I needed a break
and I took it.
A 3-minute read about how AI drained my creativity and ambition.
Sometimes it’s hard for me to listen to my body. And honestly, my body isn’t even the problem most of the time. It is my mind that feels overwhelmed by constant stimuli.
This letter should have been send last week but guess what?! It wasn’t written yet. I was struggling to find time to write.
I don’t want to write for the sake of writing.
I want to write because something touches or moves me.
Last week and maybe the week before too, I have been pre-occupied with figuring out what I want from life. Just after sending that last letter about discipline and consistency, it left me virtually. I needed some time to go inward and actually ask myself: what the hell do you want? What is it, that you want to be consistent and disciplined in?
And yes, superficially, I wanted consistency in my physical yoga practice, I wanted discipline in climbing the wall, I wanted more ambition in general to go through with the things I start in life.
But what was it that I actually needed? Beneath the surface?
I don’t know how you feel about this whole writing, sharing, creating world? But I have been getting sick off reading “hooks” and captions that seem to be straight from AI. And I know, people have been talking about this for some time now, but it really hit me last week.
Even though, I wasn’t really using AI to create content, I still was. I let ChatGPT check my texts for purpose, I asked for advice, I went into dialogue with this virtual thing. And I am not here to bash AI. Although I see it very critically. I am here to find my way back to not using tools to find answers for me.
Most of the things I see online feel generic. Like everyone is out to get you in the first few seconds, with the next best hook, without real content behind it. So I decided to quit. To quit using AI for anything. I know search engines use AI and you cannot really get around it. But I will not consciously use it again. Not for now at least. I need my own brain cells to work for me. Because …
… and this is what I noticed.
It seems small, but for me it had an huge impact.
AI was not only robbing me off my creativity but it was actually draining my ambition to achieve beautiful things on my own. And maybe, it wasn’t the starting point of discipline and consistency, but it is now.
How many hours a day did I spent on throwing questions and answers back and forth with a virtual tool instead of just experiencing things and doing the things my body was calling for? Many, many, many hours.
Even if those things never saw the light of day, they sure engraved themselves into my brain.
Anyway, being in constant dialogue with something that seems to have all the answers but in the end doesn’t, is like getting your hopes up and them being crushed just a few seconds later. Because the answers never seem to please you. And this thrive that I used to have started to diminish by a simple push of a button on my keyboard.
And as we all know, these things spread across all things you do in life. Your body memorizes the habit and the feeling of that habit. And because I started to develop anger against a tool after not getting the result after many many tries, I stopped trying as often. When the reply didn’t please me? I just quit.
Back in real life it looked like this: I climbed a wall, it felt scary, I tried some options, still scary, I quit. Never really getting to the point of a reward. Only then, if it was fast. If it didn’t take too long. If I didn’t have to try to hard.
This past week, I did. I (literally) jumped out of my comfort zone, I took time to recalibrate, I did try hard, and I succeeded. I succeeded in reenforcing my ambition for climbing. I succeeded in actually noticing a shift in my courage, discipline and consistency. After just two weeks of no AI and trying again.