The Algorithm Wants You Unsatisfied

Something shifted in me a few months ago. Not dramatically. Just a slow, creeping frustration that finally tipped over.

Every tool I use for my work as a virtual assistant, and I mean every single one, started flashing some version of the same message. “We have AI now.” “Connect to our AI assistant.” “Try our new AI features.” CRMs, project managers, communication tools, scheduling apps, client portals. All of them, suddenly, with a little sparkle icon and a pitch.

Here’s the thing. I actually took a 12-week course on AI. I wanted to understand it. I wanted to know if I was missing something. I came out the other end more screen-bound than I’d ever been in my life, and vaguely resentful about it.

That’s not the complicated part, though. The complicated part is that AI genuinely helps me sometimes.

I use it for meal planning for our imperfect plant-based lifestyle. I’ve built out a custom project that makes me a better cook and helps us actually think through our nutrition instead of winging it every meal. And when Mark’s mom health began to decline, I found myself turning to it in a completely different way. I’d feed it her medical records, conversations we’d had with doctors, things we were observing and didn’t fully understand. It helped us make sense of what was happening and gave us real, thoughtful questions to bring to her care team. That mattered. A lot.

So no, I’m not here to tell you AI is bad.

What I am going to tell you is that the conversation around AI has started to make me want to throw my phone into a lake.

It’s not the tools. It’s the story wrapped around them.

Scale your business.
Grow your income.
If you’re not learning AI right now, you’re already behind.

The only path to success is to grind harder, spend more, train more, give more of your time to eventually get more back. Instagram reels, course landing pages, business newsletters. The message is everywhere, and underneath all of it is the same quiet implication: wherever you are right now, it’s not enough.

I just don’t believe that anymore.

Mark and I don't often book pre-packaged tours, and when we do, we're choosy about it. We want the ones that go deeper, not the ones that hand you a laminated itinerary and a headset. Mostly we find the local restaurant, the independent guide, the farmers market vendor who can tell you exactly what went into what they're selling. We've always been pulling toward the real, unpackaged version of whatever we're doing.

Turns out that instinct doesn’t stop at the airport.

Last summer, we got serious about the garden. Peppers. Tomatoes. Real vegetables we actually planned to eat. There is something refreshing and satisfying about waking up slowly, making coffee, and going outside to enjoy a few moments in our gardens before the days get loud.

There’s something about watching a vegetable start to grow that does something to your nervous system. Especially if you’re the one that planted it. It’s food. Real food, no packaging, no ingredient list, nothing added. Just something that grew because we paid attention to it. Those slow mornings became the best part of my day and I’m looking forward to that again this summer.

Then came the indoor plants. Twenty of them now, which I did not see coming. And I’ll be honest about how that started. Instagram.

I bought a couple of plants, watched a few tutorials, and the algorithm immediately decided I was a plant person and started serving me content accordingly. So yes, I found a hobby I love through the exact technology I’m sitting here complaining about.

I’m aware of the irony. Fully owning it.

But here’s what the garden and the plants and the slow mornings have taught me: I don’t want to scale anything. I want to go deeper into what we already have.

Not because more money wouldn’t be nice. Of course it would. But the version of success I keep getting sold asks me to sacrifice the things I’ve worked really hard to build. The mornings outside. The time that feels like mine. The life underneath the work.

What I actually want is to take what we have and squeeze more life out of it. More presence. More intention. More of the stuff that makes a Tuesday feel worth living, not just worth surviving.

That’s not a lesser goal. I’d argue it’s a harder one.

Because it means ignoring a loud, persistent message that profits from your dissatisfaction. It means deciding your current version of a good life is actually a good life, without needing an algorithm or a course landing page to validate it.

We’re planning a bigger garden this year. Mark is getting into bonsai. I’m repotting things and reading about soil and talking to my plants, and it’s some of the most grounded I’ve felt in years.

The screens aren’t going anywhere. AI isn’t going anywhere. But neither is the garden.

So I’ll leave you with this:

What would it look like to stop trying to grow your life, and start trying to deepen it?

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