Most of us have something we keep saying we are going to do. Maybe it is to start a business, write a book, build an app, focus on that career change. Sometimes its just an idea we have explained to other people enough times that it has become part of how we think about ourselves. We are going to do it when work slows down, when we have more money, when we find the right person, when we learn enough to know where to start.
For most of my life, those were often good reasons. Ideas were easy to have and hard to make real. Even a small one could require people, money, skills you did not have, and months of work before you learned whether it was any good.
Remember how long you’ve been putting this off, how many extensions the gods gave you, and you didn’t use them. — II. 4
That is not the world I live in now. I have an idea and I build it (e.g. Tortie from this month). I want to understand something better and I research, ask and do. I need code, a design, a draft, or a skill I do not have, and I learn enough to move forward. More and more people work this way. Things we would have put on a proverbial roadmap a few years ago now get tried in a day.
We talk about this as a huge gain in what people can do, which it is, but there is another side to it. When the cost of doing something falls, the reasons we have for not doing it get weaker too. I like to say “you can just do things now”.
You said you would write if you had more time, but writing takes less time now. You said you would build the thing if you knew how, but you can learn while you build it. You said you needed help, but you now have access to more help than most people could have even conceived of a few years ago. This meme captures that sentiment.
Of course, real limits remain. People have jobs, children, debt, sick parents, and obligations that no software removes. But many of the smaller limits we blamed for years have disappeared, and that leaves us with the reasons underneath them.
Often we are afraid nobody will care. Sometimes we are afraid they will. Sometimes the idea is not very good. Sometimes we like the idea of writing a book more than we want to spend our time writing one. Sometimes we have spent years saying we want something and, once it becomes easy enough to try, we keep finding other things to do.
That is harder to admit because in our minds the things we never try remain perfect. The book we never write can still be great. The company we never start can still work. The other life we imagined can still have been better than this one. Nothing has happened to prove otherwise.
Then we do the thing and reality gets a vote.
This is the part of AI I find most interesting. The shortening of distance between what we say we want and what we are willing to do. And as that distance gets smaller, it becomes harder to confuse an excuse with our true preferences.
The Stoics understood that your life is not the person you meant to become. It is what you chose to do with the time you had.
For years we’ve been asking what we would do if we had more ability.
Now we have it.
We lose alibis.