I’m watching a mesmerizing instagram video of Kalu Putik, staring at me intently from a dusty shack in Africa as he poses in scavenged combat boots, a cowboy hat, and a custom suit he’s made of recycled rubber. It occurs to me that social media, despite the criticism, is sometimes more than just a dopamine hit; it catalogs our individual acts of revolution and unique genius. In an era where AI relentlessly optimizes for the average, these bursts of weirdness are a scarce signal of authenticity. They aren’t just quirks—they are vital data points the universe needs to keep the human experiment from flatlining.
Kalu Putik, in a suit of recycled rubber. (via Instagram)
I’ve personally felt the call of authenticity - but unlike Kalu, I’ve often ignored it in favor of the golden handcuffs: 401k, health insurance, and a kanban board I need simply follow. These days, I’ve got a fleet of AI agents to do my bidding - and while they’ve made me more productive, that productivity doesn’t equal presence.
Being present these days seems to require significant effort. Despite the ability to do so much more because of AI, I still find myself using that time to keep the agents running, rather than embrace my own weird passions. Is that a personal failure of willpower, or is something structural happening to our capacity for attention and agency? My fear isn’t that machines will think for me, it’s that, by relieving me of friction, they might also relieve the need to become myself.
We call this ‘cognitive offloading’. The question I keep asking myself is: what am I offloading while I bide my time in a comfortable retirement’s waiting line? If AI is now the worker, am I just the heartbeat, prodding it along? The accountability heatsink?
My team is building a tool to help small businesses handle the deluge of social media marketing necessary to get found online. But that’s a blue button-up-khaki-slacks work, not one where you get to wear combat boots and a cowboy hat. Ideally, as a small business, you’d speak when you genuinely have something to say, and connect to that unique brand of people who get you and want the gifts you have to offer. The ‘heatsink’ feeling I have, where I manage AI instead of doing the work, is the same thing I risk handing to others with the tool that I’m building.
We spend a lot of time thinking about how AI will change. We spend almost no time thinking about how it will change us. Bigger than the threat of AI doing my thinking for me is the thought that it will slowly relieve me of the need to become myself. Every time we simplify a workflow, we risk pulling people deeper into the algorithmic void and further from creativity.
What if the tool could reward your weirdness instead of the median aesthetic? Encourage friction and slowness? Philosophers and spiritualists have argued that this is our cosmological duty. Alan Watts argued that each person represents a unique point of experience in the universe. A world of identical people producing identical lives contains very little surprise, or information. Your weirdness isn’t vanity. It’s priceless data.
That imposes an obligation on us. Not to optimize. Not to endure. To be the fullest, strangest, most irreducible version of ourselves. Not to let intellectual curiosity go down a lazy river, but to put on the boots and rubber suit, and embody our weirdness in a way no one else can.
