Introducing Block Patterns
I’m not sure humanity needed any more isolation, but here we are.
For the longest time, I thought, perhaps a little gullibly, that social media would be the biggest technological shift I’d witness after the internet made its way into our lives. I never imagined anything could feel more intriguing than the first time I sat in front of a computer my friend’s parents had bought for him and his sibling.
He became my best friend, and I would go to his house every day after school just to play games that seem ancient now. My favorite required little more than clicking a mouse to shoot arrows at balloons. Oh boy, I loved that game.
Then came smartphones and so much more. Somewhere along the way, I became a passive observer of technology. It was moving faster than I could keep up with. But as someone active in the workforce, I felt intimidated, especially during those first few years of rapid AI advancement. It left me wondering what value I could continue bringing into the world.
AI writes better, speaks better, does more, and helps more. At least, that’s how it can feel. But the one thing it doesn’t have is stakes.
When I write about something I’ve experienced, I’ve lived it with every sense I have, including some I probably don’t have names for. Still, I know that how something is made doesn’t really make a difference to many of us. Often, all we’re looking at is the final product.
This brings me back to a question I’ve had since I was young: What value do I bring to the people around me? Whether it’s my small circle of siblings and parents or the broader community, doing something for someone has always felt like the only way I could belong.
The funny thing is, AI liberated me.
Sounds too optimistic, right? But hear me out.
Years ago, I worked for a humanitarian agency in one of those countries you hear about on the news all the time. For me, it was my country, and life was business as usual. For many watching from elsewhere, it was a shithole and a shitshow. A place you’d feel happy you hadn’t been born in while watching CNN on a Saturday evening, sipping your pumpkin spice latte or eating a slice of pie made with apples you’d picked at an orchard the day before, sometime in September.
Anyway, it was Friday, and everybody in that ten-story building in central Beirut was excited about the weekend. Being silly as usual, I stormed into the office I shared with a handful of colleagues and asked that tired question we used to hear from self-proclaimed life coaches on social media:
“If you had a million dollars right now, what work would you do instead?”
Some people threw out answers. Others just giggled at how silly I was.
Now, with AI, figuring out the question has become harder than answering it.
In my mind, that question has evolved into two possible alternatives. The first is: “If you had access to AI that could do almost anything you asked, what would be the first thing you’d do?”
A decent number of people I know have no answer. Others just want to roll with it and learn as they go. There’s that line we keep hearing, and I don’t know who said it first, about losing your job to someone who uses AI rather than to AI itself.
But there’s another version of the question: “If you lost your million dollars because of AI, what would you do?” Or your job, if the million dollars never arrived in the first place.
There aren’t many clear answers to that one yet.
In my very small circle of people still building careers or trying to preserve theirs, I often hear things like, “I’m learning to use my hands,” or, “I’ll be going back to school soon.” Neither seems unreasonable, given what we know so far.
I can’t answer either question with much confidence. What I can say is that, for me, the liberation came from caring a little less about figuring out what the world would become.
I chose to do more of what I love every day, the little things, and to stop asking what value each of them brings. Some things I want to do simply because I enjoy doing them. The parts of life where AI isn’t involved started to feel like things I wanted to give more attention to.
Will this bring value to the community? Maybe not to the broader one, or at least not in any way I can measure. But the small community of people who actually share my life has something to gain. And so do I.
I now like to think of myself as a creature who exists and happens to need food and resources, rather than a creature whose existence is all about obtaining food and resources. That might sound like the same thing, but it feels different to me. I still need to make a living. I just don’t want that to explain my entire life.
Back to being gullible, perhaps, but part of me trusts that we’ll somehow adapt. AI will reshape the economy, and we’ll find ways to sustain ourselves and hopefully benefit from it.
Then there’s the other possibility I worry about: that the balance breaks. That the disruption goes beyond the usual statistics about who is poor, who is rich, and who belongs to the upper or lower middle class, and starts breaking the systems we all depend on.
My mind goes between those two extremes, even though I know there are plenty of possibilities in between. I don’t know how it will turn out.
So what do I do?
I live. I let myself experience being here. I do the little things I love and spend time with the people around me. I still want to help. I still want to contribute. But I’m trying to stop treating usefulness as the price I have to pay to belong.
I don’t have a neat answer to what comes next. I just don’t want to spend my whole existence proving that I deserve to have one.
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