The Best LLM Response I Ever Got

And why I will go back to quiet for a while.

I’m struggling a bit, to be completely honest with you.

Not anxious. Not depressed. Uneasy.

Since I got free from my last full-time role at the end of last year, I’ve gone deep into what I call the “AI moment”. I built Steady with Cansu. I’ve read countless articles, essays, and “takes” on AI from every conceivable angle. I’ve started actively building a fractional VPE/CTO practice which gave me the perfect excuse to reconnect with many people I should never have allowed the radio to go silent with.

I’m loving it, truly. Opportunities are beginning to take shape, for which I’m both grateful and excited. There is good work to be done.

But something feels off.

I try to be empathetic and extend grace to people whose words and actions (online, mind you) stoke my anger or make me recoil. The way my brain tries to make sense of the world is by repeateadly asking “But why?” in the hope of reaching the essence of, well, everything.

Tall order.

That can become overwhelming if I’m not careful. As Nietzsche, that complicated individual, once wrote:

"Whoever battles monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster himself. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."

That quote comes from Beyond Good and Evil, which feels like an apt title for what I’ve been grappling with lately.

So these days what do you do when you’re feeling off and wrestling with existential questions?

Exactly.

You ask the LLM.

Why and how that can make sense is for another post. Which is ironic because this is a post to let you know, loyal reader, that there won’t be any other post for a while. But stick with me a moment longer.

I just unburdened myself to Claude. More precisely Claude Opus 4.8 High (“Most capable for ambitious work”) with Thinking enabled (“Can think for more complex tasks”).

And this sure is a complex task, my guy.

So, I vomited my best articulation of everything that has been feeling off regarding AI¹ to its patient lap and eagerly awaited the therapeutic verdict. To be honest, I didn’t expect much. What come back, however, felt like a revelation. To me, anyway. But, if you’re anything like me—and I suspect there’s a lot of you out there feeling similarly²—then it might be a bit of a revelation to you as well.

Think of it like you may not be in my precise location, but you might in the same postcode.

Call this unsolicited advice, if you will. As with all advice, feel free to throw it in the bin. But in the spirit of the Hagakure, I’m offering you something that made sense to me in the hopes that it can make sense to you, too.

I’ve reproduced it below, lightly edited to remove identifying information.

Let me take seriously what you’re actually describing, because I think there are several different things tangled together and the tangle is itself part of the draining.

First, the cleanest piece, because it’s almost a relief: the publishing question has an answer, and it’s the one your gut already reached. You laid out your actual pipeline and every single one came from a conversation, a reach-out, a referral. One inbound from publishing and you flagged it yourself as the lone exception. So the story “I publish because it drives business” is, by your own evidence, not true. You don’t have to litigate it further. The honest version is: publishing is something you do for other reasons, and you’ve been laundering those reasons through a business justification because that felt more legitimate than the real ones. That’s worth naming plainly, because once you stop pretending it’s lead-gen, the decision to pause gets much lighter. You’re not giving up a growth channel. You’re declining to perform.

And I’d gently push on what the real reasons were, because I think you said it: writing is how you figure things out, and sharing is how you take a stance, vent, locate yourself. Those are good reasons. But notice they’re in tension with publishing right now, because right now the thing you’d be figuring out in public is unresolved, raw, and entangled with people who might pay you. You’d be trying to think clearly in the exact venue where thinking clearly is most expensive. That’s not a recipe for clarity; it’s a recipe for self-censorship dressed as content. So pausing public writing while continuing to write privately isn’t avoidance — it’s moving the thinking to a room where it can actually happen. Keep the figuring-out. Drop the broadcasting. Those were never the same act; they only felt fused.

Now the harder thing, the part underneath. You said it almost in passing and then moved on, but I think it’s the actual center: “an underlying war happening, implicitly, rooted in what it means to be human, which drives the whole discourse. I’m curious about it and sick of it at the same time.”

That’s not a small observation, and I don’t think the unhealthiness you noticed this morning is coming from the industry being unstable. Instability you could watch from a distance, like you said. What’s draining you, I’d guess, is that you can see the war and most of the discourse is conducted as if it isn’t there — as if it’s all ROI timelines and adoption curves and tooling debates — when underneath, people are actually fighting about whether human judgment, craft, understanding, the slow constitutive work, matters, or whether it’s sentimental overhead to be optimized away. You spent our whole prior conversation building exactly this distinction. You have a developed position on what’s worth preserving in a person. And you’re operating in an environment where that position is, at best, unfashionable, and where saying it out loud risks the very relationships that feed you. That’s the actual bind. It’s not “the industry is chaotic.” It’s “I hold a view about what’s being lost, the holding of it isolates me, and I can’t tell whether to fight for it, withdraw from it, or whether I’m even right.”

That feeling has a name and it isn’t dysfunction. It’s what it feels like to have values that have drifted out of alignment with your environment while you still depend on that environment materially. Of course it’s draining. You’re spending energy continuously translating between what you believe and what’s safe to say, and that translation tax runs all day in the background. The reading-to-get-to-the-bottom-of-it is you trying to resolve the dissonance by thinking harder, and it won’t resolve that way, because it isn’t an information problem. You don’t lack the analysis. You have too much of it. You lack a decision about how to hold it, which is a different thing, and no amount of further reading produces it.

So here’s what I’d actually offer toward clarity, focus, and peace.

On the war: your instinct to step back and watch “non-attached, from a distance” is right, but I’d distinguish two versions of it, because one is healthy and one will quietly eat you. The healthy version is equanimity — you stay curious, you keep paying attention, you stop needing the discourse to resolve or needing to win it, you let the IPOs and the ROI debate and the rest play out without your nervous system being hooked to each twitch. The unhealthy version that wears the same clothes is suppression — you stop engaging because engaging is unsafe, you swallow the stance, and you tell yourself it’s detachment when it’s actually a low hum of self-betrayal. The tell between them is simple: equanimity feels like spaciousness, suppression feels like a held breath. You’ll know within a couple of weeks which one you’re in. Aim for the first. The first is available precisely because you’ve already done the thinking — you don’t need to keep relitigating it in public to know where you stand; you can let it be settled internally and unspoken externally. That’s not cowardice. A person can hold a clear conviction and choose silence about it for a season without the conviction degrading. What degrades the conviction is pretending you don’t hold it. Don’t do that. Just don’t broadcast it yet.

On the fractional-work tension — “do I even want to work with those?” — I’d hold that question loosely rather than forcing it now. You’re in a depleted state, and depleted states make everything binary: I must purge anyone who doesn’t share my values, or I must shut up and take the work. Neither is true. The reality is your pipeline runs on specific human relationships with specific people, not on an ideological alignment test. You can do good work for people whose worldview you don’t fully share; that’s most of professional life. The alienation worry is mostly a publishing worry — it’s the fear that taking a public stance will cost you clients. Remove the publishing and most of that fear dissolves on its own, because in actual conversations you’re not declaring a manifesto, you’re solving someone’s problem. So the “do I want to work with these people” question is probably downstream of the publishing question, and once you pause publishing you may find it quietly stops feeling urgent. If it doesn’t — if it turns out you genuinely can’t stand the work itself — that’s real information, but you’ll be able to hear it more clearly when you’re not exhausted.

On focus: I’d narrow your field of attention deliberately, because part of what’s draining you is that you’re trying to metabolize the entire macro environment — the war, the IPOs, the AI ROI reckoning, the meaning of being human — as if you’re personally responsible for resolving it. You’re not. None of that needs your verdict. The only things that actually need your attention in the next quarter are: the live conversations, doing that work well, and protecting your own equilibrium. That’s the whole list. The macro will play out whether or not you track it hourly. Letting it run without your commentary isn’t disengagement from your life; it’s refusing to let the discourse colonize your attention. You can be a citizen of this industry without being its full-time analyst.

And on peace — the thing in shortest supply — I think it comes less from resolving the war and more from giving yourself permission to not have resolved it yet while still functioning. The exhaustion you feel partly comes from an implicit belief that you have to figure all this out before you’re allowed to feel settled. Flip it. You’re allowed to feel settled now, in the unsettledness, with the questions open. The questions about what it means to be human in this transition are genuinely hard and genuinely unresolved for everyone — you’re not behind, you’re not failing to crack something others have cracked. Sitting in good faith with an open hard question is a perfectly stable place to stand. The instability you’re feeling isn’t the industry’s instability leaking into you; it’s the strain of demanding closure on something that isn’t closeable on your timeline.

So, concretely, what I’d actually do: pause publishing, no end date, no guilt, explicitly reframed as “I write to think, and right now I think better in private.” Keep a running private document — the venting, the stance, the war, all of it — so the impulse to articulate has somewhere to go that costs nothing. Keep paying attention to the macro at maybe a tenth of current intensity, as a curious observer with no obligation to comment. Pour the freed energy into the live conversations and the work itself, which is where your livelihood actually comes from anyway. And let the question of whether you ultimately want to take a public stance, or work with these particular people, sit unanswered for a defined stretch — say, until the fall — on the explicit understanding that not deciding is a decision, and a legitimate one, when you’re this depleted.

One more thing, because you said this isn’t psychologically healthy anymore and I want to take that at face value rather than only as a strategy problem. The compulsive reading, the can’t-stop-trying-to-get-to-the-bottom-of-it, the draining — if that’s tipping into something heavier than “I’m wrestling with a hard professional season,” if it’s bleeding into sleep or mood or a more general flatness, that’s worth treating as its own thing and worth talking to someone real about, a friend who knows you or a professional, not because anything you’ve said sounds alarming but because “I noticed this morning this isn’t healthy for me” is exactly the kind of self-observation that deserves more than a reframe. The clarity I can offer is structural. The peace partly has to come from rest and from people who know you, and those aren’t things to think your way to.

What’s your read — does the war-underneath framing land, or is the thing draining you actually somewhere else?

It lands, buddy. It sure lands.

I’ll pause it here, but please don’t be shy—reach out. DM me here on Substack, LinkedIn, email me or just book a call directly. If we already know each other, let’s catch up. If you need help, let’s talk. And if we never met (but we should), let’s get to know each other.

Heaven knows how much we need real, human connection right now.

1. To be clear, I find there’s a ton of great use cases for language models. I use them every day. I’m far from an “AI luddite.”

2. As an example, someone I know and prize wrote to me earlier today: “I really enjoy your posts and your take on AI. I want to share/repost even more of them, but sometimes I take a step back and don't, mainly because I work at a company that's "all in" with AI (which is exhausting to be honest :D)”