I was planning to write another blog post. I may still write it – or not. But as I opened my computer, I had a pile of open tabs. I’d clicked on a bunch of articles of Daniel Miessler’s blog for possible further reading. Daniel is the guy behind LifeOS (previously PAI), a personal AI framework (infrastructure) I have written about and spent many (many!) hours battling with since April.

It had been a pleasant surprise to discover Daniel’s blog was active, and even more that it was readable, as most of what I’ve seen “from him” these last months is in the GitHub repo or PAI/LifeOS documentation and rather AI-sloppy, sometimes even to the extent that it sounds like his DA (Digital Assistant) posting on his behalf. (I say this with all due respect, the thinking behind PAI/LifeOS is genius.)

Not so with the blog, clearly well-written by a human (see, by the way, his AI Influence Level system, something in the same vein as AI Labels).

So I fell in the trap of looking at the topmost open tab before closing it, and I started reading, and I was even more pleasantly (ephorically?) surprised to read this:

I value text because I see it as one step away from thought.

I believe thinking is the one thing we should be careful not to outsource, and I worry what this idea smuggles in is a major step toward making our creations opaque to humans. Not just AI’s creations, but ours as well.

The reason I value Paul Graham so much is because of the idea compression work that goes into writing super clean prose. It’s difficult to write clearly because it requires thinking clearly.

Daniel Miessler, “Text is Thought, and Thought is Holy“

I worry that if we vibe-think to AI and have it spit out amazing HTML, we’re instantly disconnected from the idea. Like where did the idea go? It started as vibes and got put through a woodchipper and turned into someone else’s HTML.

I see this happen so much. A lot of writing is a way of thinking, it’s not “path to an output”. And I think that when thinking is missing in the process, we feel it, which is why AI Slop and even many “decently AI-generated texts” are so distasteful to read.

Because the “thought” they contain is not coherent, not organic, and we cannot access it comfortably through the text we’re reading. We need to do extra work to try to get at it – and sometimes it’s not even there. Just like “over-optimised” administrative processes end up outsourcing a large part of the work they’re supposed to do to the people they should be serving, “over-optimised” text production outsources part of its work to the reader.

We could maybe apply this analysis to badly constructed, hastily-written reports whose sections have been copy-pasted to death and which lack overall integrity and structure.

Jens-Christian wrote about this too in “Keep Your Voice“.

Daniel again:

I just feel like if you didn’t put the hard thinking and writing work into the original idea, and then maintain it in a format that’s easy for humans to read and edit, then you have somehow surrendered something Holy to the machines. I say this as a total AI maximalist.

This reminds me of two things that came upon my radar recently.

The first is this post by Alex Hillman about how generative AI has broken the social contract by upending the balance of effort from producing to consuming content. What used to be expensive (writing, creating a song, shooting a video, etc.) is now super cheap, in terms of effort (if not tokens). Sure, we used to have content farms and the like, but it was still a lot of manual labour. Now I can feed a one-line prompt to an AI model, leave the computer running and come back to a whole book of content. Sloppy, but a lot of words.

Over time, the world we live in has shifted more and more in the direction of “too much content, not enough brain time to absorb it”. It’s something humans have been complaining of since before the internet. But like everything, it’s speeding up like a hockey stick. The democratisation of online publishing, and social media on its heels, has brought in another height of cognitive overload and collective anguish about there being “too much stuff out there”. And now that more and more of this stuff is produced by machines that never need to sleep or eat (except a prompt or two), the overall quality of what is out there is going down as fast as its quantity is going up.

This reminds me somewhat of my thoughts about audio and video versus text, back in the day. If you record a 30-minute video and post it online, it took you 30 minutes, but it will also take each person who watches it 30 minutes. If you spend 30 minutes writing up your message, it will take the people reading it much less time.

Because what has not changed is the finitude of human existence. Not only is our time limited, but also our energy and ability to read, watch, learn, concentrate. This is, now more than ever, our bottleneck. Producing something today is pretty much worthless. Producing more is senseless. What has value is: does it enter somebody’s mind in a meaningful way?

There is a link between this and the AI brain fry explanation that I referenced some time back. AI has no limits on the concurrent projects it can work on, and no limits on how much content it can produce. But we have limits on how much delegation we can supervise, how many open loops we can stand, and how much content we can absorb.

And this brings me to the second thing: understanding cannot be outsourced. Andrej Karpathy now famously said you can outsource thinking, but not understanding. A lot of what AI produces does not help us understand anything. It gives the illusion of opening the door to that, but it’s more often than not just word froth. Reading is about understanding. It’s about meaning. There is no shortcut to that. Only you can learn and understand so that you later know.

When Karpathy says you can outsource thinking: well, some of it. But what we writers-as-thinkers know very well is that the thinking that we do when we write is the kind of thinking that leads to understanding. Saying that thinking can be outsourced is a slippery slope because it drags down a chunk of understanding with it.

Writing is thinking is understanding.

Well, that was the first open tap. 27 more to go. (Just kidding. I’m going to close them. I might write my Paléo Festival blog post tomorrow.)

C’est moche pour l’accessibilité, je sais.

Transcription IA non vérifiée (22.07.2026):

I’m on the train to Paris. I’ll be coming back a week on Monday. It’s a comfortable, easy trip. The reason for my travel is I’m attending a two-day course on burnout – part of my training at the Gregory Bateson Institute. I’d planned on postponing this module until next year or the year after, given that my main priority now is building my working capacity back up following last year’s accident. But earlier this year, the whole curriculum was redesigned (it’s a good thing!), and the material on burnout will be incorporated into a longer module which is largely redundant with the courses I’ve already taken. So: now or never.

Following my relapse/brain crash earlier this year, I took the decision in March to pretty much clear out anything that was in my calendar. It was a tough decision, but it was the right one (people who have experience with chronic fatigue will know what I’m talking about). For those few plans I held on to, I « cleared the decks » around them to ensure they would not interfere with getting my work done, and that work would not jeopardise them. This means I took the whole week off for these two days of training, just like I took the whole week off a fortnight ago to go and see Mika live at the Caribana Festival. It worked.

In my pre-accident life, I might have travelled on Monday, attended the training on Tuesday and Wednesday, and travelled home Thursday. The « recovery » version of this is to add at least a day of padding in between training and travel, with nothing planned, so I can rest/stock up on « energy »/recover, and reduce the risk of (for example) travelling on a maxed out brain. I figured I might as well add on a few extra days (particularly as Oscar is not around anymore – something I’m really thankful for to be honest, with the awful heat wave that hit us over the last week), and catch up with a couple of people, if I’m in good enough shape.

This is my fourth « real trip » since my accident. I went to France twice for extended week-ends with family or friends last year. Each time was absolutely exhausting (but nice). Then after Christmas I went to spend some time at the chalet – first time I was going back since my accident – and we know what a disaster that turned out to be. This time, I think I’ve planned and organised things well enough and with a lot of caution.

As I was packing and preparing for departure yesterday, I realised I was really stressed out. More than usual. Packing and preparing to travel has always been stressful for me. It’s not the actual travel or being in a strange place or away from home. Or maybe just a little. What it is mainly is all the executive function acrobatics required in dealing with travel-related logistics:

• making sure I do the things that need to be done before leaving
• deciding what to bring with me (this is a huge one)
• organising cat- and plant-sitting
• inserting these « unusual activities » into my days at the right time, in the right order, and with enough time to carry them out
• leaving wherever I’m at to go “somewhere else” – the transition itself.

Putting things in the suitcase is actually a part I like. It’s real-life Tetris: fun. Once I’ve locked the door behind me and am heading out with my luggage, I’m good. But before that, it’s complicated. I have got much better at dealing with it over the years, and with the clearer view on my executive function challenges that my ADHD diagnosis brought me a few years ago (and meds!) it’s even better.

I don’t have a very clear memory of how preparation for my two France trips went last year (only that I overpacked, a sign that making decisions regarding what to take or not was difficult, so in doubt, pack more). But I do know that packing for the chalet in December was a nightmare.

OK, I had already « crashed » during the previous week, but I’d taken rest to recover and felt functional enough to tackle it. And yes, it was also the first time back to the chalet since my accident, but I was really looking forward to heading back. I was aware there was maybe a little (normal) underlying apprehension that I might not be perceiving.

What apprehension I could feel was not about going to the chalet, but about the possibility of an unexpected emotional reaction to being there again. It was the same thing when I went back on the ski slopes: not scared of skiing, just worried I might have misjudged my readiness and have some kind of PTSD-like reaction to being back on my skis or where the accident took place. Nothing like that happened, by the way. Everything was fine.

This illustrates where most of my post-accident anxiety lies. I am normally pretty good, in general, in predicting how I’ll react, what will be challenging, what I can and can’t deal with. I know myself well, including my biases, and of course I know that when you expect something to do this way or that, it does have an influence on the outcome – I do my best to correct for that. Since my accident however, I have been blindsided by my brain more times than I can count. At times I feel like I do not know myself anymore, though of course I’m still me and very much feel me, but when it comes to “what I can take”, whether mentally, physically or emotionally, I’ve had a lot of bad surprises.

I am repeatedly finding myself in the situations where my brain does not deliver in the way I expect it to, and where I misjudge what I’m able to do. In my accident-recovery-life, the consequences of these prediction errors are swift: I crash. I don’t know if it hits everybody this hard, but for me in any case, it’s pretty traumatising to have my brain brutally and unexpectedly go on strike like that. Both the “brain not working” and the “didn’t see that coming” aspects are really scary.

So now, as time goes on and my recovery stretches out way longer than I initially imagined, as the clock of certain administrative deadlines regarding my return to full work capacity start audibly ticking, as I fail again and again to know my fluctuating limits, I can feel my underlying confidence in my abilities and self-awareness slowly erode, leaving place to self-doubt and increased anxiety about dealing with life and the world. It sucks: the anxiety is not crippling, it’s just a nuisance and an energy-drain at this stage, but I can see the process and the slope I’m on, and I do not like it one bit. Breathe. Relax. Deal with today. Be patient. Hang in there. Keep at it. Trust the recovery process. All this works, and I don’t feel in danger, but it’s more and more work to not let myself be dragged down.

Right. So there’s that. My trust in my ability to manage myself and deal with life is weaker than it was. So my baseline anxiety is higher, my executive function is struggling more, and I tire quickly. But as I was walking to my neighbourhood station to catch the local train a few hours ago, I understood that something else was probably coming into play in terms of post-accident travel and packing anxiety.

You see, my accident happened on the very day I travelled to the chalet for my holidays. I hadn’t been there for a while, I’d actually emptied the chalet of all my stuff and Oscar’s when I had last departed, so it was already an “increased stress” packing and travel operation. Nothing disastrous, still quite within the realm of ordinary, but not a walk in the park.

I got to the chalet (later than I had intended), got Oscar settled, dumped my unopened luggage in a corner and headed off immediately to get a couple of hours of skiing in on this first day. When I fell, I was heading back to unpack and enjoy the evening. I didn’t make it back: I spent the night at the hospital, in the haze and stress you can imagine, worried about my shoulder and my old diabetic cat who was alone at the chalet, trying to make decisions and organise logistics (How can I get back to the chalet? Should I go back to Lausanne? Who has a good shoulder specialist? Who can help me with my car as I can’t drive? That’s just the start of them). The next day a friend picked me up at the hospital and drove me back to the chalet, and another one came to help me empty the chalet and drive me back home. It was horribly stressful. I was in pain, I was freaked out, and instead of resting my concussed brain I was in full crisis management mode. It didn’t get better over the next two weeks.

I wouldn’t be surprised if my accident taking place just on the heels of travelling to the chalet didn’t add an extra layer of “negative association” to a transition that was never that easy for me to begin with.

Say you have a pet who always stressed out when heading to the vet’s. You do stuff to make it smoother: stay calm yourself, get your pet used to the carrier or the car, add treats, maybe a mild sedative, maintain usual routines as much as possible… It’s not great, but it’s not a disaster anymore, it’s manageable. And then, one fateful vet visit, something “bad” happens there. Not on purpose, of course. An exam that’s longer or more intrusive. A different vet. A loud noise at the wrong time. The pet freaks out, has a really bad experience.

Well, chances are that the next time you prepare to take your pet to the vet, it’s going to be more complicated.

That’s how I feel it’s playing out for me. I’m not actively scared of travelling or having an accident. But I’m clearly more stressed when preparing to travel, and some part of that could very well be the proximity of my accident to travel which has left a negative association. Not PTSD of course, but maybe on that continuum, probably closer to normal than pathological.

In 2019 I had a bad car accident (which resulted in surgery on my right wrist six months later). I was in a roundabout when a car entering it hit the back of my car right from the side. I didn’t see anything – there was a loud bang and choc and suddenly I was heading off the road right onto a big metal signpost solidly anchored in the ground. The car flattened it, ripped it out of the ground, and in turn it bent the car frame into a right angle. The car was totalled, we were lucky. I drove quickly afterwards with a rental, without issues. I’ve always liked driving and never been afraid at the wheel. But for months afterwards I felt a tiny surge of apprehension when going through roundabouts (it even still happens sometimes now when I’m on the precise spot of the accident). Nothing huge, but a clear signal – and this was on the backdrop of an activity (driving) that was very positive in terms of associations, compared to packing/traveling which was already fraught.

We’ll see how things play out over the next months and years. But I think I’ve put my finger on something that wasn’t on my radar. You know how sometimes you have an insight that just feels like it’s the missing piece? That’s what this feels like. In my experience, it’s often enough for me to just understand this kind of mechanism to defuse it. Like when I understood that a huge amount of my anxiety over Oscar’s impending death was the possible consequences this loss would have on my recovery timeline, given the post-accident uncharted territory I described higher up when it comes to my ability to “deal with life” in these times.

I typed this on my phone, with an external keyboard. Pretty comfortable I have to say, but not quite enough that I feel like adding links (there would be a good handful to add). I’d also like to say more regarding continuums between normal and pathological, and also on the somewhat related question of normality: when it comes to living beings, normal/average is a mathematical abstraction (or a bell curve), which should make us think real hard about how we frame certain realities (e.g. “neurodiversity”).

Anyway, I’m going to leave things there. I’m starting to feel a bit of motion-sickness and I feel just about ready for a nap in my comfy train seat.