I am not what I do. I am me. And I can do something new.
That might be the clearest thing I've read on the fear and the opportunity of AI. Liz Fosslien has a way of fitting big feelings into small pictures.
The question those words opened up for me wasn't an interesting one initially. It was a frightening one. I've spent most of my adult life working hard toward a role. The idea that AI might replace what I do wasn't just a professional threat. It pointed at something I'd spent years not looking at directly.
Five years of psychotherapy has slowly taught me that the work is on the inside. That consciousness is something worth protecting. And that for me, the journey inward is frightening because I can't control what I'll find.
But I'm beginning to understand why the journey matters. There is a small 'me': the one assembled from titles and output, from what I produce and deliver. And there is a larger 'me'. Connected to something no job description can hold. That is the spiritual path for me — and it needs a daily practice.
That path inward is where meaning is found and real connection lives. The gift — the real one — is that going inward is how you find out who you actually are. And it's much bigger than the role. Expanding through every experience.
I've also noticed something I can feel more than explain: when I spend too much time on social media or with AI, the content gets into my consciousness and changes me. Not dramatically. A quiet drift. Michael Pollan named it: consciousness hygiene. What you let in matters. What you protect your attention from matters.
Social media is off my phone now. A significant first step. The result surprised me: less noise, not less connection. Doom scrolling really does build a sense of doom. It shifts my energy. Measurably. And spirituality, for me, is about protecting that energy.
And AI: too much of it can stop the process of actually living through things. It can reinforce what you think you are rather than who you're becoming. If you let it answer too many questions, you skip the friction. I heard something recently, I keep returning to...
“Real relationships require friction—and AI removes friction.” Scott Galloway and Kara Swisher
It's what makes us grow. Even when it hurts. Especially then.
So when Allie K. Miller shared a framework for building a personal knowledge base in AI, I ran the experiment consciously, with that tension held. Replace what I do with an AI knowledge base. See what's left.
I loaded everything in. Claude, Obsidian, a bit of code underneath. Less than a day and minimal cost.
What lives in that knowledge base isn't just mine. It's the collective intelligence of every person I've worked alongside. AI amplifies that. It removes the friction between thinking and adapting.
But I keep reminding myself.
Remove too much friction and you remove something essential. Friction in relationships tells you what matters. It's how people understand each other. It's where growth lives.
So. The knowledge base is valuable. But so is friction.
Then I looked at the 'me' part. That's not a business skill. It's a human one. A therapeutic one. A spiritual one. Holding space long enough for the real 'me' to surface. Staying in the friction instead of moving past it. I'm still doing that work. This is the thinking mid-process.
What I've gathered over a few decades: I am deeply curious. Genuinely observant. Able to translate lessons into frameworks that hold. Good at listening to what's said and the emotion that sits underneath it. Able to transmute fear of technology into creative momentum. Quick to understand and translate people's unique value. Good at gathering people toward their own best thinking. Turning that into something executable.
What AI couldn't touch: knowing when to push and when to hold as the friction builds. Reading a room. The trust that gets built slowly and broken fast. The thing that happens between people when they're doing something genuinely hard together.
I don't know if that's EQ or something older than that.
But I know it's me. Not the role.
How did Liz Fosslien's post land for you?
(Links to her book and Allie K. Miller's knowledge base post are in the comments.)