The View From Nowhere. What's left when no one else is watching? I'll tell you... Click the link below.

The machines can finish your sentence, but you’re the one that gets to write your story. Being Human in a World Of Machines Every week in my newsletter, I reflect on what it means to be real. To be authentic. To be honest. To be human. But lately I’ve been wondering what that even means in a world that keeps speeding up. Through technology we are surrounded by miracles of speed. I can video-call my dad from anywhere in the world. I can play chess with a stranger at 2 a.m. when I can’t sleep. I can generate an image, outline a book, or get an answer to almost any question instantly. It’s incredible. And yet I catch myself speeding through things I enjoy, as if getting to the end faster will make them more meaningful. So I keep asking myself: Why are we in such a rush? Technology compresses time. Things that once took weeks, months, or years now take seconds. AI pushes this even further, compressing thinking, creating, and deciding for us. But human life doesn’t compress the same way: We can’t rush trust. We can’t accelerate grief. We can’t shortcut connection or push feelings. These things happen at their own pace. They resist optimization. And still, we keep trying to speed everything up. But toward what? We don’t actually want to reach the finish line faster, do we? We don’t want to die sooner. We still have our whole precious life to fill. So why are we so obsessed with compressing it? I don’t deny there are real advantages to technological advancement. It leads us to more (and isn’t that what we always want?) More speed → More experience → More expansion → More intelligence → More advancement → More technology. Which leads to: More speed, more experience, more expansion…. A cycle that endlessly repeats and that doesn’t have a natural stopping point. It just keeps accelerating until… well, the heat death of the universe, I suppose. It’s the logic of exponential growth. But it demands that we trade depth for breadth. The promise of “more” might be seductive. But what if all this speed prevents us from feeling more, even as we get more done? Today we can zap through the world. We can be almost anywhere on earth in under 24 hours. A journey that once took months is now one plane flight away. So we can travel more, see more, do more. But visiting 10 countries in 3 months versus traveling slowly through one country on horseback isn’t just a logistical difference. It creates a different kind of understanding. This isn’t nostalgia. (Or maybe a little. I’m getting old). It’s a question of what kind of humans we want to be. In last week’s newsletter I spoke of the “everything-is-fine-but-you-still-feel-empty”-state. Acceleration and constant stimulation don’t fix that feeling. They actually make it worse. When speed becomes the main metric, our focus moves from presence to output. A slow walk where you feel the sun on your face. A conversation that wanders for hours with no agenda. An idea that slowly evolves in the back of your mind. Knowledge that comes through lived experience. These aren’t inefficiencies. They’re where life happens. I don’t think technology is evil (yet). It’s incredibly useful. But I’m not sure it makes us more human. And that is the part we need to protect. AI is powerful because it thrives on patterns and acceleration, but humanity has always lived, at least partly, in uncertainty. In not knowing. In waiting. In creating something from scratch. That’s where originality and aliveness are born. I’m not saying we should reject technology, but we should protect what it means to be human from optimization. So that we are the ones living, instead of outsourcing life to a machine. Because the acceleration won’t stop. It just keeps going. Yet meanwhile, here we are. With hearts that still beat at the same pace they always have. One Step Toward the Real You This week, choose one thing, and do it the slow way. On purpose! Write a paragraph by hand instead of typing. Think about a question for a day before asking AI. Let a thought stay unfinished for a while. Notice what happens in the friction. Slowing down isn’t morally superior, but it might help you hear your own, deeply human voice. Without having a machine attached to it. One Thought Worth Keeping The question is no longer whether AI can write like Shakespeare. It’s whether we should outsource everything to machines, just because we can. We don’t need to get to the end faster. (Remember: heat death. Not ideal). Take your time. With love, Lilé

In 1914, explorer Ernest Shackleton set out on an expedition to cross Antarctica. The plan was ambitious. Possibly impossible. But Shackleton believed it was worth attempting. Before they ever reached land, disaster struck. Their ship, Endurance, became trapped in ice. For months the crew waited, hoping the ice would loosen and allow them to continue. But it didn’t. Eventually the pressure crushed the ship. Shackleton had a decision to make. Continue chasing the original dream or abandon it. He chose the latter. Years later someone asked if it was difficult to give up the mission he had spent years preparing for. His answer was simple: “Difficult? Yes. But the moment survival becomes the goal, all other ambitions disappear.” Like Shackleton, we all have dreams. Maybe you’ve carried yours ever since you were a kid: become a professional athlete, a top model, a parent, a CEO. You’ve sacrificed time, comfort, relationships. You’ve believed in it, whole-heartedly. Maybe you made it. But maybe you didn’t. When the dream fails or stalls you face a choice: keep chasing it, or let it go. Society tells us: “Don’t settle. Don’t give up. Keep going.” And we do. For years, decades. We wait for the perfect circumstances, the perfect people, the perfect life. We call it patience and ambition. But sometimes persistence doesn’t help. Sometimes the dream you refuse to abandon is holding you back rather than pushing you forward. It shields you from reality and protects you from discomfort. Growth. Happiness even. The line between courage and delusion is thinner than you think. Chasing a dream says: I deserve better. But refusing to let it go says: I cannot survive without this fantasy. Some opportunities never appear. Some doors never open. And waiting for it does not make you principled. It makes you stuck. Shackleton set out to cross Antarctica. He never did. But he accomplished something far more important: he brought every single member of his crew home alive. The original dream was lost in the ice. But the dream to survive took its place. Our lives work the same way. Some dreams push us forward for years. Until they are meant to be released. The dream you once chased may no longer be the one you need. And letting go might be the very thing that moves life forward again. -Follow me on Substack if you want to receive my weekly Newsletter. All things life, meaning, and inspirationally depressing philosophy.-