sometimes I might. And when I do, I want to pay close attention to the particular shape and flavour and texture of my attention. And ask myself: which state is this behaviour really breeding within me?

If you’d rather watch me talk about this, there’s a brief explainer over on my TikTok, which is here:

@beccacaddyThe is changed my perspective on attention, scrolling and why I feel so anxious all the time 🙃 #tech #philosophy #mindset #criticalthinking

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