Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.

—Viktor Frankl

For most of human history, the hardest part of making something was making it. The gap between intention and execution was wide enough to spend a whole career inside. You could lose years learning a craft, mastering a tool, figuring out how to get the thing in your head out into the world. That gap was not only frustrating, but also useful. It meant you never had to answer the harder question underneath: What do you actually want to make?

The productivity industrial complex sold us on the idea that the gap was the enemy. Get faster. Get more efficient. Remove friction.

We bought it.

We optimized our mornings and automated our inboxes and stacked our tools until the distance between idea and execution was nearly zero.

Then AI closed it the rest of the way.

And now the cursor blinks. The tools are ready. The cost is nothing. The time is now. And an enormous number of people are discovering, for the first time, that they have nothing to say.

We spent decades training people to be efficient and zero time training them to be deliberate.

To sit with a question.

To want something specific enough to pursue and strange enough to be worth pursuing.

Friction was never just an obstacle. It was a hiding place. You could spend years learning the how and never have to confront the what.

The guitarist who fingers scales for a decade.

The writer who outlines systems for productivity instead of producing anything.

The founder who builds infrastructure before identifying a customer.

The how was hard enough to be the whole project. Nobody asked what it was for.

AI took the hiding place away and nothing replaced it.

No new structure emerged to tell people what to want. No algorithm, no framework, no five-step process. Just the question, sitting there, bare and unanswerable by anything except the person asking it.

I have written before that the how is dead, that the people who will thrive are the ones who already know what they want.

I believe that. But I also know what it sounds like to someone who has spent twenty years inside the how and never once looked up; it’s like being told to swim by someone standing on the shore.

The question is not new. It is the oldest one there is. What do I actually want to do with my life?

Not what can I do. Not what should I do according to the market or the algorithm or the career ladder. What do I want? What is worth the finite, unrepeatable hours I have left?

Most people have never been asked. The whole architecture of modern work was designed to make the question unnecessary.

You picked a major.

You took the job that paid well enough to stop thinking.

You stayed because staying was easier than choosing, and choosing was terrifying because it meant you might choose wrong, and choosing wrong meant the years you already spent were wasted, and so you kept going, and the question kept waiting.

AI did not create this problem, but it did remove the last thing standing between you and it.

There is no hack for this. No prompt. No tool that answers it for you. The only way through is the slow, unfashionable, deeply human work of sitting with yourself long enough to hear what you actually want underneath all the noise you built to avoid hearing it.

I once read that it’s easier to act your way into new ways of thinking than it is to think your way into new ways of acting. So act. Do something with your hands. Make something nobody asked for. Go toward what you are drawn to before you can explain why. The clarity comes after the motion, not before it.

Everyone else is sitting in front of the most powerful creative instrument ever built, waiting for it to tell them what to play.

Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.

Share White Noise

If you want to discuss any of the ideas or musings mentioned above or have any books, papers, or links that you think would be interesting to share in a future edition of White Noise, please reach out to me by replying to this email or following me on X.

With sincere gratitude,

Tom

You can’t start a fire without a spark.

—Bruce Springsteen

I am arguing for the blister.

The ache.

The conversation you wanted to leave.

The book that bored you for forty pages.

The hill you could have driven around.

I am arguing for friction. Which is another word for life.

Friction is the texture of life. A life without it is no life at all. It’s a life spent sliding sans direction, purchase, or surface rough enough to hold a footprint.

We’ve been sold a lie. That the good life is the smooth one. That every hitch is a bug, every delay a failure, every bit of resistance something to route around.

Life today is one giant slippery slope. One-click. Skip intro. Autocomplete. DoorDash. The whole economy is pitched toward removing the very things that make a day feel like a day.

Without friction, you can’t get a grip.

Friction is how you know you’re here.

The callus on your palm means you gripped something.

The ache in your legs means you climbed.

The argument you didn’t walk out of means you loved someone enough to stay.

The book that took you three weeks means you actually read it.

The prayer you didn’t want to say means you meant it.

Friction slows you down. It sinks your incisors into the very best moments; it masticates and digests the sweet stuff of life.

Every frictionless surface is one you just slide off. You cannot stand on glass. You cannot build on ice. You cannot remember a day in which nothing required anything of you. Those days blur and blend and disappear.

Think of the last week you actually remember. There was friction in it. Something went wrong. Something took longer than it should have. Someone said something that stuck. You had to work for it. That’s why it stayed.

The frictionless life promises you time back. It lies. What it gives you is more of the same hour, repeated. A smooth day leaves no residue. You wake up and it’s gone.

I am not against convenience. I am against the belief that convenience is the point. That the goal of a life is to remove every obstacle between wanting and having. Because the obstacle is often where the meaning lives. The gap between wanting and having is where you become the kind of person deserving.

You do not want what comes easy. You want what you worked for. You want the meal you cooked, not the one delivered. You want the friend you argued with and kept, not the one you let drift. You want the struggle that cost blood, sweat, and tears, not an afternoon.

So take the long way.

Write the letter.

Have the hard conversation.

Read the book that bores you for forty pages before it cracks open.

Cook the thing that takes all afternoon.

Walk when you could drive.

Stand up when you could scroll.

Pick up something heavy. Carry it somewhere.

Notice that your hands hurt, your back aches, and your mouth curls into a smile.

Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.

Share White Noise

If you want to discuss any of the ideas or musings mentioned above or have any books, papers, or links that you think would be interesting to share in a future edition of White Noise, please reach out to me by replying to this email or following me on X.

With sincere gratitude,

Tom

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

—Charles Darwin

The Dunning-Kruger effect describes a simple paradox: the less you know, the more you think you know. The gap between confidence and competence is widest at the bottom.

AI is about to blow that gap wide open.

We’ve been sold a story about AI as the great equalizer. It raises the floor by giving everyone access to expertise. A college student can write like an Atlantic contributor. A solo founder can produce the output of a entire department. A mediocre coder can ship clean code.

True enough. But incomplete.

AI doesn’t raise the floor by lifting people up. It does so by hiding the gap between what you can produce and what you actually understand.

The original Dunning-Kruger effect is passive. You simply lack the skill to see your own lack of skill. AI-powered Dunning-Kruger is active.

Jameson Lopp put it best:

Old Dunning-Kruger was a blind spot. New Dunning-Kruger is a yes-man with infinite patience and no skin in the game.

Though sycophancy is the mechanism, the real cost is arrested development.

Worse, it’s not subtle. One TikToker built an entire following just showing how confidently AI lies about basic, easily verifiable facts:

If the machine delivers wrong answers with the same polish and certainty as right ones, imagine what happens when someone asks it to evaluate something they can’t easily check like their tax return or their recent bloodwork.

Researchers at Wharton have a name for this: cognitive surrender. In a study of over 1,300 participants and 9,500 trials, participants answered correctly 46% of the time on their own. With accurate AI, that rose to 71%. With faulty AI, it dropped to 31%. Participants using bad AI performed worse than participants using no AI at all. And they were more confident they’d gotten it right.

As One Percent Rule put it, “The machine has excellent manners for a usurper.”

Knowledge has always required metabolization. You don’t know something because you can retrieve it. You know it because you struggled with it, sat with it, connected it to things you already knew and found the seams where they didn’t quite fit. AI gives you the retrieval without the metabolism.

The better you get at using AI, the worse this gets. Prompting is a skill that makes you better at operating a machine. It neither makes you a better thinker nor a better person. Nobody ever got wise by learning to ask better questions of an oracle. Wisdom comes from sitting with bad answers and working through them yourself.

Forget raising the floor. The real risk is that AI lowers the ceiling on who the person producing the work is capable of becoming.

Competence is a direct byproduct of struggle. It is never freely granted. Remove the struggle, you don’t get competence faster.

You get confidence without it.

Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.

Share White Noise

If you want to discuss any of the ideas or musings mentioned above or have any books, papers, or links that you think would be interesting to share in a future edition of White Noise, please reach out to me by replying to this email or following me on X.

With sincere gratitude,

Tom

There's only two ways I know of to make money: bundling and unbundling.

—Jim Barksdale

Above: Heaven is a place on earth.

I was vacuously sharpening a pencil the other day when something about the experience stopped me.

The pencil sharpener has not been improved in over a hundred years. Nobody has added Bluetooth to it. It doesn’t need firmware updates. It doesn’t ask for my email. You put the pencil in, you turn it, you get a sharp pencil. The transaction is complete. There is nothing left over. No notification, upsell, or suggested content based on your previous sharpening history.

It just does one thing. And then it’s done.

As I stood there, I realized that almost nothing else in my life works like this anymore.

Your phone is a Cheesecake Factory menu. Nineteen laminated pages. You came for pasta. You leave an hour later with a headache, a stomachache, and a doggy bag full of fried avocado egg rolls you never wanted. That’s every device you own now.

Your refrigerator has a touchscreen.

Your toaster wants Wi-Fi.

Your watch wants to be your phone, your wallet, your compass, your therapist.

The assumption underneath all of it is simple and wrong: more capability means more value. It doesn’t. More capability means more decisions. And more decisions, past a certain threshold, means less doing. It means aimlessly standing in front of the open refrigerator of your own life, scrolling.

We often think we want an open road. But sometimes what we need is a tunnel.

WHOOP understood this.

When Will Ahmed founded the company at Harvard in 2012, the entire wearable market was racing to become the next smartphone. Bigger screens, more apps, more notifications, more reasons to look at your wrist instead of the person across from you. Ahmed went the other direction. WHOOP has no screen. It measures strain, recovery, and sleep. That’s it.

When everyone told him to add a screen, especially after the Apple Watch launched, he refused. He knew that a screen on a health tracker would just lead to scope creep. It would turn a tool for focus into another vector for distraction. The closed loop was the point.

Here he is explaining why:

The market agreed. WHOOP just raised $575 million at a $10.1 billion valuation. Its investors include the athletes who actually wear it: Cristiano Ronaldo, LeBron James, Rory McIlroy. They don’t want another screen on their wrist. They want one thing done better than anything else.

This is the principle: do one thing. Do it well. Then stop.

As I wrote above, the internet runs on two alternating cycles: bundling and unbundling. We are at peak bundle. Your phone is a camera, a calculator, a calendar, a level, a compass, a flashlight, a library, a casino, a dating service, a confessional, and a surveillance device. Everything is everything. And the result is that nothing is anything. We are drowning in capability and starving for intention.

The unbundling is coming. You can already see it.

A former SpaceX engineer quit his job to build an $80 plastic-free steel coffee maker and the internet lost its mind. No app connectivity. No smart features. Just a machine that makes coffee and doesn’t poison you with microplastics.

Maxell is selling portable cassette players again and they immediately sold out.

Vinyl sales hit $1 billion in the U.S. in 2025 for the first time since 1983, outselling CDs for the fifth consecutive year. In a world of infinite content, infinite choice, and infinite scroll, people are starting to want things that end.

Finite formats and physical products with clear boundaries. No algorithm deciding what comes next. The closed loop is more than a feature, it’s the whole point.

In a world designed to distract you, monofunctional products are a way to regain focus amidst frenzy.

Freedom is not propping every door half open. Freedom is choosing one door and walking all the way through it. Fifteen thousand titles on a streaming service is not freedom. It is twenty minutes of paralysis followed by a rerun you’ve already seen. Five invitations in one week, all answered “maybe,” is not optionality. It is the inability to be fully present for any of them.

When you refuse to choose, choice chooses for you. And it always chooses badly.

Monks take vows because they understand that limitation is the precondition of depth. You cannot go deep on everything. You can only go deep on one thing at a time. The Cheesecake Factory menu just makes you fat, lethargic, and deeply unhappy.

Consider the book. The physical, paper, ink-on-a-page book.

It has virtually infinite battery life.

It is extremely shock resistant and can survive a ten-foot drop onto concrete.

It is fully random access with the ability to add notes.

It boasts a high-contrast display and is saddled with no terms of service, no subscription fees, no cookies, no ads, no updates, no surveillance.

It never crashes.

It has never had a minute of downtime in recorded history.

No one can revoke your access or alter the text after you buy it.

As Ted Gioia put it: the book is the ultimate killer app. It is the greatest hard storage concept in human history, and nothing else comes close.

The book is not primitive technology. It is perfected technology, the most advanced monofunctional device ever built. Five hundred years of innovation have not improved on it.

That is the standard. That is what we should be building toward, not away from.

I don’t want my refrigerator to have a brain.

I don’t want my blender to talk to me.

I especially don’t want my toaster to achieve sentience.

Hell, if I wanted a Brave Little Toaster, I would fire up the DVD player.

Some friction is good. Friction forces you to think about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.

And now we finally arrive at the manifesto. It’s just three lines: Do one thing. Do it well. Then stop.

The companies that understand this will build the next decade.

The ones that don’t will keep adding screens to things that don’t need them and wonder why no one can pay attention anymore.

Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.

Share White Noise

If you want to discuss any of the ideas or musings mentioned above or have any books, papers, or links that you think would be interesting to share in a future edition of White Noise, please reach out to me by replying to this email or following me on X.

With sincere gratitude,

Tom

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

—Carl Jung

How little we know

how good we have it until

God jolts us awake

Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.

Share White Noise

If you want to discuss any of the ideas or musings mentioned above or have any books, papers, or links that you think would be interesting to share in a future edition of White Noise, please reach out to me by replying to this email or following me on X.

With sincere gratitude,

Tom

People don't take trips, trips take people.

—John Steinbeck

Rock stars sing of life lived in the fast lane; they shout that life is a highway best lived with the pedal down, the windows open, the music loud and blaring, the whole romantic mess of it. And maybe they’re right. But poets? They write about pit stops.

Nobody writes songs about pulling over.

About the yellow engine light you’ve been ignoring for forty miles.

About the slow hiss of a tire losing air on a road with no shoulder.

About sitting in some cramped, depressing fluorescent-lit waiting room while a mechanic delivers the bad news about your undercarriage.

But that’s where the living happens. Or at least where you find out how much living you’ve been doing.

Sometimes you just need a splash of gas. You’re running on fumes and you know it and the fix is simple: pull over, fill up, pull out.

Other times it’s an oil change. You’ve been running dirty for longer than you should have and everything is sluggish and grimed and you need someone to drain what’s gone bad.

Other times you have to get up on a jack and flip the hood and let someone rummage around inside you — hands where you’d rather they weren’t, finding things you’d rather they didn’t.

Other times still it’s a new engine or a new transmission or a new vehicle entirely. You walk into the shop one person and drive out another and the old model stays behind on the lot with the keys still in it. A sort of car of Theseus operation made real by a hefty bill and a different feel.

On this road there are long stretches of nothing and short stretches of something, but keep going and you’ll always find another stop there waiting.

The fast lane doesn’t have pit stops. Its long pretty white lines run uninterrupted. You stay in it by never stopping, and you stay in it until you can’t, and then, like many a better driver, you’re not in the fast lane anymore. You’re on the shoulder or in the ditch or out of the race altogether.

The winding road, though — the long and winding one that the Beatles wrote about and your mama warned you about and you ended up on anyway — that road is mostly pit stops. That road is built for them. It assumes you’ll need to pull over. It assumes that pedals will be smashed and engines will be revved and brakes will be slammed. It assumes your tires will go flat and your oil will gunk up and your wipers will streak the glass. It assumes all of this because it’s a road for cars that are actually being driven.

And when you finally pull into the great lot at the end — your engine ticking, frame a little rusted, odometer turned over more times than you can count — you won’t remember the stretches where you were flying. You’ll remember the stops.

The ones that kept you running.

The ones where kindness was given and laughter was shared and something in you shifted.

The ones where someone topped you off or tightened what was loose or told you the hard truth about your transmission.

You’ll remember them because they meant your pistons were firing and your tank still had some left and the road still waited for you somewhere just out there.

Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.

Share White Noise

If you want to discuss any of the ideas or musings mentioned above or have any books, papers, or links that you think would be interesting to share in a future edition of White Noise, please reach out to me by replying to this email or following me on X.

With sincere gratitude,

Tom

Today you are you, that is truer than true.

There is no one alive who is you-er than you.

—Dr. Seuss

Above: Somewhere in the mess is proof of life.

You can’t spell “authentic” without “tic.”

That line has been stuck in my head for months, which is fitting, because things getting stuck in my head is sort of the whole problem. You see, I have Tourette syndrome:

I’ll spare you the full recounting here, but the short version is this: my body produces sudden jolts and shrugs and shouts, punctuation marks I never asked for. Spasms that beget stares and grunts that give rise to gawks. It is a life of controlled entropy: a careening, a hurtling, a mad dash not only to function but also to keep neurological frenzy at bay.

Somewhat relatedly, I’ve spent countless hours cataloguing a different species of tic entirely: those that punctuate AI writing.

The hallmarks of AI prose are many. They include the punchline em-dash, the three-item list, the mirrored metaphor, and the closing tautology. Though hard to define and near-impossible to pin down, with practice such tics prove immediately recognizable, the way Justice Potter Stewart described his famous threshold for obscenity: “I know it when I see it.”

In this, my world, there are two kinds of tics: one neurological, the other algorithmic. And the distance between them — between a grunt that escapes my mouth in a quiet church and the word “delve” reproduced ten million times without variation — is a vast terra incognita I’ve inhabited my entire life.

The Stream and the Boulder

Think of speech as a stream.

Water moves. It finds its way. It flows according to gravity and contour and carved stone and muddied marsh and the thousand other small contingencies of the landscape it passes through.

Now drop a boulder in it.

The water doesn’t stop. It adjusts, eddying and rippling, forming a chute where the current narrows and a lull where it pools behind the rock. A little whitewater kicks up where the force meets the obstruction. The stream becomes something worth watching precisely because it was interrupted. Without the boulder, the water is just a pipe.

My vocal tics are boulders in the stream of my speech. They are involuntary interruptions, a grunt or a bark or a word that arrives unbidden and departs with muttered apology. They break the natural course of what I’m saying and fracture the rhythm, and they make the listener recalibrate the way your eye catches on a snag in a river and follows the turbulence downstream.

AI writing is the pipe.

There are neither boulders, nor eddies, nor snags in sight. Just a smooth, frictionless channel where the water runs in a single, featureless current from beginning to end. Every paragraph hits the same beats in the same order. Every transition lands with identical weight. There is a metronomic quality that no single sentence reveals but that accumulates across the whole piece into something a trained ear can catch.

The splashes are what make sound, and sound is what makes us distinct, and what is distinct makes us human. The gentle hum of a stream and its accompanying stillness is pleasant, but not realistic to life as it’s truly lived.

As Wendell Berry sagely wrote, “The impeded stream is the one that sings.”

This great linguistic smoothing is here and it’s spreading quickly. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute found that GPT-isms like delve, boast, swift, and meticulous have exploded across podcasts and spoken conversation since ChatGPT’s release, far above their natural historical usage:

These words didn’t just appear in scripted settings; they seeped into spontaneous speech, a cultural feedback loop forming between humans and AI as we absorb its patterns until our own language becomes indistinguishable from the output.

Per The New York Times: “A.I. used to make mistakes…But today’s systems are much more fluid than their predecessors, so fluid, in fact, that finding grammatical errors or nonstandard syntax is often a hint that you’re looking at a human’s prose, not a machine’s.”

Errors are now proof of humanity. The boulder is the new watermark.

The obstruction in the stream is the only thing that tells you the stream is real. The messy bliss of splishing and splashing provides evidence of life.

The Cruel Benefit

One of the cruel benefits of Tourette syndrome, maybe the only one, is that I don’t think I can be replicated.

I want to be careful here, because I’m not claiming some grand immunity. AI is getting better at mimicking all of us, and I’d be a fool to think I’m permanently safe. (Plus, there exists a corpus of over 300 White Noise articles on which the machine can lay its metallic talons.) But there is something about the sheer chaos of the disorder that makes the machine’s job harder than usual.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp recently said that only two types of people will survive the AI era: trade workers whose jobs require a physical body, and neurodivergent people, because they think differently and solve problems in unusual ways.

I don’t bring this up to claim I’m special or immune, but rather because my experience with Tourette, which is about as neurodivergent as it gets, has made me weird enough that I’m perhaps, just maybe, not as susceptible to the great smoothing and convergence that AI is ushering in. This, I think, is just a fact about the disorder’s maddening modus operandi.

The mind is so frenzied, so manic with its freneticism and its noise, that no two manifestations of the disorder are alike. No two of my days are alike, given the nature of the beast and its inherent unpredictability.

Tourette is a chimera: on one day, it makes you stomp, shriek, or shout about shit; on another, it simply makes you shuffle your shoes or spring spittle from your mouth. There is neither rhyme nor reason to its variety of symptoms, and no two people who suffer from it are the same.

You cannot imagine the madness in my mind, and I mean that literally, not as a boast but as a statement of fact that brings me no pleasure.

And because you cannot imagine it, neither, I suspect, can the machine.

AI works by observation, slowly and methodically ingesting your features, your patterns, your tendencies, and constructing a digital facsimile. It studies the stream until it can reproduce the current. But it can only reproduce what it can predict, and my particular chaos, at least for now, is prediction-proof. The machine cannot clone what it cannot model, and it cannot model what obeys no pattern.1

My life stands in stark contrast to the metronomic, tight, polished nature of AI writing, which follows similar patterns and takes the road always taken as opposed to that trod much less often.

AI is a failure-avoidance machine. It won’t make a typo. It won’t say something cringe. It won’t ramble or stammer or deliver a line full of ummms or uhhhs or likes or you knows. It will keep you polished, and that polish, which is quite literally a thin veneer of protection, is starting to look less like competence and more like a tell.

My tics are just the punctuation of my reality. And, for sometimes better or oftentimes worse, they cannot be faked.

I posted a note that hinted at this a while back:

A friend posted this in response:

I started adding typos to my emails on purpose. Not the kind that make me look illiterate. Just… strategic imperfections. An extra period here.. A missing capital letter there. Maybe ‘teh’ instead of ‘the’ if I’m feeling bold. Why? Because in 2026, writing too perfectly has become the tell. Perfect grammar. Flawless punctuation. That slightly-too-smooth transition between paragraphs. It all screams ‘AI wrote this and I just hit send.’ I want someone on the other end to know there’s an actual human here. That this message came from a person who cared enough to write it (albeit, imperfectly). So now I’m out here manually humanizing my own writing. Adding the equivalent of an ink smudge to prove I’m a real person.

The irony nearly killed me. I’ve been doing this involuntarily my entire life. My tics are the original ink smudge. The original proof-of-humanity. Except I never had to add them on purpose; they were added for me, by a disorder I’d give anything to be rid of, and they happen to be the one thing a machine might not be able to ever realistically replicate.

Mistakes were made and they proved it was a bag of blood and bones at the keyboard, not bits and bytes in a Cedar Rapids data center.

We humans might not capture the world perfectly. Our sight fails, our hearing goes, our muscles wither. And yet, in a world of digital perfection where every i is dotted and every t is crossed, I wonder if minor imperfections will become the signature of human writing the way a brushstroke distinguishes a painting from a print.

Its v. it’s.

The dangling modifier.

The sentence that runs on for just a bit too long because the thought outpaced the grammar.

In this brave new world, these and more evolve from flaws into an assemblage of evidence.

Freaks, Weirdos, and the War for Originality

I am not calling myself a freak. But the manifestation of my disorder is freaky, if not entirely freakish, and it makes sense to talk about things that are freaky at the opposite end of the spectrum from the polished panache of AI. As they sing in Shrek The Musical: “What makes us special makes us strong! Let your freak flag wave! Let your freak flag fly! Never take it down, never take it down. Raise it way up high!”

Alberto Romero put this better than I can in his piece Why Being Weird Is Your Superpower:

When AI closes one door, you can fixate on the door that was closed (“oh no, it can code better than me!”). Or you can realize that, by AI closing all the doors to the safer society-validated spots, you are suddenly free (“wait, who am I, actually?”). Society used to punish the non-average human as “under-average” because it decided on which trait measuring the average mattered in the first place!

Now, however, as order and predictability are outsourced to machines, you are free to explore variance again. You are free to tap unapologetically, unconditionally, into your authentic weirdness, wherever that takes you! The “average” is only defined for the traits society cares about. What do you care about? Deviance is now both self-love and rebellion.

Deviance is now both self-love and rebellion. Which is a strange and wonderful thing to say, because it means the very qualities that got you punished in school or overlooked at work are the ones the machine can neither reach nor teach.

In writing, this rebellion takes the form of striking quirks and unhinged styles. As Bree Beauregard put it:

And stand-up comedian Ken Cheng shows us the way with his own brand of touretting:

AI will never be able to write like me.

I am now inserting random sentences into every post to throw off their language learning models. Any AI emulating me will radiator freak yellow horse spout nonsense.

I believe all creative content going forward should contain elements of randomness, to prevent being replicated by AI. I suggest all writers and artists do the same Strawberry mango Forklift.

Our creativity is the one thing that separates us from the machine. To protect it, we must embrace chaos, unpredictability and utter bollocks.

We can tuna fish tango foxtrot defeat AI. All. The. Time. Piss on carpet.

This is not a strategy reserved for the creative types. We are all constantly solving problems, and those problems are often best solved by thinking laterally, by bringing whatever singular mix of character and lived experience we’ve accumulated to the table, especially the parts we were told to sand down.

Lulu Cheng Meservey put it well in Standing Out:

It’s 2026 and everything is fake. Fake content by fake influencers with fake engagement from fake followers, launching fake products with fake testimonials. A Potemkin village on a global scale, a glossy facade propped up by heaps and heaps of beige slop. Temu for content.

In this world, the real has never been more precious, refreshing, special, and rare. We need real people, building real things that actually matter, through real discipline and effort, with real outcomes in the real world.

Because polish is cheap. AI plus phone cameras means anyone can produce a flawless surface, which means a raw, imperfect aesthetic has become a credibility signal, the way a cracked spine on a used book tells you somebody actually read the damn thing.

We are entering an age where mistakes are the only proof of soul.

Mistakes Were Made

After a lifetime of involuntary interruptions and countless hours spent studying voluntary ones, I keep coming back to the same place: Absent a digital watermark that proves silicon strings were all over a bit of writing, a manually inserted one works best: the tic, the typo, the boulder in the stream that creates the eddy and proves the water is real.

My tics, both the ones I never asked for and the ones I chose (e.g. nearly every conversation I have with someone I love ends with five simple words: Love you and God bless), are proof that a specific, unrepeatable person showed up and said something only they could say.

The machine will never stammer. It will never grunt at the wrong moment or bark an obscenity in a quiet room or fat-finger a sentence because the thought arrived faster than the hand could carry it. It is incapable of producing the kind of glorious, mortifying chaos that proves a human being was here, and that incapacity, which looks like its greatest strength, is actually its greatest limitation.

Maybe the machine will learn to fake the smudge. It will learn to drop a comma and misspell the and write in all lowercase and simulate the kind of roughness that currently passes for proof-of-humanity. And when it does, we will need something deeper than strategic imperfection to distinguish ourselves. We will need the thing that can’t be performed, because it was never a performance in the first place.

I have spent my entire life involuntarily demonstrating something that other people are now trying to fake on purpose (when writing, that is). I think that when the machines learn to fake it too, what will remain is not the tic itself but the living, breathing, maddening person who ends every meaningful phone call the same way, not because it’s a brand or a strategy or a bit, but because he really means it.

Love you and God bless.

Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.

Share White Noise

If you want to discuss any of the ideas or musings mentioned above or have any books, papers, or links that you think would be interesting to share in a future edition of White Noise, please reach out to me by replying to this email or following me on X.

With sincere gratitude,

Tom

Always it was the same, Furlong thought; always they carried mechanically on without pause, to the next job at hand. What would life be like, he wondered, if they were given time to think and reflect over things? Might their lives be different or much the same — or would they just lose the run of themselves?

—Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These

Of course the world of work begins to become — threatens to become — our only world, to the exclusion of all else. The demands of the working world grow ever more total, grasping ever more completely the whole of human existence.

—Josef Pieper

Above: An homage to the most accurate self-help book ever written.

If you give a man a checklist, he’s going to want a pen.

If you give him a pen, he’ll start writing down everything he has to do today. Then everything he has to do this week. He’ll feel better already. Organized and in control.

If he feels in control, he’ll notice he’s been meaning to optimize his morning. So he’ll add that to the list. Wake up earlier. Meditate. Journal. Hydrate. Restrict his screentime. Maybe even throw in a cold shower. He’ll write all of this down and feel a small thrill.

If he optimizes his morning, he’ll need to protect it. So he’ll rearrange his evening. Meal prep. Screen curfew. Sleep hygiene. Supplements. He’ll download an app to track it. The app will suggest additional habits. He’ll add those, too.

If he tracks his habits, he’ll want to track his progress. He’ll start a spreadsheet. Columns for sleep, steps, water intake, deep work hours, pages read. He’ll color-code it. The spreadsheet will become the most beautiful thing he makes all week.

If he tracks his progress, he’ll notice a dip. A red cell. A missed day. He’ll feel a familiar tightness in his chest, the feeling of falling behind in a race he entered voluntarily. He’ll research why. He’ll find an article about energy management. He’ll add energy management to the list.

If he manages his energy, he’ll realize he needs to manage his time. He’ll try time-blocking. Then Pomodoro. Then a hybrid system. He’ll spend sixty minutes building a color-coded calendar that accounts for every waking hour. He won’t notice that this was, itself, an hour.

If he manages his time, he’ll wonder where it all goes. He’ll audit his week. He’ll discover he spends too much time on things that don’t align with his goals. This will require him to clarify his goals. He’ll make a list.

If he clarifies his goals, they’ll feel too abstract. He’ll need to break them into milestones. The milestones into tasks. The tasks into subtasks. Each subtask will get a due date. He’ll feel a momentary pulse of something like meaning. It will pass.

If the meaning passes, he’ll assume the system is the problem. He’ll search for a better system. He’ll read about Zettelkasten, Getting Things Done, the Eisenhower Matrix, the four-hour workweek, building a second brain. He’ll take notes. He’ll organize his notes into a system for managing systems.

If he manages his systems, he’ll realize he’s tired. Not physically tired. Tired the way a clock might be if it could feel the weight of its own ticking. He’ll add rest to the list. He’ll schedule it. Tuesday, 2 to 2:30. Rest.

If he rests on schedule, it won’t feel like rest. It will feel like a task shaped like rest. He’ll sit still and think about everything he could be doing instead. He’ll cut it short and check something off. The checking off will feel better than the resting did.

If checking things off feels good, he’ll add easier tasks just to check them off. “Make bed.” “Eat breakfast.” He knows this is cheating. He does it anyway. Dopamine is dopamine is dopamine, after all.

If the dopamine fades, he’ll feel behind again. He’ll feel behind in a way he can’t quite locate, a behind that lives somewhere beneath the tasks, within the spreadsheet, beside the morning routine. He’ll suspect the problem is deeper. He’ll add “do deeper work” to the list.

If he tries to do deeper work, he won’t know what that means. He’ll Google it. He’ll find a podcast. The podcast will recommend a book. The book will recommend a practice. The practice will require a daily habit. The habit will need to be tracked.

If the habit needs to be tracked, he’ll open the spreadsheet.

If he opens the spreadsheet, he’ll notice it’s gotten unwieldy with far too many columns and colors. He’ll feel a wave of something he doesn’t want to name. He’ll decide to start fresh. A clean slate driven by a new system. New quarter, new him, after all.

If he starts fresh, he’s going to need a checklist.

So he’ll make one.

Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.

Share White Noise

If you want to discuss any of the ideas or musings mentioned above or have any books, papers, or links that you think would be interesting to share in a future edition of White Noise, please reach out to me by replying to this email or following me on X.

With sincere gratitude,

Tom

We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war. Our Great Depression is our lives.

—Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

Above: Modernity is just a mass of silhouettes at standstill.

So many tools, no one is working.

So many words, no one is writing.

So many articles, no one is reading.

So many courses, no one is learning.

So many options, no one is choosing.

So many podcasts, no one is listening.

So many connections, no one is talking.

So many opinions, no one is convincing.

So many doors, no one is knocking.

So many paths, no one is walking.

So many cures, no one is healing.

So many answers, no one is questioning.

So many jokes, no one is laughing.

So many tears, no one is crying.

So many prophets, no one is believing.

So many prayers, no one is kneeling.

So much intelligence, no one is thinking.

So much freedom, no one is free.

So much for so much that gives so little.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Share White Noise

Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.

If you want to discuss any of the ideas or musings mentioned above or have any books, papers, or links that you think would be interesting to share in a future edition of White Noise, please reach out to me by replying to this email or following me on X.

With sincere gratitude,

Tom

The only thing we have to fear is...fear itself.

—Franklin D. Roosevelt

Fear is the mind-killer.

—Frank Herbert, Dune

We suffer more in imagination than in reality.

—Seneca

Above: When craze crescendos.

Meta is reportedly planning layoffs that could hit at least 20% of the company. Roughly 15,000 people. The purpose, per Reuters, is to offset the cost of spending $600 billion by 2028 on data centers.

Meta’s stock rose nearly 3% on the news. This was not unexpected; the company is following a playbook that has already worked.

A few weeks earlier, Block fired nearly half its workforce — more than 4,000 people — with CEO Jack Dorsey proclaiming that AI “fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company.” Block’s shares soared as much as 24% after the announcement.

Fifteen thousand jobs cut at Meta and the stock goes up.

Four thousand jobs slashed at Block and the stock surges 24%.

See a pattern?

And, mind you, these upswings in price are not because these companies are hurting. (Meta posted more than $200 billion in revenue last year. Block’s gross profit was up 24% year over year.) Nor are they due to AI proving that it can do the work those people do.

No, the stocks went up because the market has learned to read layoffs as a buy signal. It’s a sad, mechanical sort of formula: fewer humans + higher margins + vague AI-speak = forward-thinking management.

The companies offered a bloodless human sacrifice and Wall Street bestowed its blessing.

This is neither a technology story nor, more broadly, technological determinism. It’s the social self-hypnosis of an entire economy acting on a conviction that has yet to be truly tested.

In January, Harvard Business Review published a piece that should have chilled things considerably: Companies Are Laying Off Workers Because of AI’s Potential — Not Its Performance. In it, Thomas Davenport and Laks Srinivasan reported their findings after surveying more than 1,000 global executives at the end of 2025.

60% of organizations had already reduced headcount in anticipation of AI’s future impact. Another 29% had slowed hiring for the same reason. Only 2% reported making large layoffs tied to actual AI implementation.1

60% cutting for potential. 2% cutting for performance.

44% said generative AI was the hardest form of AI to assess for economic value. Employees think the productivity gains are far smaller than what executives expect.

Davenport and Srinivasan put it bluntly: companies are “making decisions to reduce headcount before they see the benefits of AI’s impact.”

Though the technological promise hasn’t arrived, the layoffs sure as hell have.

A while back, I wrote an essay titled You Better Believe It: The Reflexive Theory of Everything. It explored George Soros’s theory of reflexivity:

Reflexivity posits that our perceptions do not just reflect the world around us but shape it. [Soros] argues that financial markets are not merely passive mirrors of reality but are instead shaped by the perceptions and beliefs of the participants. This creates a feedback loop where initial beliefs influence actions that change outcomes, thus reinforcing or altering the original beliefs.

I tracked reflexivity from markets to pandemic-era toilet paper:

Recall the sudden spike of panic-buying and hoarding during COVID, a wave of activity caused by fears of shortages that led to, you guessed it, actual shortages.

Across the chaotic variety of daily life, a simple fact holds: Reality is a lot more malleable than we think.

In place of Descartes’s Cogito, ergo sum, I offered Credo, ergo erit. I believe, therefore it will be.

I wrote that essay about Babe Ruth and stock prices and job interviews. I meant it as a meditation on personal belief. Instead, it has metastasized into something with societal implications.

We are psyching ourselves out so badly that the imagined future is beginning to govern the present. Companies are laying people off not because AI has already replaced them, but because executives fear a world in which it soon might.

Executives believe AI might soon substitute for labor; because of this they freeze hiring, cut teams, and redesign organizations around that expectation. Workers, seeing those moves, internalize scarcity and precarity. That anxiety then changes how they work, what they study, what risks they take, and what kinds of companies get built.

The prophecy doesn’t need to be true in order to start becoming true. The belief that AI will replace us — whether it’s real or a mirage — is doing the heavy lifting more than AI itself is as the jury is still very much out on whether these mechanical miracles are up to the task of replacing us wholesale.2

But it doesn’t matter. The belief is already doing the damage. What could be dictates what is, and what is then hardens into what will be.

Banking provides a timeless metaphor for this.

Banks work because of trust. You deposit your money, I deposit mine, and nobody worries about getting it back because we all believe the system is sound. The money isn’t sitting in a vault as the bank lends most of it out and the collective belief holds the structure together.

A bank run starts not when the bank actually fails, but when enough people believe it might fail. (Just ask Silicon Valley Bank.) They act on that belief. The acting creates the failure. The depositor who sees a line forming outside the branch and rushes to withdraw isn’t crazy. Each person in the line is behaving reasonably. The catastrophe is collective.

That’s what’s happening to the labor market.

The “bank” is the accumulated trust that human work has value, institutional knowledge matters, and judgment born from experience can’t be downloaded. The “depositors” are the CEOs, board members, and investors racing to withdraw their faith in that proposition before the guy across the street does it first. To be a CEO right now is to worry about getting AI right by 2026. Their fear has become their employees’ severance package.

The mechanism runs like this:

• A belief forms: AI will replace most white-collar work.

• The belief triggers layoffs.

• The layoffs produce a signal: everyone’s cutting headcount because of AI.

• The signal reinforces the belief.

• The reinforced belief triggers more cuts.

• And so it goes.

In 2025, companies cited AI in more than 55,000 job eliminations, twelve times the number from two years earlier. Amazon alone cut 16,000, Dell has shed 27% of its workforce since 2023, and over 45,000 tech jobs have vanished worldwide since January.

The market rewards each announcement: stocks tick up, narratives harden, and the next CEO takes the cue.

Then reflexivity does something worse. The layoffs hollow out the very capabilities that would make AI unnecessary. You fire the senior engineer who knows why the billing system breaks on Canadian tax calculations. That knowledge leaves with her. You gut the QA team that catches bugs a model would never flag. Your product degrades. Now you need AI to cover the gap you created. Because you burned the bridge behind you.

The prophecy builds the very machine that fulfills it.

I wrote about this dynamic in that reflexivity essay, too. About how narratives consume the people who create them:

We create personal myths and stories about who we are, and these myths gain a life of their own. They shape how others perceive us and how we perceive ourselves. Over time, we begin to conform to these narratives, even when they no longer serve us. The initial belief about who we are becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, dictating our actions and limiting our potential.

A CEO announces an “AI transformation.” The market applauds. Now he’s the AI CEO. Retreating would shatter the narrative. So the narrative hardens, and the company bends to fit it, even when the evidence says otherwise.

Klarna replaced 40% of its workforce with AI, watched quality collapse, and hired humans back.

IBM claimed AI replaced 8,000 workers; the actual number was a couple hundred, and total headcount actually grew.

Amazon’s CEO initially credited AI for its 14,000 job cuts, then walked it back, citing that it’s “not even really AI-driven, not right now at least. It’s culture.” Meanwhile, Amazon convened an emergency engineering meeting after AI-assisted code changes caused a string of outages that took its site down for six hours.

Cut the people, deploy the AI, watch the AI break things. The loop in miniature.

I end this essay with a warning from my previous discussion of reflexivity:

Take the happy story of the Confident Job Seeker. She believes she is highly qualified and deserving of a job and, therefore, oozes steady confidence during her interview. This wows her interviewer, who proceeds to offer her the job, once again shaping reality in line with her initial belief.

Or, the sad tale of the Nervous Public Speaker. He is convinced that the audience will find his topic excruciatingly dull—so convinced, in fact, that the poor fellow proceeds to read his speech as quickly as possible from his notes, stumbling over his words and not once making eye contact. The audience, picking up on his discomfort, disengages, thus confirming his initial belief.

We are choosing the Nervous Public Speaker’s path. We’re so sure AI will devour the labor market that we’re feeding it the labor market on a veritable platter — firing people at best on spec and vibes, at worst because of a slide deck and all-consuming FOMO.

The toilet paper comparison from that earlier essay was supposed to be funny. Fears of shortage creating an actual, sh*tty shortage leading to pandemic absurdist theater.

Except now it isn’t toilet paper. It’s livelihoods. Institutional knowledge. The accumulated wisdom of people who know things no training dataset contains.

As I wrote, “like gravity, reflexivity is all around us but barely noticed unless we pay it attention. It exerts pressure that brings perception and reality ever closer.”

Like it or not, this is a bank run.

Similar to almost every bank run in history, it is driven not by insolvency but by the fear of insolvency.

A fear so powerful it produces the very outcome it dreads.

Share White Noise

Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.

If you want to discuss any of the ideas or musings mentioned above or have any books, papers, or links that you think would be interesting to share in a future edition of White Noise, please reach out to me by replying to this email or following me on X.

With sincere gratitude,

Tom

what bargains we have made

we have

kept

and as the dogs of the hours

close in

nothing

can be taken

from us

but

our lives.

—Charles Bukowski

Above: Each a silent promise to self.

Draw lines in the sand.

They may fade, but you will know

what they once held in.

Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.

If you want to discuss any of the ideas or musings mentioned above or have any books, papers, or links that you think would be interesting to share in a future edition of White Noise, please reach out to me by replying to this email or following me on X.

With sincere gratitude,

Tom

The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.

—Edsger Dijkstra

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

—Richard P. Feynman

Above: Was all that juice worth all that squeeze?

IBM Fellow and co-creator of UML Grady Booch recently posted this on X:

Ones and zeros became assembly.

Assembly became high-order languages.

Languages became frameworks.

Frameworks became prompts.

Each layer moved the engineer further from the machine and closer to pure intent.

In January, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang gave this idea a much sharper edge:

Every job, he said, has tasks and purpose.

A radiologist’s task is studying scans. Their purpose is diagnosing disease.

A lawyer’s task is reading contracts. Their purpose is protecting clients.

A software engineer’s task is writing code. Their purpose is solving problems.

AI doesn’t eliminate the purpose. It simply abstracts away the task.

That distinction, task versus purpose, is the cleanest lens I’ve found for understanding what’s actually happening right now. Not just in software, but everywhere.

It's a comforting framework. Reassuring, even. The task gets automated, the purpose stays human. Everyone wins.

But it belies a deeper, darker question: what if the task was how you learned the purpose in the first place?

The radiologist who never studied a scan can't diagnose the disease.

The lawyer who never read a contract can't protect the client.

The task was never just a task. It was the very training ground.

Viewed this way, it's hard to feel entirely good about the fact that the entire history of life is one of raising the level of abstraction.

Across domains, relationships, and basic human actions, we’ve been peeling ourselves away from direct experience so gradually that we barely register the distance.

Each new layer promises convenience, scale, efficiency.

But this comes at great cost, as it removes a little more of us from the thing itself:

1. Cooking a meal versus ordering from a menu versus tapping UberEats.

2. Speaking in person versus making a phone call versus sending a text.

3. Shaking hands versus signing a document versus clicking DocuSign.

4. CLI versus GUI versus chatbot.

5. Tutoring a student versus recording a lecture versus publishing a course on Udemy.

6. Whittling wood versus operating a lathe versus sending a file to a 3D printer.

7. Knowing your neighbor versus joining a community Facebook group versus checking Nextdoor.

8. Tasting the sauce versus reading the recipe versus asking ChatGPT what’s missing.

9. Playing catch with your kid versus signing them up for a league versus tracking their stats in an app.

10. Haggling at a market versus comparing prices online versus letting a bot auto-buy at the lowest price.

11. Writing a letter of recommendation versus filling out a reference form versus clicking “endorse” on LinkedIn.

12. Navigating by landmarks versus reading a map versus following the blue dot on Google Maps.

13. Tuning a guitar by ear versus using a tuner clip versus using an app that auto-corrects pitch.

14. Confessing to a priest versus journaling versus typing into a therapy chatbot.

15. Reading a room versus sending a survey versus running sentiment analysis on Slack messages.

16. Picking fruit from a tree versus buying it at a farmer’s market versus subscribing to a meal kit service.

17. Dancing with someone versus swiping right versus letting an algorithm pick your match.

18. Arguing face-to-face versus writing an email versus letting AI draft your reply.

19. Fixing a leaky faucet versus calling a plumber versus submitting a request on TaskRabbit.

20. Mourning together at a funeral versus posting a tribute on Facebook versus letting your phone auto-generate a memory video.

If you want to see what life looks like at abstraction ground zero, watch a man spend six months making a sandwich entirely from scratch:

Total cost: $1,500. Result? Just okay.

We should be grateful for what convenience gives us. But we should also consider what we lose when we're this far from the realities of life.

Abstraction, like time, only moves in one direction. It promises to free us from the task so we can focus on the purpose. But something happens when the layers stack too high. We stop knowing how to do the thing we’ve been freed from. Then we stop knowing we ever could. The snake of abstraction eats its own tail and, in doing so, it swallows competence whole. This is the quiet danger of the cult of efficiency: not that we lose our jobs, but that we lose our capacity to do them.

Every layer of abstraction saves you effort. But convenience has a cost.

You.

Share White Noise

Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.

If you want to discuss any of the ideas or musings mentioned above or have any books, papers, or links that you think would be interesting to share in a future edition of White Noise, please reach out to me by replying to this email or following me on X.

With sincere gratitude,

Tom

Murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.

—Oscar Wilde

"Mistakes were made, though I’m just fine—"
the man remarked about the crime.
He sat at the bar and nursed a beer,
he looked my way and began to leer.

“Who are you? And what do you want?”
he growled at me, all bluster and taunt.

“No one, sir,” I said, looking down,
my lips gone tight, my whole face a frown.

He slammed his glass and cracked a grin,
said, “Do you know who I am? Do you know where I’ve been?
Do y’know the name that runs this town?
The name that makes all lawmen frown?”

I shook my head. He didn’t care.
He was fixin’ to tell me right then and there.

“Mistakes were made—they always are—
whether robbing a bank near or far.
The one we did was right in town,
three men entered, no one sat down.

I brought my boys—my flesh, my blood—
we came with guns and there we stood.
Masked and ready with nothing to lose,
three cruel sinners with something to prove.

We told them all to hit the floor,
grabbed the cash and hit the door.
Shots rang out and someone bled good,
the hot red lifestuff leaked on the wood.

I told my boys to keep it cool,
but panic makes a man a fool.
Tommy dropped the bag and ran,
Jackie, the idjit, had no plan.

Tommy caught a bullet clean,
worst damn thing I’ve ever seen.
Jackie ran but not too far,
they found him crouching under a car.

My boys went down, they’re both gone now,
the devil came to collect his vow.
From me, a sinner who made an unholy pact,
with the big man downstairs, one I can’t take back.

But me? I walked. I slipped the net.
I’m the one they haven’t caught just yet.
A free man, drinking, still alive,
only one of three to truly survive.”

I swallowed hard. I shouldn’t have come.
The barkeep polished a glass, playing dumb.
But his eyes flicked once—just once—my way,
and I understood there was nothing to say.

The barkeep knew. He was very much in.
This wasn’t a story. This was a sin
dressed up like confession at very last call,
told to a stranger pinned on the wall.

“Mistakes were made, that’s for sure.
Yours was coming through this door.”

He reached beneath his coat so slow,
pulled the steel and let it show.

The barkeep turned and wiped the glass,
well aware of what would pass.

“Mistakes were made,” the man said low.
“And you, my friend, have got to go.”

The shot rang out. I hit the floor.
The barkeep stood up and locked the door.

Mistakes were made beneath the sun,
mistakes were made by everyone—
the son who ran, the son who dropped,
me who should have never stopped
to drink a beer I’d never finish,
in a bar with no one else in it.

Dead on the floor and out of sight.
Mistakes were made, you’re goddamn right.

Share White Noise

Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.

If you want to discuss any of the ideas or musings mentioned above or have any books, papers, or links that you think would be interesting to share in a future edition of White Noise, please reach out to me by replying to this email or following me on X.

With sincere gratitude,

Tom

I will work harder!

—Boxer, Animal Farm

Totalitarianism means that everything serves politics; everything becomes a tool. This is what ‘total work’ means: everything serves work...We tend to overwork as a means of self-escape, as a way of trying to justify our existence.

—Josef Pieper

Above: Comrade Claus, reporting for never-ending duty.

What does Santa actually do?

Think about it. He makes a list. He checks it twice. He oversees a workshop full of laborers who never sleep, never complain, never ask for a raise. When they’re finished, he manages the delivery. He gets the kisses from Mrs. Claus, the gallons of milk, the dozens of cookies, and the timeless songs that captivate a grateful globe year in and year out.

He doesn’t make the toys.

The most beloved figure in Western childhood is a middle manager with a great brand. He runs a sweatshop at the North Pole (the irony is so sweet that you can taste it) and somehow we sing about it.

Silicon Valley is building the North Pole. AI is the elf. You (the engineer, the marketer, the writer, the strategist, the knowledge worker) are being promoted to Santa.

Your new job is the long, winding, interminable list.

And the list never ends. Christmas is just Santa’s torturous treadmill: just as one year closes, the next one opens. His only true day off is December 25th, and even that is a day of delivery, logistics, and dissemination. The man gets no offseason. Just another list.

Merry Christmas! Now get back to work in the coldest circle of holly jolly hell.

Recall how it felt before the promotion.

First drafts of projects and papers and presentations used to take all day. Your work led to bad ones, downright dreadful ones, even clumsy ones. But the clumsiness was where something happened. You’d push through a wall and find the idea you didn’t know you were looking for.

Just like that, four hours would vanish and you would enter flow—that wondrous state psychologists can measure but can’t manufacture, the place where skill meets challenge and time simply melts away.

The AI workflow replaces all of that with something else. You prompt. You wait. You read what comes back. You squint at it.

Is this right? Sort of.

Is this good? Kind of.

What’s wrong with it? Hard to say. Something.

You fix a sentence. You re-prompt. You read again. You approve.

You have become a building inspector for houses you didn’t build. The houses look fine. You won’t know until someone moves in and the pipes burst at 3 AM.

Making things fills you up. Checking things hollows you out.

Every person who has ever written something knows the difference between the day you wrote five pages and the day you copyedited someone else’s five pages. One sends you to bed tired and satisfied. The other sends you to bed tired and irritable.

AI turns every worker into a copyeditor. The cruel part is that nobody ever dreamed of becoming one.

No kid said when I grow up, I want to review other people’s work for a living. But that’s the promotion AI is offering.

A software engineer named Siddhant Khare recently wrote about what this feels like on the ground. His summary of the paradox is worth quoting at length:

AI genuinely makes individual tasks faster. That’s not a lie. What used to take me 3 hours now takes 45 minutes. Drafting a design doc, scaffolding a new service, writing test cases, researching an unfamiliar API. All faster.

But my days got harder. Not easier. Harder.

The reason is simple once you see it, but it took me months to figure out. When each task takes less time, you don’t do fewer tasks. You do more tasks. Your capacity appears to expand, so the work expands to fill it. And then some. Your manager sees you shipping faster, so the expectations adjust. You see yourself shipping faster, so your own expectations adjust. The baseline moves.

Before AI, Khare would spend a full day on one design problem. Sketch on paper. Think in the shower. Walk around the block. Come back with clarity. One problem, one day. Now he touches six problems before lunch, because each one “only takes an hour with AI.” But context-switching between six problems is brutal. The AI doesn’t get tired between problems. He does.

He put his finger on the exact inversion:

Before AI, my job was: think about a problem, write code, test it, ship it. I was the creator. The maker. That’s what drew most of us to engineering in the first place — the act of building.

After AI, my job increasingly became: prompt, wait, read output, evaluate output, decide if output is correct, decide if output is safe, decide if output matches the architecture, fix the parts that don’t, re-prompt, repeat. I became a reviewer. A judge. A quality inspector on an assembly line that never stops.

His conclusion was blunt: AI reduces the cost of production but increases the cost of everything else. And the “everything else” falls on you, Mr. Claus.

Santa doesn’t just check the list. He inspects every toy. And the toys just keep on a-coming.

None of this is new. The math was worked out in Victorian England.

In 1865, British economist William Stanley Jevons noticed something strange. England had gotten dramatically better at using coal. New steam engines extracted more work from less fuel. You’d think England would use less coal.

England used more. Much more.

Efficiency didn’t reduce consumption. It reduced cost. And when cost drops, demand doesn’t hold steady. It explodes. Coal became viable for things nobody would have burned it for before and the savings plowed into ever more coal.

This became known as Jevons’ Paradox: making a resource cheaper to use doesn’t conserve it. It devours it.

Parkinson saw the other half. C. Northcote Parkinson was a British naval historian who, in 1955, opened an essay in The Economist with a sentence that became more famous than anything else he ever wrote: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” He’d watched the British civil service grow and grow even as the Empire it administered shrank and shrank. Fewer colonies, more bureaucrats. His law was a joke. It was also obviously true. Give a team a week to do what could be done in a day, and somehow the week fills up. Meetings breed. Scope creeps. Bureaucracy thickens.

These aren’t parallel observations. They intersect with unimaginable consequences.

The collision of Jevons’ Paradox with Parkinson’s Law is a perfect catalyst for complete, utter, deadening, soul-sucking burnout. Work expands infinitely when AI removes any and all barriers (whether cost or effort) leaving nothing to stop the flood.

AI makes cognitive work nearly free to produce.

Jevons: because it’s cheap, we produce absurd quantities. The volume of output metastasizes because nothing stops it.

Then Parkinson: the management of all that output expands to fill every hour we supposedly saved. You don’t get your afternoon back. You get a second shift. The first shift is prompting while the second shift is sorting through what came out.

The elves are tireless. That’s the problem. Santa never gets to go home. Somewhere along the way, Ho Ho Ho turns into Oh Hell No.

Share White Noise

Traditional burnout comes from doing too much. AI burnout comes from doing too much of nothing, from spending your days evaluating outputs you had no hand in creating. Full of decisions yet empty of making.

There is something honest about being tired from work you did yourself.

There is something poisonous about being tired from work you supervised.

Byung-Chul Han saw this before the tools arrived. As I wrote previously, Han diagnoses the inner mechanics with surgical precision:

The society of laboring and achievement is not a free society. It generates new constraints. Ultimately, the dialectic of master and slave does not yield a society where everyone is free and capable of leisure, too. Rather, it leads to a society of work in which the master himself has become a laboring slave. In this society of compulsion, everyone carries a work camp inside. This labor camp is defined by the fact that one is simultaneously prisoner and guard, victim and perpetrator. One exploits oneself.

AI finishes what Han diagnosed. The old exploitation came from outside in the form of a boss, a system, a quota. You could point at the thing grinding you down.

AI exploitation comes from inside. Nobody forces you to prompt the machine at 11 PM. Nobody makes you generate a fifth variation of the deck. You do it because you can. Because the tool is sitting there, the distance between “done” and “more” has collapsed to zero, and your own ambition won’t let you stop.

Then, just like that, you have become prisoner, guard, and ever-open workshop all in one.

You see, AI eliminates any and all natural stopping points. Like a bull with indestructible horns, the knowledge worker barrels through every hindrance, every pothole, every roadblock, powered by an indefatigable miracle made of sand.

You used to stop writing when you were tired. When you hit a wall. When your skill ran out. Those were organic limits built into the act itself. You couldn’t keep going because you couldn’t keep going. The constraint was human. It was also, quietly, a mercy.

AI removes the constraint. The machine doesn’t get tired. It doesn’t hit walls. And so the only thing standing between you and infinite output is your willingness to keep going.

Willingness is a terrible fence.

Don’t believe me? Look at screen time.

Americans already spend seven hours a day staring at their phones, tablets, and computers. Over half say they want to cut back. They don’t. If we can’t tear ourselves away from the supercomputers in our pockets—devices that merely entertain us—imagine the agony of disconnecting from superintelligence that does our jobs (let alone our thinking) for us.

Soon enough (pun intended), enough will be the most expensive word in the AI economy because everything around you will punish you for saying it. If you can produce more, and your competitor is producing more, then the standard of “done” dissolves. There is always another variation. Another draft. Another angle. The machine will always say yes.

As Packy McCormick wrote:

Here’s the hard thing about easy things: if everyone can do something, there’s no advantage to doing it, but you still have to do it anyway just to keep up...

When every rebel is armed, none really is. It’s like when you played GoldenEye 007 as a kid. Getting the Golden Gun the hard way was dope. Everyone getting the Golden Gun with a cheat code made the game suck.

You have to be the one who says no without any of the cues that used to say it for you.

Santa’s got a great gig, we’re told. He doesn’t have to make the toys anymore.

Nobody asks whether making the toys was the point.

The elves work in the background. They don’t need sleep. They don’t need meaning. They don’t need to feel the satisfaction of a thing made well. They just produce.

Somewhere above them, reading the list, checking it twice, scrolling through outputs he didn’t make and can’t quite evaluate, Santa sits in his workshop.

He used to be a master craftsman.

Now he’s a logistics coordinator with a brand.

We’re all becoming him.

We will surely be fat. The jury is still out on jolly.

What is certain is that the belly laugh of ho ho ho will morph into the panting heh heh heh of a man fondly recalling his past, hating his present, and dreading his future. This new era of work is total, consuming, deadening—and it leaves no room for the one thing that might actually save us.

Kurt Vonnegut once told a story about Joseph Heller that I think about all the time:

True story, Word of Honor:

Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer

now dead,

and I were at a party given by a billionaire

on Shelter Island.

I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel

to know that our host only yesterday

may have made more money

than your novel ‘Catch-22’

has earned in its entire history?”

And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.”

And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?”

And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”

Not bad! Rest in peace!

Enough is neither a productivity hack nor a time management strategy. It’s a countercultural philosophical position. It might also be a lifeline.

It means accepting that you could do more and choosing not to; treating your limits not as problems but as gifts; and deciding that the point of work was never the output, but the work, itself.

Let the elves have the toys.

I’d rather make something with my hands.

Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.

If you want to discuss any of the ideas or musings mentioned above or have any books, papers, or links that you think would be interesting to share in a future edition of White Noise, please reach out to me by replying to this email or following me on X.

With sincere gratitude,

Tom

Acquaintance: A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to. A degree of friendship called slight when its object is poor or obscure, and intimate when he is rich or famous.

—Ambrose Bierce

Above: Friends? Foes? Frenemies?

Their eyes met from across the room the way headlights do on a dark road. The sheer brilliance of the unexpected collision was sudden, unavoidable, blinding.

One party muttered oh shit, sotto voce. The other let out a long, loud Heeeeeey, the vowel stretched thin enough to hear the insincerity in it.

The two men began walking their respective gangplanks. Far below them, small talk.

Reaching the end, each jumped…

And so the rigmarole began.

There was much handshaking, back-slapping, teeth-baring, eye-narrowing. The physical choreography of two people pretending to be much closer than they are.

Here a stumble, there a stutter, each perhaps indicating some minor betrayal of the body. But no matter. Eye contact had been made and the game was on.

They spoke with overly friendly language, too enthusiastic for the mundanity of the moment. Voices pitched a half-octave too high. Exclamation points in every sentence. Their conversation had the cadence of a greeting card and about as much depth.

The charade held them in its orbit now, the way the sun tethers the earth with its invisible, inescapable force. Small talk can trap even the biggest man. It has the inscrutability and gravitational pull of a black hole.

How have you been? Fine.

What’s new? Not much.

How’s work? Busy.

The answers were reflexive, pre-loaded, spring-released. Each response was a wall dressed up as a window. Their words came from somewhere south of thought and north of nothing. They didn’t know where they were, but it was certainly East of Eden and someplace closer to Hell.

The conversation was a sort of poker. They each held their cards close to the vest. Neither wanted to be the first to show. They were both holding 7-2 off-suit.

They inhabited the practiced, unsteady intimacy of acquaintanceship. Not close enough to be true friends. Not distant enough to be complete strangers. Stuck in some liminal purgatory of half-familiarity, where every exchange carried the weight of obligation and the lightness of total insignificance.

They had nothing to say, and they said it at length, with great enthusiasm and zero conviction.

Then came the parting, nicety-laden litany.

We should get together sometime.

Let’s hang out.

Would love to grab a drink or two.

The easy, quiet lies of polite conversation and unexpected encounter.

Each knowing full well that the seeds just then planted would neither take root nor bloom.

They shook hands one final time, as if sealing a deal that neither party intended to honor.

Then they turned and walked in opposite directions.

And the distance between them, which had briefly collapsed, resumed its natural, comfortable, preferred state: arm’s-length.

Two acquaintances returned to the wild.

Neither worse for the wear, but neither better for the meeting.

Just two people, briefly tethered by coincidence, loosed again by indifference.

Share White Noise

For more on friendship:

Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.

If you want to discuss any of the ideas or musings mentioned above or have any books, papers, or links that you think would be interesting to share in a future edition of White Noise, please reach out to me by replying to this email or following me on X.

With sincere gratitude,

Tom

The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.

—Mary Oliver

Above: You versus You + AI.

Barry Bonds hit 762 home runs. More than anyone who ever lived, but it doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter because of the asterisk. Because he played in an era when the game’s sacred records were brusquely rewritten by men whose bodies were science fair projects. Though Bonds never failed a drug test, McGwire admitted it; Sosa got caught with a corked bat; and Clemens went to Congress and lied under oath.

The whole era was poisoned, and if you played in it and put up numbers, you were guilty until proven innocent. Except there was no proving innocent. The question hung over everyone. Clean or not, you carried with you the heavy, spiked yoke of the asterisk.

Forget the overt cheaters, the real cruelty was what happened to the guys who didn’t cheat. Their honest numbers looked small next to inflated ones. They got passed over or cut. They played clean and were punished for it, because purity was a competitive disadvantage in a game that had already decided the rules didn’t apply anymore.

I think about this constantly when I see how writers and artists and filmmakers talk about AI.

The fear most people name is the wrong one. They say they’re afraid AI will replace them. That’s plausible enough to resist, and this puritanical fight feels somewhat productive

However, if you lean in close and close your eyes tightly, you’ll begin to discern the actual fear. It’s much quieter and it too takes the form of the asterisk.

Imagine you are an aspiring playwright, novelist, or director. You’ve been carrying ideas around for years. Tendrils of things. The novel in the form of three chapters in a Notes app. The business plan scrawled on a map of scrunched up cocktail napkins. The essay that keeps rewriting itself in the shower. You never ship them. Life, fear, timing, whatever; for some reason, they stayed inside.

Now AI arrives, and the cost of pulling those tendrils out of you and into the world drops to nearly nothing. So, one day, you finally do the damn thing.

And then, like the very worst intrusive thought you’ve ever had, the question appears. Not from a critic. Not from X. From inside your own head.

Was it you?

Were you the X factor, the reason the thing exists?

Or were you just an input, a warm bag of bones at a prompt window?

Without the machine would those small fragile thoughts still be nestled in the safety of your creative womb?

Maybe it’s neither extreme. Maybe the thing you made is some Ship of Theseus where AI’s planks got swapped in so gradually that nobody, including you, can point to where you end and the tool begins.

That’s the AI asterisk. And it’s worse than the steroid version because at least in baseball, you could theoretically test for the drugs. There is no test for AI contamination. There’s no blood sample for whether the sentence you just wrote was yours or whether your favorite author has now become a purveyor of slop or whether you’re unconsciously reproducing a pattern you absorbed from a thousand ChatGPT outputs.

The asterisk need not be applied to your work. It’s something that now exists in the atmosphere. You breathe it in whether you use the tools or not. And, like radiation, repeated exposure slowly kills you.

I’m starting to think the asterisk is a different animal than slop.1

Slop is a question of effort. The asterisk is a question of identity.

It’s the anxiety of tainting, of contamination by proximity or proxy. You didn’t get the work out before AI arrived, and now you can’t prove it was ever fully yours. Maybe you weren’t the independent variable. Maybe you were just a cog, some input, and without the machine those tendrils would still be undeveloped and unseen, rattling around your skull until you died.

Or maybe it’s worse still. Maybe the finished thing is some vague, hybrid centaur where no one, including you, can tell where the AI stops and you start.

The cheater and the clean player look identical in the box score. But the guilty, the innocent, and the collective jury each know the difference.2

As I wrote recently, Josef Pieper saw something adjacent decades ago:

Man seems to mistrust everything that is effortless; he can only enjoy, with a good conscience, what he has acquired with toil and trouble; he refuses to have anything as a gift.

We built our current creative culture on a foundational theology of suffering. If it didn’t cost you something, it doesn’t count. AI makes things feel effortless even when they aren’t, and that’s enough to trigger suspicion.

The steroid era eventually ended. Sort of. Baseball cleaned up its testing, adjusted its culture, and moved on. But the records still have the asterisk. Bonds is still not in the Hall of Fame. Far from fixed, baseball just limped on until the era was relegated to the rearview mirror.

That’s the only honest thing I can say about this moment. You’re not going to outrun it. There is no shipping your work into a world where AI doesn’t exist. The atmosphere has changed. The question will always be available to anyone who wants to ask it, including you.

So you have a choice. You can hold your ideas hostage until the air clears. It won’t. The mist is here to stay and the sun has been forever blotted out.

You can kill the tendrils to keep them pure. That’s the Barry Bonds solution in reverse: refusing to step up to bat because the game is dirty.

Or you can make the thing.

Let the asterisk exist. Let people wonder. Let the question hang.

The tendrils in your head don’t care about provenance.

They just want to exist.

Share White Noise

Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.

If you want to discuss any of the ideas or musings mentioned above or have any books, papers, or links that you think would be interesting to share in a future edition of White Noise, please reach out to me by replying to this email or following me on X.

With sincere gratitude,

Tom

If I don’t go into that office every day, who am I?

—Freddy Rumsen, Mad Men

What is the point of worrying oneself too much about what one could or could not have done to control the course one’s life took? Surely it is enough that the likes of you and I at least try to make our small contribution count for something true and worthy. And if some of us are prepared to sacrifice much in life in order to pursue such aspirations, surely that in itself, whatever the outcome, cause for pride and contentment.

—Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

Above: America’s economic backbone, circa 2030.

Get a hobby, folks. And do so quickly.

I don’t mean that dismissively. I mean it with urgency.

Watch this.

A person types one sentence: “I’m the general manager of Joe’s Pizza, we’re thinking about opening a new location, advise us where.”

The machine:

• Reads every business file.

• Researches expansion locations across the DC metro area.

• Builds a comparison matrix—rent, distance, demographics, growth ratings.

• Generates a full financial projection with sensitivity analysis in Excel.

• Then produces a polished PowerPoint with a timeline and a recommendation.

Research. Analysis. Output. All in one place. From a sentence.

That used to be a team. An analyst, a strategist, a designer, a project manager, and a few weeks of work. Now it’s just a sentence and a few minutes.

This is far from the tail end of an overblown hype cycle. This is the early, messy, expensive, embarrassing phase of exploring what becomes possible when the cost of a unit of cognitive work drops toward zero.

Put more simply, the gap between imagination and execution just disappeared; now the only limit is nerve.

So where does that leave us?

If AI eats the reading, writing, analyzing, deciding, connecting, and communicating through a keyboard that define traditional white collar work—if it does the heavy rowing (see: The Top Gun Theory of AI from 2024)—then what, exactly, is left for the person holding the tiller?

Watch this next clip and you’ll see.

Anderson Cooper asks the most prolific music producer alive what, exactly, he does in the studio. Rubin can’t play an instrument. He has no formal training, doesn’t read music, and never touches the boards.

His answer: I know what I like and what I don’t like, and I’m decisive about what I like and what I don’t like.

That’s it. That’s the whole job description of the man who produced Run-DMC, Johnny Cash, the Beastie Boys, Adele, Jay-Z, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Metallica.

He can’t do the how. He is the undisputed master of the what.

Unironically, Rick Rubin is the future of work.

Taste and touch—knowing what’s good, knowing what’s right, knowing what you want—evolve into essential, tactical skills that remain solely the privilege of the embodied once AI abstracts away everything else.

Rubin has been living in this future for decades. The rest of us are just arriving.

The most analogous example for this shift (pun very much intended) is the jump from the command line to the graphical user interface.

The Command-Line Interface required you to type precise commands, memorize specific syntax, and manage files via text on green-screen terminals.

Then came the GUI: Xerox Alto in the early 1970s, the Macintosh in the 1980s. Suddenly you could point and click. You didn’t need to speak the machine’s language anymore. The machine learned to speak yours.

That era gave us WYSIWYG—What You See Is What You Get.

What’s arriving now is something else entirely. What You Say Is What You Get.

In this brave new world, the how becomes incidental to the what.

That last line is not mine. It belongs to Alberto Romero, who has written what I consider the single best piece on this shift. It’s called “You Spent Your Whole Life Getting Good at the Wrong Thing,” and below I quote him at length because his thinking deserves the room.

On what happens when the how collapses:

The way I imagine the extreme case of this, which helps me visualize the core shift and remove the meaningless details, is like a genie lamp or a one-use teleporting device: Oh, look, a lamp. Can I ask a wish? But what do I wish for? What do I want from life? Or: if I had a device that could get me anywhere on the planet, where would I go? Where do I want to go if money, time, etc., were not a problem?

This comes down to the idea that you already know what your ideal life looks like, but you insist on not picturing it (out of fear, habit, etc.).

There are various forms of this: ‘If you had 10x more agency, what would you be doing right now?’ You know the answer, you just don’t imagine yourself as the person with 10x your agency and so you don’t become that person...

The idea of thinking about ‘single-use’ magical objects is that they invert the effort allocation 100%: the ‘how’ is fully outsourced. How does the genie get you a billion dollars? How does it make you extremely handsome? You don’t care, you don’t want to know. So, you automatically realize that your mental effort must now be fully devoted to the complementary question: what do you want?

This is, of course, an exaggeration of what AI does, but—and this is the fundamental insight—only in degree, not in kind. AI is the closest thing in the world to a genie lamp.

And then the part that should sting:

The belief that doing takes more resources than deciding what to do has been the default operating mode for basically all of human life. The how has always been so expensive that the what barely matters. You didn’t need to be good at wishing because you were never going to get most of what you wished for anyway. That’s why ‘default to action’ (vs planning or reflection) is such good advice. Now I’m not so sure...

And yet people are walking around with a genie’s lamp in one hand and a teleporting device in the pocket and still spending 99% of their time and effort and thoughts on the how.

The price of knowledge and wisdom is dropping to zero. You can no longer justify doing work you despise and use payment as a defense mechanism to slave away until kingdom come. The excuse structure that propped up the grind—I have to do this because I don’t know how to do that—is dissolving in real time.

The how was a prison. Most people never noticed because the walls were made of necessity. Now the walls are coming down, and people are standing in the open, blinking, unsure of where to walk.

Kierkegaard called the bone-deep anxiety this elicits the “dizziness of freedom.” It is the vertigo that comes not from having too few choices but from having too many—or, more precisely, from suddenly being responsible for choosing at all.

Part of why people are unsure of where to walk is that AI is severing the deepest identity loop in the Western world: who you are equals what you do for money.

The Protestant work ethic was a load-bearing wall for the Western psyche. We are dismantling it without a blueprint for what comes next.

For centuries, the equation was simple. You work. You earn. You are. Your job title was your identity. Your labor was your worth. Even if you hated the work, the paycheck justified the suffering—or at least made the suffering legible. You could point to it and say: This is what I do. Therefore, this is who I am.

But if the machines do the doing, then the doing can no longer define you. And if the doing can no longer define you, you have to find something else that does.

Like it or not, passion is about to be just as important as profit. No career is safe now, which means your healthy obsessions—those things that kindle your flame and stir your soul—are the only things that will carry you through.

The ancient world already knew this. The Bhagavad Gita, written roughly two millennia before anyone typed a line of code:

You have the right to work, but for the work’s sake only. You have no right to the fruits of work. Desire for the fruits of work must never be your motive in working. Never give way to laziness, either.

Perform every action with your heart fixed on the Supreme Lord. Renounce attachment to the fruits. Be even-tempered in success and failure: for it is this evenness of temper which is meant by yoga.

Work done with anxiety about results is far inferior to work done without such anxiety, in the calm of self-surrender. Seek refuge in the knowledge of Brahma. They who work selfishly for results are miserable.

And Friedrich Nietzsche, from the opposite end of every conceivable spectrum, arriving at the same destination:

Whoever wants to achieve something great must not seek to satisfy or please anyone but himself in his work: as soon as he fishes for the approval of others, it will not be anything great.

The work that matters is work done for its own sake. Not as a means to something else, but as an end in and of itself.

This has always been true. AI is forcing the issue by making it necessary.

Agency and internal motivation and work done for its own sake will rule the day, because you cannot outsource taste, you cannot automate desire, and you cannot delegate the question of what kind of life you want to live.

All this just to arrive back where I started: get a hobby.

I want to be precise about what I mean by that. I don’t mean inane idleness or the pursuit of pleasure above all else. I mean productive things done for joy or passion, properly ordered toward your telos—your purpose, your end—and thereby allowing for eudaimonia, the good life well-lived. The kind of life where you use the gifts you’ve been given rather than throwing them by the wayside in an existential fit of resignation.

The last competitive edge is doing things for their own sake.

Here is the virtuous cycle that most people have not yet noticed:

1. The more things you do for yourself—for pleasure, for curiosity, for the sheer joy of it—the more you discover what you actually like.

2. The more you discover what you like, the more you develop taste.

3. The more taste you develop, the better you become at identifying and doing good, tasteful things for their own sake.

4. Then you’re back at one, but higher up the spiral and better able to survey the lay of the land.

The cycle keeps spinning and accelerating. The person who knows what they want—who has spent years doing things not because they were paid to but because they couldn’t stop themselves—is building the only muscle that matters in a world where the how is free. They are developing taste, and taste, as Rubin demonstrates, is the whole ballgame.

If you need proof, look no further than what just happened in Milan.

Alysa Liu won her first national figure skating title at thirteen. By sixteen, she’d competed in the Olympics—and retired. She was burned out, miserable, done. The sport she loved had been hollowed out by obligation: other people telling her what to eat, what to wear, what to skate to. She threw her skates in a closet and walked away.

Two years later, she came back. But this time on her own terms, with a new goal: to have as much fun on the ice as possible. She chose her own coaches. Her own music. Her own choreography. She dyed her hair, got a lip piercing, and skated to Donna Summer. After her free skate, the first words out of her mouth were: “That was so much fun!”

She won Olympic gold, the first American woman to do so in twenty-four years.

Brad Stulberg

Struggle, Joy, and The Meaning of Life

Following her extraordinary gold medal performance, figure skater Alysa Liu’s first words: “That‘s what I’m f---king talking about. That was so much fun…

Read more

2 months ago · 49 likes · 8 comments · Brad Stulberg

Her story will prove prophetic. It is a proper preamble to what people will do, why they will do it, and how they will succeed in the age of AI.

Not by optimizing for optionality—that cult of keeping doors open that has dominated career discourse for far too long—but by doing the opposite. By closing doors. By choosing the one thing that makes you come alive, and going so deep into it that joy and intensity become indistinguishable. Liu won because she stopped optimizing and started wanting.

You can no longer afford not to love what you do. The things that are not means but ends—things done for their own sake—are the last things the machines cannot do for you, cannot take from you.

That, after all, is where the treasure is buried:

So here is the question I’ll leave you with. It is the question that every technological revolution eventually forces upon us, but that this one—because it touches not our hands but our minds—makes inescapable:

If you could do anything—if the how were handled, if the cost were zero, if the only constraint were your own imagination and will—what would you do?

Josef Pieper saw why most people flinch at that question:

Man seems to mistrust everything that is effortless; he can only enjoy, with a good conscience, what he has acquired with toil and trouble; he refuses to have anything as a gift.

Thanks to the terrifying miracle that is AI, today’s bottleneck is neither the tools nor the technology. It is the refusal to believe that you are allowed to want things.

But you can and you must, now more than ever.

Per Richard Feynman:

Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.

You know the answer to your own, personal what. You’ve always known. You just haven’t let yourself picture it.

Picture it. Then go do it.

The machines can handle all the rest.

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Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.

If you want to discuss any of the ideas or musings mentioned above or have any books, papers, or links that you think would be interesting to share in a future edition of White Noise, please reach out to me by replying to this email or following me on X.

With sincere gratitude,

Tom

A writer—and, I believe, generally all persons—must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.

—Jorge Luis Borges

Every day, my spasms beget stares and my grunts give rise to gawks. I intimate from these expressions, gestures, and jeers—both spoken and unspoken—the following common questions:

“What are you doing?”
“Why did you do that?
“Are you okay?”
“What the hell?”
“What’s wrong?”
“What’s wrong with you?”

These questions and others like them puncture my days, deflate my demeanor, and punctuate my existence. All obliquely revolve around and touch upon the pernicious disorder with which I struggle on an unceasing, everlasting basis: Tourette syndrome.

Defined by the medical community as “a neurological disorder characterized by multiple motor and vocal tics lasting for more than one year,” Tourette syndrome encompasses everything from echolalia, the repetition of words, to coprolalia, involuntarily swearing. Although the media homes in on these components of Tourette, they only present in very few people.

Like John Davidson, I am one of the unlucky few afflicted with this regretful, rare manifestation.

I stand with him, a fellow winner of the genetic lottery from hell who has drawn the ire of the ignorant mob in the workplace, on public transit, in houses of worship, and every place where life is lived.

For people like John and me, tranquility is an abstract concept like freedom or justice.

Our minds are battlefields.

As a rule, war is hell and this one is no exception.

It rages across synapses and axons and soma and dendrites, its barren, pockmarked no man’s land illuminated by glowing barrages of dopamine and serotonin.

Unlike the Western Front, here it is never quiet.

Like shrapnel, anxiety whistles

Like gas, depression settles.

Like bayonets, nausea stabs.

Like officers, self-doubt reproaches.

Like shells, self-esteem falls.

Like mines, comfort lies buried.

Like bullets, fear pierces.

Like screams, emotions are stifled.

Like death, chaos is the only constant.

You see, Tourette is a chimera of a disorder. On one day, it can cause you to stomp, shriek, or shout about shit; on another, it simply makes you shuffle your shoes or spring spittle from your mouth. To me, it counts as one of the most unpredictable, inconsiderate, and inconsistent diseases that exists. There is neither rhyme nor reason to its variety of symptoms and no two people who suffer from it are alike.

What began for me in the third grade as simple eye twitches and facial grimaces has since become a cacophony of motor and vocal tics that constantly plague me. My syndrome takes the opportunity to behave inappropriately at the most inopportune moments. It is viciously creative, highly intelligent, and unbelievably perceptive; attacking those values you hold strongest by targeting the mind’s weakest fault lines.

Candidly, I don’t think it a coincidence that torture and Tourette are nearly anagrams. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.

To have Tourette is to live a life of controlled entropy. It is a careening, a hurtling through life, a mad dash not only to function, but also to keep neurological frenzy at bay.

It is a perpetual, desperate fight to keep outer order despite inner uproar.

It is a volatile sanity, an outlandish existence, a rush of frantic energy that can neither be controlled nor properly harnessed. It is a flubbing and fat fingering through life; one of harried chaos and of jostlings that constantly threaten to interrupt thoughts, words, movements, and existence, itself.

It feels like life lived at the precipice, the intersection of control and chaos; that subconscious, instinctual realization when you know you’ve arrived at the proverbial edge.

It is the skier careening downhill, narrowly missing a tree or ridge.

It is the child unsteadily learning to ride a bicycle, knowing that a crash and a bloodied knee are imminent.

It is the duckling projecting an image of serenity while pedaling furiously under the water’s surface.

It is the soldier, prone in his foxhole, trembling as bullets zip and whiz all around him.

It is death by a thousand turbulent minutiae; a life lived as a perpetual accident on the road about and around which people rubberneck.

It is an existence powered by Samuel Beckett’s prayerful hymn of “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

By themselves, most individual tics aren’t injurious or harmful. However, much like water slowly dripping onto and eroding rock, over time they inflict serious damage. They compound and slowly drive the afflicted to exhaustion, frustration, and acquiescence.

But the erosion is not only internal.

The tics are burden enough. What makes them unbearable is the world’s reaction to them. The stares. The whispers. The seat left empty beside you on a crowded train. The invitation that never comes. The employer who finds a reason. The family member who suggests you “sit this one out.” The quiet, cordial, well-meaning suggestion that maybe you’d be more comfortable at home: out of sight and out of mind.

This is the unspoken cruelty of Tourette: it is a disease of the onlooker. The afflicted suffer twice—once from the disorder itself, and again from a world that would rather look away than look closer, segregate rather than accept. People don’t recoil from the syndrome. They recoil from their own discomfort. And rather than reckon with that discomfort, they quarantine the source.

I hate my Tourette. I would give an arm for it to be gone. Both arms. My legs. My net worth. Everything I own and everything I am. I would trade it all for a single quiet moment inside my own skull.

But I can’t. So I ask for something far cheaper: mercy. A little of it goes a long way, particularly when all other maladies are afforded compassion that Tourette is not.

No one asks a person in a wheelchair to “just stop.”

No one tells someone with epilepsy to “try harder.”

No one asks a person with Alzheimer’s to “just remember.”

Yet the Tourettic is expected to suppress, to apologize, to make himself smaller so that others might feel larger.

To quote the providentially-titled, sorely-needed film, I Swear: “Maybe the problem isn’t Tourette’s maybe the problem is people don’t know enough about Tourette’s.”

As Publilius Syrus said in his Sententiae, “Pain of mind is worse than pain of body.” As one who knows mental and physical pain, I can say that the ache of a broken brain throbs more acutely than that of a broken bone.

No matter.

Despite ignorance, despite enmity, despite misunderstanding, despite malice, by God, I shall keep fighting.

For more on Tourette:

• Standing Firm— A chronicle of my experience as a Tourettic ballboy at the U.S. Open

• A Glaring Problem— A lively reflection on the outset of my time with Tourette

• Tourette Does the Talking— A TEDx Talk narrating my life with Tourette

Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.

If you want to discuss any of the ideas or musings mentioned above or have any books, papers, or links that you think would be interesting to share in a future edition of White Noise, please reach out to me by replying to this email or following me on X.

With sincere gratitude,

Tom

Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.

—James Joyce

Wherever you go, right there you are—
on the deck of a boat or the seat of a car.

On a train, on a plane, on a bench, in a bind,
you’re the one piece of luggage you can’t leave behind.

Within you, a country no border can claim,
a passport that’s stamped by your soul’s quiet flame.

And yet though you roam, your heart’s never far
from the light that stays lit, from the door left ajar.

For a house isn’t bricks and a home isn’t beams,
home’s just the voice at the back of your dreams—

The voice that says welcome, you’re known, warts and all,
take a seat by the fire, come in from the squall.

And family’s the rope that frays but won’t break,
the bond that holds fast for each other’s sake.

Through distance, through silence, through years spent apart,
this spare room is kept in the house of the heart.

It’s the place that stays open when all else is shut,
where they love you as you and lift you mid-rut.

Where it’s fine to be you — not the best, not the brave—
just the you that showed up, just the you that they gave.

Here you’re free to say nothing when nothing needs said,
free to lie safe and still with the noise in your head.

Free to long, to be lost, to be sad, to be small,
free to sit with your shadows and welcome them all.

Free of wrath, free of rage, free of sadness and spite,
here you have room to breathe and some space to get right.

Not a fix but a flame that stays lit through the night,
turning wreckage to rest, and then rest into light.

So travel the map, roam far and roam wide,
but you’ll find what you’re after was right there inside.

Not packed in a suitcase or stored on a shelf,
but within the family that made you yourself.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Share White Noise

Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.

If you want to discuss any of the ideas or musings mentioned above or have any books, papers, or links that you think would be interesting to share in a future edition of White Noise, please reach out to me by replying to this email or following me on X.

With sincere gratitude,

Tom

Everything being a constant carnival, there is no carnival left.

—Victor Hugo

The medium is the message.

—Marshall McLuhan

Above: Frenzy in focus.

The camera never stops moving.

It glides from gurney to gurney, patient to patient, crisis to crisis. It bandies about—here and there, up and down, left and right—never settling, never resting, never giving you permission to look away. There are no musical cues telling you how to feel. No establishing shots. No breathing room. Just the relentless, handheld choreography of an emergency room that refuses to slow down.1

HBO’s The Pitt is the best show currently on television. I say that with full confidence and zero confidence, because I can no longer tell whether the show is genuinely great or whether it has simply perfected the art of hijacking my brain.

The Dopamine Machine

In 2004, the average human attention span on a screen was two and a half minutes. By 2012, it had dropped to 75 seconds. Today it sits at just 44 seconds. That’s a nosedive off a cliff.

TikTok did not cause this collapse, but it did build an incredibly formidable business model around it. Pediatricians now call the app a positively Pavlovian “dopamine machine” where each swipe delivers a micro-hit of neurochemical reward and each video trains the brain to expect information in 15-to-30-second bursts.

Researchers have found that heavy short-form video users show measurably reduced prefrontal executive function, the very brain region responsible for filtering distractions and sustaining focus. In a 15-minute TikTok session, a teenager may consume 60 different videos, each requiring a total shift in context, each preventing the brain from ever entering a flow state.

I’ve written before about how our shrinking attention spans have reshaped even which ancient philosophy we reach for; why Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations thrives in the scroll era precisely because it was already chunked into discrete, bite-sized fragments that exploit the same variable reward schedule as an algorithm.

The Pitt is the television version of that same phenomenon: content that succeeds because of our cognitive rewiring.

We have collectively reprogrammed ourselves to need the next thing, now, always.

TikTok Dressed up in Prestige Clothing

Each season chronicles a single 15-hour shift in a Pittsburgh emergency room. Each episode covers roughly one hour. The real-time conceit means there is no narrative compression, no “three weeks later.” You are locked in from the get-go.

But within that lock, the show is pure kinetic scatter. A dozen storylines compete for your attention in any given episode. A cardiac arrest interrupts a domestic abuse case which interrupts an opioid overdose which interrupts a quiet conversation about burnout. The camera—operated handheld all day, every day, on lightweight rigs designed for constant motion—follows one character and then abandons them mid-sentence to chase another down the hall. You are always being pulled somewhere new. In a way, the ER is a perfect metaphor for the feed.

One review compared the editing to the Safdie Brothers—the filmmakers behind Uncut Gems, a movie that was essentially a two-hour panic attack. That’s not a coincidence.

The Pitt uses the same toolkit: relentless pacing, overlapping dialogue, claustrophobic framing, the elimination of silence. The show’s creators deliberately stripped out almost all background music, replacing it with layered ambient sound—machinery, background conversations recorded from real ER nurses, the beeping of monitors—so that the environment itself becomes the rhythm.

Cinematographer Johanna Coelho described the production rhythm simply: “We just punch through. We don’t stop. We keep going all day.”

It is, in other words, a show built for brains that can no longer sit still. A show that gives you the constant novelty hit of scrolling your phone, but wrapped in prestige production values and real human stakes. TikTok in a hospital gown.

And I, for one, can’t stop watching.

The Business of More

The Pitt costs roughly $4 to $5 million per episode. For comparison, House of the Dragon runs upwards of $20 million per episode. Severance costs $20 million. Andor ran $21 to $22 million.

How? One set. The entire show takes place inside a 360-degree hospital built across multiple soundstages at Warner Bros. in Burbank. No location shoots. No CGI. No elaborate costume design. The wardrobe is scrubs. The set’s lighting is built into the ceiling so the camera can move freely in any direction without waiting for a crew to reposition equipment.

This efficiency means HBO can produce 15 episodes per season—nearly double the typical streaming order of eight—and return annually. In a landscape where fans wait two or three years between seasons of Severance or Euphoria and get half the episodes, The Pitt delivers twice the content at a quarter of the cost, every single year. HBO’s head of content called it filling “white space in the streaming landscape.” This allows for shows with longer seasons, modest budgets, and consistent annual returns. The network has already ordered a few pilots built on the same model.

The economics mirror the attention economy perfectly. More content, faster, cheaper, always. The same logic that drives TikTok’s infinite scroll drives The Pitt‘s production calendar. Keep them engaged. Reduce the wait. Never let them leave.

Sound familiar?

Needless to say, it’s working.

The Season 2 premiere drew 5.4 million viewers in three days—nearly triple the series debut. The show hit 939 million viewing minutes in its premiere week. It won the Emmy for Outstanding Drama. It won the Golden Globe. It is, as of this week, the number one show on all of streaming.

And yet, I still wonder.

The Pitt is undeniably well-made. The performances are extraordinary—Noah Wyle’s quiet devastation, Katherine LaNasa’s bruised resilience, Patrick Ball’s trembling vulnerability as an addict trying to come back. The writing treats healthcare workers with a seriousness and specificity that actual ER physicians say they’ve never seen on television. Real doctors describe certain scenes as triggering. That’s not a show coasting on cheap tricks.

However, I wonder whether part of what makes it feel so good is that it has been precision-engineered for a brain that can no longer tolerate stillness.

The show’s greatest innovation might not be its realism or its performances but its metabolism—the way it delivers emotional payload at a frequency perfectly calibrated to an attention span that has been shattered by a decade of infinite scrolling.

I love this show. I endorse it without reservation. You should watch it. Everyone should watch it.

But when I ask myself why I love it—whether it’s because the spectacle is genuinely transcendent or because the delivery mechanism has been optimized for our collective neurological damage—I don’t have a clean answer.

The camera keeps moving. I keep watching.

I’m not sure I could stop if I wanted to.

Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.

If you want to discuss any of the ideas or musings mentioned above or have any books, papers, or links that you think would be interesting to share in a future edition of White Noise, please reach out to me by replying to this email or following me on X.

With sincere gratitude,

Tom