The Quantum State of Living
Between AI-Maxxing and Going Analog
Note: This essay is an expansion of this note that I wrote and proved to be quite popular. If you are new here, welcome! I hope you stick around
The pixelated rust-orange space invader sits squarely on my screen ready to take my instructions. A genie in a bottle with a command line.
This innocuous window, font type Styrene B with the blinking white rectangle, turns laymen into hackers. This is Claude Code—the cool kids’ new tool on LinkedIn. You can’t escape it, like Labubus, Dubai Chocolate, or the Harlem Shake.1
Part of me wants to bow out of this bit of zeitgeist. I have a natural trepidation for things that seem to take over the discourse like a rip current.2 Particularly with AI, the hype machine works furiously to tell us that, yes, we are missing the next best thing, so go check it out!
“Why are you not using ChatGPT?” “Oh my god, you gotta try the new Claude model.” “Did you install Open Claw yet?” “What have you made with Claude Code?” “Did you play with Nano Banana?”
Spring has arrived in Seattle. A few minutes from my house there is a nature trail. Poplars line up like Swiss guards, close to retirement and making their last stand. Magnolia dogwoods emerge like a soufflé under the soft April sun. The evergreens welcome reinforcements from swordferns, buttercups, and all kinds of thistles.
I pair my nature walk with intermittent moments of silence and Mort Garson’s Mother Earth’s Plantasia. Garson’s album was composed for plants to listen to; I tell myself that the flora around me is being serenaded by the faint sound emerging from my headphones.
My eyes welcome the break from the computer screen, and the eye strain that feels as if I was looking straight into a blowdryer. I congratulate myself for unplugging, walking at a pace that would piss off every New Yorker, and being enlightened enough to appreciate the little things in life. “Look at me taking it easy and smelling the flowers!”
I check the time and a doubt emerges. Was this the best use of my time? Was this nature walk a way to connect with my surroundings, or am I running away from a growing list of skills to learn, technology to try, all in the efforts of remaining somewhat employable, at least to the point where I don’t have to live like Dostoevsky to write?3
The last few months of my life have been defined by a game of seesaw where I plant my ass on one end of the teeter-totter, hit the ground, then sprint to the other end and plop down again. I’ve attempted to stay at the vanguard of technology while learning how to be bored and not fidget after two minutes sans digital stimuli.
These two poles hold their own set of values, with different virtues and pitfalls. I wrestle with living inside both of these conflicting realities at the same time; telling myself that if I aim for balance, like most things in life, that I will be fine. The word “balance” emerges as a high-wire cable between two skyscrapers.
AI-maxxing
AI is here. Pandora’s box has been opened, in fact, the box is getting bigger. We’ve gone from using ChatGPT as a Google-with-an-attitude, to a set of tools that can book flights, create websites in blinks, and automate most aspects of our digital lives.
Every new tool, every “things will never be the same” pulls us towards our computer screens to try these things. I’m impressed at how easy it’s become to create a decent website—I created this website to stand out when I applied for a Writer job at Stripe in a couple hours.4 I’ve also used AI to research and explore topics with such depth that I can’t really imagine living without anymore. AI has allowed me to supercharge my curiosity and turn my rabbit holes into burrows.5
But embracing these tools comes with terms and conditions that we reflexively scroll through on our way to clicking “Agree.” This is what we are agreeing to: AI literacy will be enforced like learning to work a computer. You must now make more, do it with less, and do it faster. After all, you now have an army of digital servants. Oh, and forget about asking how these models were trained, or how much energy they consume, or whether these labs give a shit what happens to our brains on AI. Nope, just vibe code baby!
If you dare to stray from the path of AI-maxxing, well then you’ve made the naïve choice to meander through life and forego the rewards of experimentation, speed, and relevance.
Going Analog
Analog is cool again. Vinyl records are in, Film photography is back, and brick phones are becoming a status symbol. Per this New York Times essay from 2025, 68% of Gen Z adults reported feeling nostalgic for times before their own birth.
These trends are a response to a greater yearning. It’s become commonly accepted that social media is probably harmful in some way, that scrolling mindlessly for seven hours on TikTok is not healthy, and that part of collective psychosis may be partly due to the fact that we are stimulated by everything everywhere all the time.
The antidote: To reclaim our attention, break free from screen hypnosis and our headphones, to embrace an atypical slowness to life. To live like a poet admiring orchids and tulips. The primal case for this is sanity. But the pragmatic argument is that this new era of machines places a premium on things being more human. You rebel against AI slop not just by refusing to participate in it, but by cultivating your sense of taste, away from the screen. That’s how you opt out of the never-ending-now.
Major magazines like The Atlantic or The New Yorker are writing about our fight against technological omnipresence. The winning essay from Essay Architecture’s $10,000 essay contest was titled “How to End Your Extremely Online Era.” But there is this undercurrent I’ve noticed whenever these discussions about relying on technology less and AI intersect: It prejudices investing time learning how to use AI as “normie” behavior that signals a lack of scruples, environmental conscience, and/or desire to be exceptional. This line of thinking is a coping mechanism that naïvely proposes that if we all agree AI is shit, somehow we’ll put a lid on Pandora’s Box.
The idea of going analog, of touching grass as an act of rebellion against our AI overlords misses the key point that, you know, maybe it’s an unequivocally good idea to touch grass—AI apocalypse or not. We could all benefit from a bit more silence and chill, not to stick it to “the man,” but to just live more at peace.
The Quantum State of Living
I’ve presented a binary scenario: Either you commit to AI mastery and reap the rewards of relevancy; or you opt for the analog life and the presence that comes with it. The next question is: “why not both?”
Over the past month I’ve been thinking about a world where I can’t reconcile this tension and have to commit to one way of living, and another timeline where I do a little bit of both, balancing the spinning plates of technology while sitting atop my unicycle of Zen. Judging by my actions and my penchant for trying to do it all, looks like I’ll take the unicycle.
Maybe I’m talking myself into this. But humans are highly adaptable (sometimes it takes us millennia, but whatever), and over the coming years we’ll waddle, debate, and politicize our way to AI co-existence. The younger generations are already discovering that there is something worthwhile about reclaiming our attention, living at the pace of the sun, and not of a stopwatch—and that our screens can dazzle us, but so can the cherry blossom’s bloom every spring, as it has, for thousands of years.
Now you are thinking about the song, huh? And it’s going to be stuck inside your mind all day. You are welcome.
This is why to this day, I’ve never seen Frozen, Hamilton, or K-Pop Demon Hunters. If I ever told you that I watched any of these, I regret to inform you that I lied to you to prevent a badgering as to why I had been living under a rock.
Part of me cringes whenever I write paragraphs that are just a bunch of questions because I feel like Carrie from Sex and the City.
I am, sadly, not writing for Stripe. But I’m convinced that creating artifacts (videos, websites, memos) that bring value to a potential employer is 100x better idea than spraying n’ praying your resume across hundreds of job applications hoping for the best.
20 years later after slogging through Watership Down, I can now say something useful came from reading it.