A Different Kind of Capital

My mornings have developed an order, one I have come to look forward to and protect. Before the house wakes and the day begins making its demands, I step outside and let the first morning sun reach my face. Then I move my body. What follows is considerably less peaceful: the usual mad rush of getting the kids organized, getting myself ready, and somehow getting everyone where they need to be. A few hours later, I arrive at work, coffee in hand. And then, before the emails and meetings take over, I spend five minutes grounding myself with AI.

It is a simple practice. I ask AI to share some inspiring words, something to think about as I set my intention for the day. I always end that conversation with a quote, because anyone who knows me knows how much I love a good quote. A year ago, I could never have imagined that talking to a machine would become part of my morning routine, and I certainly never imagined I would look forward to it.

Like most people, I started using AI for work. I was fascinated by how much time it saved me and how quickly I could do things that previously took hours. As I became more comfortable with it, I started experimenting with how I could use it in other parts of my life. Somewhere along the way, the question changed from simply how can this make me more productive? to something I found much more interesting: what if, instead of only asking AI to help me do more with my life, I asked it to help me see more of it?

That is when things became interesting. I started small with everyday things: designing outfits before going to my tailor, asking for journal prompts when I had writer's block, feeding it my fitness data and asking it to coach me toward my goals. I also started using it when I was frustrated or could not understand why someone had reacted in a particular way. None of this is particularly profound, and maybe that is the point. AI has found its way into the small spaces of my life, the places where I am trying to make a decision, understand something, change a habit, or simply think a little more clearly.

When something upsets me now, sometimes, not always, because I am still very much a work in progress, I try to resist the immediate reaction and ask why it is bothering me so much. When I am struggling with one of my children, I sometimes ask AI to show me another version of the situation. Not because I think a machine knows my children better than I do. It doesn't. But because when I am tired, frustrated or emotionally caught up in something, my own perspective can become very narrow. The answer is not always right, and I don't expect it to be. But every now and then, it asks me a question I had not thought to ask myself, and that question allows me to see something differently.

Lately I have been wondering whether that might be one of the more interesting things this technology can give us. Not necessarily better answers, but a wider perspective.

For most of my adult life, I equated progress with doing more. Getting through the list. Solving the problem. Making the decision and moving on to the next thing. I still get enormous satisfaction from a productive day, and I am proud of the life that instinct has helped me build. But at this stage of my life, I find myself wanting something slightly different from the years ahead. Not necessarily more, but perhaps something deeper. I am beginning to think that another kind of progress comes from seeing more clearly: seeing the patterns we repeat, understanding why certain things still affect us, and perhaps hardest of all, seeing ourselves without all the explanations and beliefs we have spent years constructing around why we are the way we are.

For years, journaling has been one of the ways I have tried to do that. I have page after page containing different versions of me from different seasons of my life: hopeful, frightened, ambitious, heartbroken, grateful, angry, healing. As part of my experiment with AI, one day I gathered more than one hundred pages of those journals and uploaded them with a very simple question: Tell me the patterns you see.

I was genuinely surprised by what came back. There were connections between entries written years apart, the same worries appearing in different forms, and questions I thought I had resolved that had simply returned wearing different clothes. There was one pattern in particular that surprised me because I could suddenly see how quietly it had influenced decisions across different periods of my life. The strange thing was that none of the information was new. I had written the words. I had lived the experiences. What was new was the distance from which I was able to see them.

That experience made me wonder whether the most valuable thing AI gives us may not only be the hours it saves, but the ability to see certain things sooner. We spend years accumulating experiences. We make mistakes, repeat patterns, fall in and out of relationships, get hurt, raise children, lose people, succeed at things we once thought were impossible and fail at things we were certain would work. Slowly, if we are paying attention, all of that living becomes experience, judgment and, perhaps eventually, wisdom. There are things I understand about myself today that I simply could not have understood twenty years ago, even if someone had tried to explain them to me.

And that leaves me with the question at the heart of all of this: what happens when technology does not just increase our productivity, but accelerates our becoming? Can something help us recognize in an afternoon what life might otherwise have taken years to show us? I think perhaps it can. But I am also beginning to understand that seeing something sooner is not the same as learning it sooner. AI might show me the pattern, but it cannot live the consequences of that pattern for me. It can accelerate the insight, but I still have to decide what to do with it, and then live differently because of it.

That distinction matters because it also makes me question some of the time we are so eager to save. I think about the young analyst building her first model. She was not simply producing a model. She was getting things wrong, working through frustration, questioning assumptions, asking someone more experienced for help and starting again. Somewhere in all of that inefficiency she was developing judgment. I know I did. So what happens to the apprenticeship when the machine can produce the answer before we have had the experience of struggling toward it?

I feel fortunate to be meeting AI at this stage of my life. I have years of experience behind me and have made enough mistakes to know that an answer can sound impressive and still be wrong. I developed judgment the slow way, and AI can now build on that foundation. But that makes me wonder what happens when someone has access to the leverage before they have had the opportunity to build the foundation. Perhaps some of what we call inefficiency was never really wasted time. Perhaps some of it was the process through which we learned to question, discern, recover from being wrong and eventually trust our own judgment.

And maybe that is the tension I find most interesting. I am excited by a technology that can give me back hours of my life, and at the same time I am no longer convinced that every difficult hour should necessarily be saved. Some things should become faster and easier. But perhaps there are other things that only acquire their value because they take time, because we struggle with them, or because we have to live through them before we can fully understand them.

I started using AI because I wanted to save time. Somewhere along the way, it made me think much more deeply about what time is actually for. Perhaps AI can shorten the distance between experience and insight, but I am not sure it can shorten the distance between insight and wisdom. Some things still have to be lived.

Maybe that is the part of this technological moment that interests me most. Not simply how much more we will be able to do, but what we will be able to see about our work, about each other and about ourselves. AI may help us see sooner, but what we do with that insight, how we allow it to change us, and who we become because of it still belongs to us.

The Highest Return

"Directed at your work, a tool like this can save you hours. Directed at yourself, it may help you understand the years." Faiza Chaudhary