At the speed of thought

Frictionless convenience claims irritate me. The importance of self-inflicted struggle has been pivotal in my life. Manual, tedious effort trains my mind and body—or at least builds discipline and lowers expectations. It’s the only way I’ve grown. Not much has happened by way of teaching since my last school exam. A lot of stuff got in but never truly went anywhere. Perhaps that’s how stupid I am. That’s why I believe in the superiority of experience over conceptual learning.

That’s also why I resist automation. Not because it reduces the value of my efforts. If something can replace me, please do. I’ll gladly go do something else. But some skills I want to keep alive even if inefficient. Autonomy is part of my identity. If it constrains my capacity, I evaluate compromises carefully. Cooking, writing, cleaning, maintaining, designing, etc. Don’t get me wrong I’m the beneficiary of many automated processes, not Epictitus naked in his barrel. Personal autonomy is relative. But standards are low these days.

My rituals are unintentional, thus intuitive. I’m tall and skinny; I feel like running. I’ve built Legos and drawn my whole life; I can make stuff up on demand. I never went to restaurants as a kid, I still dislike the experience; so I cook every day. Same for gyms, I just move all the time because I can’t sit for long. All that takes an ungodly amount of time and most of my energy, intuitively so. Most of those activities are finite and rewarding. Like a Lego or cleaning the living room: when it’s done, it’s done. So goes the day. Sore feet are normal after 6pm.

The stuff laying around trips me up. Tools are fun. Hype aside, some are genuinely paired with my creativity. The recent AI ones boast a paradigm shift in creative tooling. I haven’t felt it. They take over too much of the process. So far they set rules to a game that should be open-ended, instinct-led, and laborious. My creative process never starts with “a prompt.” The start is always a vague mental image which will need an unknown context to unfold—if I even want to chase it, which most of the time I don’t. Good tools don’t beg to be used. To that extent, spoons remain above web browsers.

“Working at the speed of thought” is a terrifying proposition. I’ve read versions of it out there and got pissed every time. Mostly because I’m trying so hard to slow myself down, starting with my legs. I’ve seen what happens when I move too fast. I think about it every time I step on my double-fractured big toe. That’s what I got going at the speed of thought. When I look around I can sense that there a bunch of idiots like me running on broken toes.

← Index / Published on 2025-10-23