We Are All Getting Left Behind
I'm not “ahead of the curve”. I don't have a bloody clue what the next big thing will be (I don't even know what it is now). I don't know what innovation looks like. I don't know how to optimise anything, really.
All things that are deemed as blasphemy in the marketing world. Because it's an industry, amongst many others, that is obsessed with optimisation. Its corporate chains are tied to a never-ending mission for more. More content. More people. More growth. More visibility. More originality.
Starting this business was my escape from that endless escapade.
It was my space to slow down and savour the process. And yet, that same rhetoric has found its way into my sacred little business world, too.
Everywhere I look, there are whispers of me being left behind if I don't use the tools that simplify, streamline and speed up just about everything. If I'm not ahead of the AI curve, then I'm at the bottom of it, gasping for air as I drown in my to-do list.
Except, it doesn't feel like that at all.
In fact, I love nothing more than spending hours of my time on one single piece, dancing with the direction it pulls me in and healing a part of me on the page as it unfolds.
I'm obsessed with the hobbies that take me days because the machines cannot replicate them and instead they must honour a process that has been followed by my Nan and her Nan and her Nan.
I'm striving for the kind of simplicity where I don't actually need machines to run everything for me because there's nothing to really run in the first place.
And if this means I'm left behind, I'm so ok with that.
I'll be behind, crocheting with a cup of tea in the garden whilst I catch up with a friend and waste the kind of hours that AI could never optimise.
Because the problem with optimisation and doing whatever we can to make everything easier is that we erase what it means to be a human when we hit backspace on the messy middle.
We don't solve all of our problems; we create ones for the systems to offer a solution for.
Because if all this tech was supposed to make our lives so much easier, why don't they feel it? Why are we struggling? Why are we disconnected? Why are we so damn tired?
Why doesn’t our marketing feel easier?
Because it's bullshit.
Because yes, this tech is taking away the annoying tasks and the barriers to business, but also the human parts that desperately need tending to in the process.
That sales page that was written in seconds by AI, pried with just enough information to help it form coherent sentences that make perfect sense, whilst still saying nothing at all, is also the sales page that would connect you so deeply with your work because the blood, sweat and tears of capturing what you do with the words is part of the work itself.
That creative task you hand over the reins to a robot on, who can do it bigger and better, was also an opportunity for you to sit with the joy of bringing something to life with your bare hands and reaping the rewards of doing so.
That long-winded process you couldn’t figure out, the one that had you bashing your computer keys in frustration and threatening to throw your laptop out the window, was also the part where you realised how much this work matters, no matter how bumpy the road of it.
Maybe the real question isn't what AI make easier, but what it erases in the process of doing so?
Something I wrote about in my latest Substack.
And something I’m increasingly exploring in my work. Yes, AI can write your marketing. It can capture your work in a nice neat little package and it can make things make sense. But it also strips the feeling out of something it has never once felt. It doesn’t know how it feels to sit in front of a client and be so sure that this is your purpose and what you’re supposed to be doing. It doesn’t know how it feels to have a breakthrough on a random Wednesday morning that you know can change the lives of many others around you. It doesn’t know how it feels to dance with doubt around your work and continue to show up anyway, because you know that it’s more important than the fear trying to keep it under wraps.
That right there are the parts that we do not need to optimise. They are the parts we need to mull over, go around in circles on and dive into the deepest depths of in a way that tools rooted in optimisation cannot.
That’s what we do together. Explore working with me here.
