In high school, while working part-time for a lawyer-politician, I witnessed how my boss made both high-profile and discreet deals, and I figured a career of quietly amassing power and wealth behind closed doors was perhaps the most practical way forward for someone like me who grew up always needing money.

Maybe, I thought, if I pursued law and politics, and became successful at it, I could live beyond the humble background I was born into.

But something happened. It was a small, seemingly insignificant moment.

One afternoon, my boss’s assistants and I were going out for a late lunch. The morning’s notarization fees had been hefty, and the top assistants, who were also lawyers, figured we should eat somewhere a little more indulgent than our usual restaurant. And so we did, but none of these details really matter except for when the top assistant and I ended up in the front seat and we got to talking, and somewhere along the road I referred to a popular musical I had watched, gushing, and the assistant and the other lawyers in the backseat wrinkled their noses and scoffed at musicals altogether. To understand the sort of beauty they appreciated, I asked about what they liked, and their answers varied (fine whiskey, beach resort trips, watch collections), but I could tell those were only hobbies to them; pretty, petty things. Distractions. Things they buy to take the occasional break from what genuinely drove and ignited a fire in their souls: greatness.

I knew then that I was, as they say, one of the “sensitive souls.” The pursuit of greatness was not my path.

For years, I wore this difference like a secret badge of honor. Let them have their luxury trips and power suits, for I pursued meaning and beauty, and those to me were richer. But lately, I’ve been wondering if this “badge” has become a liability.

As I read various Substack articles here on a Saturday, I couldn’t help but notice that many pieces sounded suspiciously like Claude’s recently released Opus 4 AI model.

Take a look at these three different paragraphs:

Tech newsletter:

The problem with AI coding assistants isn't capability. It's context. Ask Cursor to refactor a function and it'll nail it. Ask it to understand why your startup's entire architecture is built around a specific edge case from 2019, and you'll get beautiful code that breaks everything. The gap between "technically correct" and "actually useful" is where most AI tools die. Not because they can't code; they code better than half the engineers I know. But because they can't sit through the three-hour meeting where the CTO explained why we're using that weird database setup. They haven't watched the company pivot four times. They don't know that Sarah from frontend will absolutely riot if you change that API response format.

Personal newsletter

The wedding invitation arrived on a Thursday. Cream cardstock, gold foil, the kind of thing that costs more than most people's rent. My ex's name in elegant script next to someone I'd never heard of. I held it in my kitchen, still in my barista apron that smelled like burnt espresso and broken dreams. Three years since she'd left me for "needing to find herself." Apparently she'd found herself in Greenwich, Connecticut, marrying an investment banker. I laughed. Not the bitter kind but the real kind, where your body surprises you with genuine joy. Because standing there, making $15 an hour and living with two roommates, I realized I'd won. Not the life she wanted. The life I wanted. The one where I could still cry at movies and mean it.

Politics newsletter

Everyone's wrong about why young men are moving right. It's not Joe Rogan. Not Andrew Tate. Not even the economy, though that's closer. Walk into any shared workspace in Austin or Miami and you'll find them: 25-year-olds making $40k trying to build the next unicorn, living on protein shakes and delusion. They're not angry because they can't get dates. They're angry because they did everything right: the degree, the internship, the networking. And they're still sharing a bathroom with three strangers. The left offers them guilt about privileges they can't feel from their air mattress. The right offers them a story where their struggle means something. Where their hustle isn't pathetic but heroic. That's the gap. Not policy. Narrative.

These are all excerpts of real pieces published by humans that I copied and asked Opus 4 to rewrite. I had to change some details and make Opus 4 rewrite it so that no one would recognize where these excerpts originally came from. But I guarantee the writing, the cadence, and rhythm of these rewrites are very much similar to the originals.

I’ve been using AI ever since it came out in 2022. I mostly used it for client work since the clients liked AI writing. I tried using it in my personal writing, too, but I mostly hated what it produced, and prompting it for fixes took longer, so I just wrote things myself. While the technology has vastly improved, I can usually spot if someone is using an AI’s default writing settings.

The creators of AI will probably dispute me. But unless you ask the AI to emulate a very specific writing style, or you change its default settings, AI writing has a distinct voice.

Compare the three above to this:

When I first saw New York I was twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off a DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in the old Idlewild temporary terminal, and the warm air smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever heard sung and all the stories I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again. In fact it never was. Some time later there was a song on all the jukeboxes on the Upper East Side that went “but where is the schoolgirl who used to be me,” and if it was late enough at night I used to wonder that. I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.

It’s an excerpt from one of my favorite essays, Goodbye to All That by Joan Didion.

And herein lies the problem.

When you read the three paragraphs above, they’re actually okay! They’re good enough. Who needs soulful writing like Didion’s when they can get the message across through an article prompted out of Claude Opus 4?

When you’re a creator who is expected to write fast and publish even faster to keep your voice above the noise, do you really have the luxury to labor over your words and create beauty like Didion’s? (Admittedly, my writing right now is crap because I’m writing this on a Saturday and I have plenty of other work to do and this piece has to be published in a few hours.)

I previously talked about how people aren’t really getting dumber these days: they’re getting number. Modern jobs demand more output because “we now have more powerful tools and AI,” so the workload is actually increased, thanks to the expectation of higher productivity and efficiency. And unlike in the old days, we couldn’t completely disconnect after work because we’re stuck to our phones 24/7, scrolling social media or bingeing Netflix to cope.

The result is a numbed populace: too tired to do the deep thinking, reading, or creative work that would develop minds and elevate tastes. This extends for longer periods (remember, mainstream ChatGPT only first came out in November 2022). And eventually, more and more people become satisfied simply reading stuff prompted out of AI.

Create content using AI to scale faster and easier and make more money to buy fine whiskey and luxury resort trips and shoe or watch collections. Maybe the lawyers from my high school days were right. This world wasn't made for sensitive souls.

If I were more inclined to build businesses or work in tech and marketing and lawyering, maybe even politics, maybe my life would be easier. I would focus on building AI wrappers or creating productivity tools or launching SaaS startups that “leverage AI” to automate everything. Creating art is such a luxury nowadays.

But I am, in the end, a sensitive soul.

I think about those lawyers in the car and come to the sad realization that their game is now the main game.

What appears to be the only realistic solution

Last week, I read an article about AI-powered billboards that can deliver personalized advertising based on real-time data about the people walking past them.

The CEO of an advertising company described it as a revolutionary advancement: thousands of targeted and personalized ads at an "unimaginable scale" and "incredibly low cost."

Is this really the kind of world we want?

A place brimming with personalized ads that are designed to make you buy more things when you could barely afford them, because AI took most of your job opportunities?

In my recent writing retreat in Reykjavik, Iceland, one of the things I noticed was their general lack of billboards and the lack of ads.

Other than the typical screen ad playing on the side of a public bus, I don't remember seeing the big flashy billboards I'm used to. Apparently, the Icelandic government forbids it to prevent distracting drivers. I think they should keep that policy. Forever.

In my limited experience, Iceland generally does not have the same consumerist habits I'm accustomed to. Iceland is one of the top ten happiest countries in the world. The metric for this is debatable. But a country that isn't so focused on consumerism, where an AI that can personalize ads for audiences in public spaces is simply not needed, is definitely much happier.

Now that it’s harder to justify process over product and meaning over metrics, what I witnessed in Reykjavik gives me hope. AI is here to stay, and it does have some good effects, like advancements in medicine and other technical industries.

But the best way to keep AI’s good effects while minimizing the bad is to follow the Iceland model. Kill consumerism. Focus on real living.

A people that doesn’t insist on buying more stuff will eventually not need all the bells and whistles that AI offers. Maybe then, we will have more time to read, and our taste will evolve to the point that reading the three paragraphs I shared above will become intolerable, and we will naturally crave real, human art.