Welcome to Change, Logged, a bi-weekly newsletter offering 5 minutes of honest thoughts about life, design, and everything in between.
Just last week, I was in Colorado for a week, surrounded by luscious, green national parks and the stunning Rocky Mountains. There was no phone signal, just us, the tour group, and vast stretches of nature (and, importantly, a lot of snacks). It was the first time I have properly slowed down in a long while.
The age of AI feels fast, expanding, and increasingly real. Alongside automated workflows and instant information comes a quieter, less discussed shift: an increasing sense of pressure. It feels like we are being pulled back onto an even more intense hamster wheel, doing more, faster, with less friction, because now, in theory, AI can do almost everything for us.
Like most of you, ChatGPT has become my new Google and life manager. While I appreciate the value of AI, it has also made me notice a shift. There is a growing desire for real, tangible things, and for offline, handmade experiences that feel grounded in place and effort.
As AI-generated experiences become more abundant, reality itself becomes more valuable.
In Meditations for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman returns to a simple idea: life is meaningful because it is finite and constrained. A good life comes from accepting limits rather than resisting them. Yet AI now promises something very different, with near-infinite outputs, drafts, and possibilities, blurring the line between what is lived and what is generated.
As Burkeman shares, “treat your to do list as a menu”. You want to pick from a menu rather than order everything.
It’s nice to collect memories, of course, but the way to do that isn’t to go about trying to collect them. It’s living them as fully as possible, so as to remember them vividly later.
Every technological leap creates abundance. With AI, we can now easily generate abundance in words, images, ideas, and even companionship (TalkGPT, anyone?).
Before modern tools, we relied on skilled people to create hand-painted signs for work and businesses. It was a craft, valued because it required time, precision, and human skill. Then digital printing and billboards arrived and replaced much of that labour.
The same pattern appears in photography. We moved from film cameras to digital photography to Photoshop, where images could be endlessly altered. Now, just the other day, I asked Gemini to generate stock-style images in a 1990s photography aesthetic from a single text prompt. As Marshall McLuhan said, “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”
What happens when content is no longer scarce? If anyone can generate hundreds of assets from a single prompt, what actually becomes valuable in this new world? When everything is available on demand through AI, the question is no longer about access, but differentiation. One of the things that still matters most is context. And context, at least for now, remains deeply human.
As digital experiences become more convincing, lived experience becomes more valuable. AI can generate representations of reality, but it cannot generate reality itself. It cannot replicate what it feels like to hike in the Rockies, see a moose up close in the bushes or to stand at Red Rocks Amphitheatre and experience everything through the five senses. These are not things you can download.
AI is extremely valuable for generating output, sourcing knowledge, and synthesising information, but there are things it cannot create: presence, human awe, and physical experience. These remain uniquely rooted in lived, human experience. How you choose to take a photograph as a memory of a place is personal, and will differ from how someone else frames the same moment.
Reality is not becoming less important. It is becoming more rare.
In the AI era, production is easy, but taste becomes more important. Authentic experiences, original thinking, and real relationships gain value as they become harder to replicate. Handmade, local, and human things start to feel like new status symbols.
There is something telling about the quiet return of independent bookshops, listening cafés, and vinyl records. The depth of lived experience seems to depend, at least in part, on a degree of unknowability. People are drawn toward things that feel heavy with presence, texture, and emotion. Consider crime dramas, board games, or musical instruments. They all contain a challenge. They wouldn’t be as fun without problem-solving.
As Burkeman puts it, life is “an unending series of complications.” And just because we can now outsource more of those complications to AI does not necessarily mean we should for everything. There is a balance to be found between ease of convenience and the value of persevering through challenge.
Perhaps the deeper question is what we lose when we stop struggling, and what that does to our capacity.
Real wisdom does not lie in getting life all figured out. It lies in knowing that you may never have everything all figured out.
- Oliver Burkeman
This is not an argument against AI. Extreme positions are rarely useful. There is space for both: thoughtful use of AI alongside a commitment to real, human experiences.
I would like to picture a future where accessible intelligence supports how we think, while slower, physical, human spaces like listening cafés continue to shape how we live. The question is not which future we choose, but how we hold both at once.
Books that inspired the thoughts on this page — and are worth a look:
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