Most of the consequential matters in our lives are set in motion long before we know they exist. The light you see from a star began its trip to your eyes long before you ever looked up.

The ice cream man

For eight years I sent the occasional “hello” email to a former client, a man I only knew for his work at an ice cream company in Michigan. We bonded over a parallel upbringing. He grew up a couple of blocks (and a couple of decades) from my childhood home in the Chicago suburbs and yet our paths crossed 300 miles from that common ground.

In 2018 I quit my job to pursue something undefined. I got a membership to a coworking space and committed to showing up. One night, they hosted a speed networking event and towards the end I sat down across from an older gentleman who ran a hedge fund. Our brief chat led to some small-world discoveries of our own and he invited me to listen in on a pitch to a high-profile prospect’s family office.

“Stefanie, my friend!” were the first words from the other line. To everyone’s surprise, the ice cream man was now the one running it.

The days that followed included a committed investment and a hedge fund manager astonished by my unexpected network. That one meeting catalyzed countless other rooms I got invited into that I had no business being in. It was the beginning of a grand adventure.

Shared light

Several years ago I was reading Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art for the first time. I was in an era of taking in content with a firehose and was simultaneously playing a podcast in the background. It was an interview with a pastor I had been following for years. Like the ice cream man, he had mirrored my geographic experiences of West Michigan and Chicagoland.

I reached a sentence in the book and the moment I read it, I heard the pastor quote it on the podcast. As seamlessly as if he was the voice of an audiobook. I stopped dead. I genuinely questioned if I was losing my mind. The book is written from a secular perspective, certainly not faith-based in the traditional sense - not something I expected to hear in that conversation.

The longer I’ve paid attention, the more I’ve realized something like this isn’t that unlikely.

Whenever we consume content, we join a club of everyone else who has read, watched or heard it. We carry it with us, oftentimes leading to further exploration. We look up texts our favorite authors quote. We follow suggested accounts. We click our way through what our algorithm offers. It’s actually not a surprise at all that the pastor and I were reading the same book. We’ve been drinking from the same wells for years.

Drawing the lines

Consider your life like the night sky. Every experience, every defining characteristic, everything you’ve learned is a star - and an infinite amount of lines connect to create our personal constellations. That concept by itself isn’t very profound. Until you realize our skies overlap far more than we think.

Two kids who grew up a few blocks and a few decades apart absorbed the same streets, schools and influences that sent them heading the same direction. When I look back and trace all the lines between myself, the hedge fund manager and the ice cream man the story seems less surprising and more inevitable. But seeing how something was arranged doesn’t make it any less miraculous.

Engineering vs. noticing

I am an orchestrator. I connect ideas and thoughts and people and opportunities as both a pastime and vocation. Engineering requires making choices - what to read, where to show up, who to talk to. When to act and when to wait. How to approach a problem. How to think through a solution. None of that is passive.

But the miracles come from noticing. The recognition of the relationship between our unique skies.

Most of what reaches us was sent long ago by hands we will never see. We do not choose when it left, we only choose whether we are looking up when it arrives.

Pop culture has been showing us what the AI takeover will look like for years. Sarah Connor tried to warn us: the metal monsters will one day wake up, decide we’re the bad guys and start terminating.

That is not the apocalypse I am worried about. I do not expect the robots to rise up and take over the world. What I am seeing instead is their ability to take over our inner world.

A vice that looks like a virtue

Most dopamine machines come with a warning label. Gambling, gaming, sugar, drinking, drugs. No one mistakes them for healthy or valuable. Knowing that excess is dangerous gives us an internal meter. We limit our bets and count our drinks because we understand the consequences if we don’t.

AI is the first vice that makes you look good while it has its hooks in you. You can lose hours of your life to it and come out with a presentation, a process or a prototype that looks and feels like progress. Nobody stages an intervention for that. Instead, you are praised.

But with every upside AI provides, there is a trade-off. For me, it began truly costing something.

The other edge

The three most obvious benefits of AI turned out to be the same three things that have cost me the most.

It doesn’t need me to be precise. A few years ago it mattered how you wrote a prompt. Now it’s irrelevant. I can type run-on sentences full of typos and grammatical errors and it still gets the gist. Voice texting straight into it is even faster. But a few months ago I noticed how bad I had gotten at talking. Actually talking. To adult humans.

Its first draft feels like magic. The first version of anything feels like it read my mind, and I am amazed at how much it gets right. Then I look at the details and the uncanny valley kicks in. Something is just slightly off in the copy or the design. Maybe it’s pulling in some unrelated context and applying it where it doesn’t belong. It’s the Pareto principle with a twist: 80% of it may be right, but the 20% that is wrong can be catastrophic.

It saves me time by spending someone else’s. Something produced fast and handed to someone else as garbage costs more than however many minutes it saved me. It costs trust and reputation. When two people are only emailing their AI’s writing back and forth, facts may be getting exchanged (perhaps even flawlessly!) machine to machine. What gets lost is everything that normally passes between two people: nuance, personality and perspective.

What I keep for myself

I give the time back to deep work, not busy work. My moment of clarity: I had automated and sped up so much of my work, and then just filled the time with more busy work. It is easier than ever to do things that feel productive. But the whole benefit of all this leverage is the space it opens up for the deepest, most human work. The stuff that is truly irreplaceable. So while a fifteen-minute code run goes, I walk. I read a book by a human author. I write my to-do list by hand.

I wrestle an idea before I hand it over. Before an idea goes into Claude, I try to work it out analog first, even if only briefly. I talk it over with a person, draw it on a whiteboard or journal it. It sounds backwards when AI can figure out so much from a raw dump. But if dumping is all that gets done, the muscles that matter most atrophy. The thinking gets thinner, and what gets dumped in gets worse and worse.

I write my own words. I don’t use AI to write my emails, posts or essays. I still use it to organize ideas, catch details I’d miss, even build an outline. But the more people tire of reading AI content, the more it matters to me to create without it. Every piece written by a person keeps the world’s ratio a little more human.

Further in

Over the past month I’ve had many conversations with people whose work looks a lot like mine. We’ve all lived the same arc: the high, the hollow feeling, the moment we really noticed something was off. This shared fatigue isn’t driving us away from using AI - it’s driving us further into our humanity.

In June 2015, millions of readers met the self-improvement corner of the internet head-on when Benjamin Hardy’s article “8 Things Every Person Should Do Before 8 A.M.” went viral on Medium. He wasn’t the first person to write about personal growth. But back then the format felt original and the advice seemed new.

At first I read it the way most people did; I ran a quick rubric on my own life and recognized I rarely did any of those eight things right away - let alone at any point in an entire day.

The method

Hardy built an entire livelihood out of that one post. Within a year and a half he had more than 100,000 email subscribers and a book deal. It’s been read over ten million times. While he finished his PhD he generated revenue as an author, a speaker and a coach. I even pursued his coaching for a moment, going so far as having an intro call with him. (He ended it by gently letting me know I wasn’t a good fit.)

My original understanding was that he had written in silence for years before anyone noticed. He didn’t. By his own admission, the post went viral about three months after he started blogging seriously. He even paid for a course on writing viral headlines along the way. He studied what spreads, and it spread.

A seed was planted: maybe I could do the same thing.

“It’s really quite simple.”

Before his list begins, Hardy writes “It may seem like a long list. But in short, it’s really quite simple.” And he proceeds to give “the simple” version - still eight items, distilled to their barest form.

I can boil it down to a three-part framework: get up, get inspired, get moving. The real value was never in his eight behaviors. It was in the principles underneath them. You don’t need to follow the prescription. You need to build your own framework from the principles that hold up in your life.

But that version would have never gone viral.

Why we buy it

Here’s the phenomenon: we would rather trade our attention for someone else’s prescription for our lives than spend the energy figuring out what actually works for ours. We exchange clicks, eyeballs and real money for instructions on how to improve every part of our lives, often from people whose only authority is that they chose to share it.

Erich Fromm wrote about this in 1941, long before Medium existed. In Escape from Freedom, he argued that freedom is heavy and people will hand it to almost any authority willing to tell them what to do. A morning routine is a small version of the same trade. If someone else decides how your day starts, you don’t have to.

How I read it

It didn’t take long for me to recognize that I was not cut out to execute those eight steps. I saw the framework underneath and made some changes to my own routine. But it wasn’t his mornings I tried to mirror. It was his writing.

For the next few years, I tried to copy that style. I wrote on Medium and LinkedIn and Substack, attempting to curate my own iteration of personal growth content. I joined communities, paid for courses, watched YouTube videos on virality. Everything I created was aimed at something fleeting and it showed. The irony was I could read his list and throw it out, but when I saw his method I tried to adopt all of it.

Who wanted this?

The list was easy to refuse - it looked like a prescription so I was able to treat it like one. The other prescription wasn’t as obvious. It looked like ambition and it felt like my own.

Fromm takes escaping freedom one step further. It’s not always as blatant as handing your choices over to authority. It’s something he called automaton conformity: we take on other people’s wants and forget they were ever someone else’s in the first place. We don’t experience it as obedience. We call it a goal.

Hardy built a career around his calling. And every time I sat down to write, I was trying to build a career around his calling too. It’s no surprise it was unsustainable.

Starting over

So now I’m back, on roughly the same platforms, for a different reason.

I have the work that pays me and it can carry that weight. Writing doesn’t have to. In fact, the more my work is driven by AI, the more my life needs to be driven by art. What has been avoidable is now inevitable. I write to understand more than to be understood.

A seed was planted ten years ago. It could only start growing after I pulled up the roots that were not mine.