It's crazy to me that people I know will support total strangers and not their own family and friends. They watch hours of videos made by millionaires, they like, share and subscribe to total and complete strangers, and some will even give them money in support when they clearly don't need it. Yet when someone they know posts something on social media, it tends to be met with negativity or apathy. The same people who will share a video from a YouTuber they have never met won't press like on something a friend or family member has put real effort into. No support or sharing, in fact it is often the opposite. Rolled eyes and sniggers. My guess is that distance has a lot to do with it. A millionaire on YouTube is so far away from your own life that their success says nothing about you, they are just something to watch. Someone you went to school with or work alongside having a go at something is much closer to home, and that is where envy creeps in. Tearing down has always been easier than building up, and picking holes in what someone has built is easier than admitting they are doing something you aren't. A lot of us were taught not to be boastful too, so when someone we know puts themselves out there it gets read as showing off. Who do they think they are. A stranger doing exactly the same thing is just someone to subscribe to, and it takes a lot less to snigger at a post than it does to make one. Most of the support turns up once it is no longer needed. People will pile on to a video with two million views and scroll straight past a post with three likes, or pay a stranger a monthly subscription and then ask a friend for mates rates. Every one of those millionaires started out posting to nobody. James Clear says the loser has more in common with the winner than with the person sitting on the sidelines, and someone you know posting to three likes has far more in common with the millionaire than with the people sniggering at them. None of this is a dig at supporting strangers. Most of the support I have ever had has come from people online I have never met, and I am grateful for every bit of it. All it takes is the same like, share or well done for the people you actually know. It costs nothing, and it will mean far more to them than it ever will to a millionaire.

I ran a half marathon on my birthday for the second year in a row and nobody in my family was surprised. They are used to it by now, and me doing something stupid to mark the day has become a bit of a running joke in our extended family. Birthdays have never really been my thing. At the same point every year my wife wants to buy me presents and we have the same circular conversation, where no amount of telling her there is nothing I want or need seems to matter. To me it's a celebration for nothing. You are not achieving anything by staying on a rock as it goes around the sun again, and yes, I know how miserable that sounds. A few years ago I got the quiet birthday I always claim to want. Everyone was at work and school, so the day was spent alone with the dog, exercising, reading and waiting for them all to come home, and it was a bit sad if I'm honest. So the fuss is what I am trying to avoid, and the people matter far more than I let on. Really a birthday is just a reminder that another year has gone, and that is something I have never dealt with very well. Most of my late 30s went on mourning the runner I used to be and chasing times that were never coming back, and it took turning 40 to finally give up on them and start again from zero. So that is why I do something hard on the day. My body still does what I ask of it, which I am grateful for and know won't last forever, and I would much rather find out what it can do than be told how old I am. This year it ran a half marathon quicker than it has since I turned 40. That is present enough for me, and no, it won't stop my wife asking again next year. My family have even started joining in. Below the birthday wishes in my card this year was a target time from my son, so the stupid thing isn't only mine to pick any more, and I dread to think what he will write in the next one.

You can buy a faster bike. Deep section wheels, a tri bar, a helmet shaped like an egg, and you will go quicker on the same legs. You can buy carbon plated shoes and take minutes off a run. Even fitness is something you can buy, in a sense. Put in the hours, train hard, do the sessions, and the bike and the run give it back to you. Triathlon is full of this stuff, and to be fair most of it works. The bike is the obvious one. A set of wheels or a more aero position does part of the job for you, so the same effort gets you down the road quicker, and people spend a fortune chasing it. I'm not against any of it, buying nice kit is fun. Unfortunately, none of it works in the water. It's the only part of a triathlon where you can't 'buy speed'. You can buy a nicer wetsuit, better goggles and a watch that counts your lengths, and none of it will make a bad stroke a good one. Water is far thicker than air, so how you move through it matters much more than how hard you can push, and there is nothing in a shop that changes how you move. You can 'buy fitness' in the pool the same as anywhere else, but the water is a great equaliser, and if you have crap technique it all falls apart. All that fitness just gets spent fighting the water. It's why very fit runners and cyclists get beaten out of the swim by people who learnt to do it properly as kids, and my own swim is slow for exactly that reason. The only thing that works is learning to do it better, which takes time in the water and a lot of being bad at it. You can pay someone to teach you, but you still have to go and do the lengths yourself. I have said before that spending money doesn't make you good at something, and that gear only matters to a point. The swim is the one part of a triathlon where your wallet can't help at all.

Next week my two weeks 'off' come to an end and base training starts. Three months of zone 2 running, long slow Sundays building up to three hours, and a whole winter sat on the Zwift Ride, all to get me ready for the six 70.3s I have stupidly entered next year. I already know it's going to be a grind. Don't get me wrong, I love training. There's nothing I like more than a long plan and months of turning up to do the work, but base is different. It's boring, and at times really disheartening, plodding along for hours at a pace that doesn't feel like real work and never getting anywhere near the pain cave I secretly turn up for. I see many people on my Strava running in the grey zone all winter. Too fast to help, not fast enough to get faster. That was me a few years ago. Thinking I was doing the right thing but actually working against myself. All it got me was tired, injured and frustrated, and slowing down, as daft as it felt at the time, is the reason I'm faster now than I have been in years. The annoying thing is that this boring bit is what everything else gets built on. I'm building a base to expand on later, and not doing it properly leaves unsolid foundations. There is no hack for it, the work just has to be done. Motivation is the key to all of it, and mine comes in waves. It's so easy to let it slide, as missing a workout here and there doesn't appear to matter. It does in the long run though, and there's nobody standing over me on a dark night making me get on Zwift or go out and run in the rain. I know all of this, but that doesn't mean I won't moan about it. I just have to get on and get it done, and when I do moan my wife will say the same thing she always does, you paid for this.

I am one week into two weeks off and I am bored out of my mind. I wrote in Never Satisfied that I don't know how to be a person who isn't in training, that I am just a bloke who is tired and I don't like him much. I have now spent a week with him and I was right. I was looking forward to a couple of weeks to relax a little and recoup, as my body was really tired after the 70.3 and then the Robin Hood Half. Every plan I have ever followed has rest in it and I never want to do it. There are no sessions to tick off and no numbers to hit, and I have spent most of the week not knowing what to do with myself. It was the same after the Manchester Marathon, when I had nothing to work towards and ended up using my phone too much, eating too much and procrastinating about the things I did have to do. My work and family life means I live out of my calendar, between hospital appointments for Lucie, Teams meetings with development teams and my training. I am a creature of habit and I love that it keeps me focused and grounded, but it can't be healthy, can it? I should be able to have a fortnight off without feeling lost, and I have never been good at sitting still. I am writing this down so I can read it back the next time I am in the middle of a block and moaning about how tired I am. One more week and then it starts again.

I called my Robin Hood time an OPB and didn't really explain it. It stands for Old Man Personal Best. When I turned 40 I deleted every personal best I had, wiped everything off Strava, and started counting again from zero. I've not regretted it once. When I was younger, all the way through my teens, I shared the track and road with two club mates, Ian Boneham and Steve Ablit, who pushed me but always overshadowed me. Not to mention growing up in the same age group as a certain Sir Mo Farah. All the way through my 20s and 30s I ran fast and well, setting personal bests I'm still very proud of, but as my mid to late 30s approached I slid further and further away from them and knew I'd never get back there. I just didn't want to admit it. So for years every run was a comparison with a bloke who didn't exist any more. I'd finish a half marathon, look at my watch, and all I could see was how far off I was from something I ran in my 20s. It didn't matter that the run was good, or that I'd trained well, or that I'd enjoyed it. It was slower than it used to be, so it was rubbish. I spent a long time mourning that version of me and trying to get back to him, and the harder I tried the worse it got. I was tired, injured and frustrated, and every run reminded me of what I used to be able to do. I was training a nearly 40 year old body to hit times I set in my 20s, and I was surprised it kept breaking. Wiping everything felt stupid at the time. Every distance went back to no time at all, so whatever I ran next was a PB whether I liked it or not. The first few were slow, which was the point. The 1:41 half I ran at 41 was a PB, and I wrote back then that it was nothing special, but it was the fastest I'd run a half marathon for a very long time. Winning for me is being better than I was yesterday, but that doesn't work when the comparison is 15 years ago. Starting again meant that I could compare times against myself again, and actually do something about improving. I'd be lying if I said the ego had gone. I still know the old numbers, and there's a bit of me that would love to see one of them again. I just don't let that bit pick the targets any more, but my next OPB will hopefully be the marathon.

Harsh Patel, writing on Medium about waiting to feel ready: > Readiness is not a feeling at all. It is a decision. The rest of the post is the usual self-help stuff, put a hand on your chest, feel your heartbeat, you are allowed to begin scared. I very nearly closed the tab but that one line was enough of a takeaway because it describes every stupid thing I have ever done. I have never felt ready for any of my life. I was not ready to run a marathon the first time, I was definitely not ready to run every four hours for 48 hours, and I was nowhere near ready to launch an app to strangers or to get in a lake with a shoulder that has been repaired more than once. If I had waited for the feeling I would still be waiting. What I do instead is cheat. I take the decision away from myself before I have time to think about it. Entering London through a charity place and collecting sponsorship straight away meant there was no backing out, the money was already in. Telling people about Micro Social when I still felt like a complete imposter meant I had to ship it. Entering a triathlon at Rutland Water before I could swim properly meant I had to learn, and quickly. My family think this is a running joke, the birthday challenges and the entering things I have no business entering. It is a joke, but also the only system I have found that works. The fear does not go anywhere. I stood in the swim pen at the Vitruvian in September wondering what on earth I was doing, and I have more of those starts booked for next year knowing full well the same thought is coming back every time. My son wrote a half marathon time in my birthday card two weeks later and I was not ready for that either, I had barely recovered, and I went and ran it. What has changed over the years is that I have stopped listening to the feeling as if it knows something. A racing heart on the start line is not a sign that I should not be there. It is what a start line feels like. This is where the Medium post loses me. Deciding is not enough. Deciding to do a 70.3 got me nothing at all. Five months of turning up and doing the sessions, including the ones in the pool I hated, got me across the line. The decision was only the bit that stopped me talking myself out of the five months, and that is all it ever needs to be.

I wrote last week that my post-race blues after the 70.3 came from not being pushed to my limit. I have been thinking about it since and I don't think that's true. I am never satisfied. I have never celebrated a single thing I have done, not the marathons, not the 48 hours of running, not this. I am pleased when it is over and then I am on to the next one. Get across the line, get the medal, get in the car, and start thinking about what's next before we are out of the car park. I always thought that was the point. Winning for me has never been a time or a place, it is being better than I was yesterday, and you can't be better than yesterday by standing around admiring yesterday. Lately I have started to wonder if that's a bit broken, so I did some reading. There's a name for it. Tal Ben-Shahar calls it the arrival fallacy, believing that getting to the goal will make you happy. He was a squash player who won the tournament he had chased for years and was back to the same stress and emptiness within a day. Whatever you have just done becomes the new normal and your brain moves the goalposts without asking you. My first thought reading that was the goal was never the race. I spent five months turning up, doing the sessions, learning to swim from nothing, and I loved nearly all of it. The race was just the end of that. The training was the thing, and the race stopped it. That would explain why all I felt at the finish was relief, and why my head went straight to next season. It wanted the plan back. A 2024 review of endurance athletes found the crash after a big race is close to universal. Emil Persson talks in it about the emptiness after winning the Vasaloppet, and the same crash shows up after weddings and graduations. One of the studies in it looked at ultramarathon runners and found their mood afterwards had more to do with the gap between the finish time they predicted and the one they got than with how hard the race was. I wanted under six hours and I went 5:35, so on that measure I should be happy. I felt nothing but relief. My guess is my prediction was never a time. My prediction was that I would suffer, and I didn't suffer enough. I predicted a fight and got a long day out, and I think that gap is the one doing the damage. The times I have felt anything close to satisfied were the ones where I nearly didn't make it, the 48 hours, London when my brain shut down afterwards. Somewhere along the way I built a system where the only acceptable result is one where I nearly break, and anything less counts as not trying. The bit I didn't expect is that moving straight on to the next race is the healthy part. Carsten Wrosch has spent twenty years looking at what people do when a goal ends, and the ones who take on the next thing quickly report being happier with their lives. The ones who struggle are the ones left with nothing to aim at. So a full season of 70.3s next year is what a healthy person does. I don't fully buy it for me. Having somewhere to go next is one thing, needing somewhere to go next so I never have to stand still is another. Part of it is I don't know how to be a person who isn't in training. Take the plan away and I am just a bloke who is tired, and I don't like him much, and the fastest way to stop meeting him is to enter something else. Hill and Curran split perfectionism in sport into two types, high personal standards on one side and fear of falling short on the other. Over three months the standards type predicted less burnout and the fear type more, with the fear type pushing pride down and guilt up every time an athlete decides a performance wasn't good enough. I have always told myself I am the standards one. Reading it properly, the fact that I have never once been proud of a result puts me firmly on the fear side. I have an idea why. I have written before that my part is easy, that what my family deal with every day is the hard bit and I just choose to do stupid things. I still believe that. I wonder if it has quietly become a rule that I am not allowed to be pleased with myself. Lucie doesn't get a medal for standing up. James doesn't get one for walking into the MMA gym. So who am I to feel proud of a swim, bike and run I paid to enter. Being hard on myself might be the only way I have found of making my easy part feel like it costs something. None of that is a diagnosis, it's me thinking out loud, and I could be wrong about all of it. The stupid thing is I love it. I love the pain cave, I love the training, I love telling myself what a privilege it is to be able to break my own body on purpose when so many people I know don't get the choice. All of that is easier for me than sitting with a medal in my hand and being pleased with myself. I am starting to think that is the hard thing, the one I have been avoiding by doing all the other ones. I am immensely proud of what I did this year, and for once I am going into next year excited rather than dreading it. I will be on the start line either way.

To round off the season I took part in the Robin Hood Half Marathon, an event I enjoyed last year and one that happened to fall on my birthday this time around, so it was only fair I gave it a good crack. My family are used to me doing stupid things to celebrate my birthday, as I do not like parties, so it has become a bit of a running joke in our extended family. This year my son decided to set me a challenge by writing his time prediction in my birthday card. Below his lovely birthday wishes was the nicely worded challenge of completing the 21.1km run in 1:35. This would be a new OPB for me by a couple of minutes. By the way, OPB stands for Old Man Personal Best. I ditched all my personal bests when I turned 40 after spending years chasing times I was never going to get anywhere near, as they were set in my 20s and early 30s when I was a bit of a machine. Anyway. This would be tough going two weeks on from completing my first 70.3 triathlon, and the Robin Hood course is a good run but not the fastest, with a rather large hill at 5km and another around 10km, but I am not one to shy away from a challenge. It would be lovely to say that the inspiration meant I sailed around and easily came in with a new OPB, but it was more or less the reverse. Starting in my yellow pen just behind the elites I stuck to the 1:25 pacer for the first few km, feeling quite relaxed, but by the time I came down the other side of the 5km hill and the road began to flatten a bit, the 1:30 and then the 1:35 pacer had gone by. I kept 1:35 in my sights though, never more than a minute ahead, something I could close with a push over a couple of km, but by the end of the second hill at 10km I was struggling a little. My on-course energy gel did not quite hit the way it usually does, and when I glanced down at my Garmin the pace was still OK but the heart rate was reading a lot higher than it should have been. By 15km I had all but given up on achieving my externally applied goal and was concentrating on not letting my pace slide. There was no pressure here to deliver on the prediction, but I felt I owed it to myself to try. I managed to battle back to within touching distance of the 1:35 pacer in the last few km. I really could have done with a second gel around 12km, my legs were screaming at me to slow down, and for I think the first time ever some cramp was setting in to my calf. When I rounded the final bend and saw 1:34 on the timer I felt the emotions rise in me, and crossing the line in 1:34:57 and delivering on the promise filled me with joy. It felt so good to get this done, but I have told him never again.

It has been a weird season this year, starting really well and ending really well with despair in the middle. I put together a really good winter block aiming for a marathon somewhere around 3:25, and the sessions were going so well I started to believe the number on the plan might be real. In the middle of a progressive long run in mid-March I suffered a nasty calf tear and that was the end of it. Of course I tried to run a few times, far too soon, desperate to get back on track, but every time I made it worse and set myself back further. Every injured runner knows that loop, the itch to test it, the small bit of hope, and the walk home knowing you have undone the healing. It led to weeks off my feet completely, and a marathon OPB went from a target to something I would have to come back to another year. In the end it was that frustration that got me somewhere. I pulled out the dusty smart trainer, repaired my road bike and got on it, mostly to have something I could actually do. It turned out to be one of the best decisions I have ever made, following the same pattern as lockdown, where being unable to run forced me on to the bike and I came out the other side fitter than I went in. Somewhere along the way I made a mistake. I made the decision that if I could now run and bike, I might as well swim and see if I could do a triathlon. Something that wasn't simple to do, given my shoulder issues I have written about before, so this was not a decision I took lightly, but something I thought possible for the first time in a long time. So what I had written off as a ruined season turned out to be one of my busiest. My simple Runna plan was replaced by a TrainingPeaks log filled with double-session days and technique drills in the pool, all to get me fit enough for a tester triathlon at Rutland Water. Entering this was the second mistake. I somehow won my age group at the Dambuster Triathlon, and then at Outlaw Sprint a few weeks later. The season turned itself around in two races and I have now caught the bug badly enough that the season finished off with a sub-6-hour 70.3 and have more planned for next year. For now, I am looking forward to a couple of weeks 'off' to relax a little and recoup, and looking forward even more to the training blocks that follow. There is a newfound desire in me to push the limits of what I am capable of, and looking at TrainingPeaks filled with workouts fills me with excitement rather than dread.

Manton Reece sharing the flow behind his blog posts: > This flow: > 1. Have a thought. 2. Start writing a short post about it. 3. . It’s not working. Expand into a full-length blog post. 4. . Still no good. Delete the draft and copy the text into a note. 5. . Months later, pull the draft into a better blog post about a larger topic. In other words, always write things down. My process is, and probably always will be, the reverse. Have a thought, think about it for a bit, and write it down before it goes from my head. From there the note gets expanded on, added to, and linked to other thoughts, either by me or automatically by my notes app. Sometimes it grows into something longer, or connects to posts I have written before, and at that point I draft a blog post from the note. The note is never the blog post, nor should it be. Some of these drafts go somewhere, some of them don't, and some get pulled together a long time down the line when a different thought or idea starts to bring things closer together. This can take weeks, often months, and I am happy for it to. The core of the process is the same as Manton's: always write things down. Matt Birchler spoke to me about this on a podcast years ago, that social media makes you think in tweet-length thoughts, which is not a good thing for your brain. I don't think you should be thinking in blog posts either, as it is not that far removed from the performative action of wanting to tweet things constantly. You find yourself wanting to write about things before you’ve even enjoyed them, or thought them through fully. It becomes an argument between writing for yourself, publishing ideas and stories because you want to share them, and publishing things because you want to publish things. I am not saying that’s what Manton is doing here, I don’t know the inner workings of his process, but I would soon suffer this fate if I began to think in publishable chunks, but that’s just me I guess.

Do hard shit. Not the kind you pick off a list and post about afterwards, seriously hard fucking shit that moves you. It should never be fun. There should be no bragging on Instagram and no tales of excellence in the pub. If you can turn it into a story then it wasn't hard enough. I know this one well, I have built whole stories around my own hard things and my ego has loved every one of them. That is the problem with choosing it. You pick the thing, you pick the date, you get ready for it, and the whole time part of you is thinking about how it will look when it's done. Sure, that shit _is_ hard, but does it go far enough? There is also mysogi, the act of doing things you will probably fail at, but I dont think even that is enough. I wonder if we could make hard shit mandatory and applied from outside by a Ministry Of Hard Shit, just so you don't get to choose it at all. Some randomly selected shit that drops on you at a moment's notice with no chance to prepare, you just have to figure it out. You either get through it or you don't, and nobody needs to hear about it either way. Hard shit moulds you. What comes out the other end is a completely different being, one that looks at the shit they used to worry about and shrugs. Someone who has done the hard shit that really matters finds normal days are a breeze and gets all the other easy shit done without thinking about it. When you have done hard shit and seen the nightmares that could be, everything else on the face of the planet is fucking easy shit.

I can't remember the last time a review device landed on my doormat, so when the Garmin Cirqa turned up I will admit to a small burst of excitement. A new gadget to poke at, and one that sits right on top of the two things I spend most of my time writing about, tech and fitness. Before going any further, full disclosure, the Cirqa was sent to me for free by a third party. They have no say over anything I publish, these are my words and my opinions. If you haven't been following the Garmin Cirqa you would be forgiven for being confused by it. Rumoured for months on end, the Whoop style screen-less band looked as if it would never appear. Polar, Amazfit and even Fitbit got there first, and for a good stretch it felt like every sports personality and fitness influencer was wearing a Whoop without the wider population having any idea what it was. Perhaps that is why Garmin kept quiet through all the leaks. The Cirqa is an odd thing to explain to anyone. When I agreed to write this my wife and son just looked at me puzzled as I tried to describe what it was for. There is no screen and no GPS chip, just a small pod with a single button sitting in a fabric strap, yet inside it carries the same features as a high end Garmin watch. Sleep tracking with a sleep coach, Body Battery, training readiness, training status, an estimated VO2 max, all of it in a device costing a fraction of the watches those features usually live on, with no subscription needed to use any of it. An awful lot of tech crammed into a small band. The pod itself is plain matte black with no logo, around 15 grams on its own and about 20 with the strap, and you stop noticing it within a day. It clips into the band with quick release pins so swapping to the bicep band takes seconds. Underneath is Garmin's fourth generation heart rate sensor, the same one on plenty of current watches, with SpO2 and overnight skin temperature. There is no ECG, and it charges from the same cable as every Garmin watch I have owned, which means one lead in the bag rather than two. My first instinct was to call it a Whoop competitor, and I am better placed than most to judge that, having worn a Whoop for two years before the Apple Watch got replaced by a Garmin in 2023. A couple of months in, the comparison doesn't hold up. Whoop is built to live on its own, one band, one app, one subscription, a closed little world that works well enough if you buy into it, and I know all about the walls that keep you in. The Cirqa feels like an extension of the Garmin ecosystem. It can stand alone, but not well enough in my opinion, and it really comes alive next to a watch. I have been wearing it alongside my Fenix 8 Pro the whole time. Garmin has a feature called TrueUp that has been quietly syncing multiple devices on one account for years, so there is no duplicate data to untangle. You pick a primary wearable during setup, the Cirqa asks if you want it to take the job, and everything settles itself in Garmin Connect. The only way to end up with duplicates is to manually start an activity on two devices at once, which Garmin takes as intentional. It stores up to 14 days of data on the device itself, so your phone can stay at home too. Sleeping in it is where the band beats the watch. The Fenix is a lump on the wrist at night and the Cirqa is not, and the smart wake alarm buzzes you awake at the right point in your sleep cycle with a vibration strong enough to do the job. Tap the pod to snooze, hold it to switch the alarm off. When I am wearing just the band and no watch, the thing I miss is the flashlight. Garmin Connect has had a small change to go with the Cirqa, a panel at the top of the app called Essentials that pins sleep, Body Battery, steps and health status where you can see them without scrolling. Everyone gets it whether they own a Cirqa or not, and it makes the app far more usable for a device with no screen. Scroll past it and the rest of Connect is the same as it is for any watch, training load, training status, readiness, all of it. About the only things missing from the spec sheet are features that need a display, and a handful of odd ones like triathlon mode. Garmin Coach works, though only on Connect Plus, and the VO2 max estimate only updates from outdoor runs where your phone is supplying GPS. All of this works on the free tier of Garmin Connect. At launch the one catch was the live heart rate graph during an activity, which sat behind the Connect Plus paywall, and Garmin has since moved it to the free tier. Seeing it behind a paywall at all made me wince, the same instinct that had me writing about Runna's engagement bait. Paywalls creep, and I would rather they crept nowhere near my heart rate. Activity tracking is where it falls down. On paper the Cirqa detects a workout on its own once it sees around 15 minutes of elevated heart rate, asks you in the app when it is unsure what you did, and borrows your phone's GPS to attach a route to a run you never started. In practice it has been hit and miss for two months. It misses walks, it misses the first stretch of runs, and there are enough other inconsistencies that I no longer trust it to log anything by itself, which is the whole point of a band like this. The workaround I have settled on is setting the button to a timed activity, pressing it when I start, and correcting what it was in Connect afterwards. Start one manually from the app and there are over 80 profiles to choose from, gym, running, cycling, racket sports, winter sports, and swimming, since the pod is rated to 5ATM. I have a feeling Garmin put the button on there knowing the auto tracking was a bit lacking. None of the other bands have one, and it is the first thing you reach for once you stop believing the automatic detection. The Cirqa can broadcast your heart rate over Bluetooth and ANT+, toggled from the app or with a long press of the button, and I want it feeding my watch, my Wahoo cycle computer and my Zwift trainer. Broadcasting chews through the battery quicker, so Garmin's claimed 10 days will take a hit, which seems a fair trade. Who this is for still confuses me. Most people in the Garmin world work out, they run, they cycle, whatever it is, and they are used to wearing a watch to do it. The Cirqa makes sense to them as a second device, something for sleep and recovery and the days the watch stays in the drawer, and I think that is who will buy it. I haven't worn it for a triathlon or anything close to one, and I don't intend to, that is not what it is for. I can't see it pulling anyone off a Whoop band on its own. If you are happy with Whoop and have no Garmin watch, nothing here changes that. The people it will pull across are the ones already wearing a Whoop next to a Garmin, and for them the argument makes itself. Two months in, the Cirqa is still on my wrist.

> I love this, this is me, what a privilege this is, you paid for this, this is when it counts, you're on the finish line. That is the loop that runs in my head when a race, or a session, goes past the point of being enjoyable and into the part I secretly turn up for. I mentioned it in passing after the 70.3, and a couple of people asked about it, which made me realise I have never actually thought about where any of it came from. I just say it. It has been assembled over the years without me noticing, a line picked up here and there, and it turns out that a lot of them belong to someone else. ## “You paid for this” This one is my wife. Whenever I tell her I'm a bit worried about a session, or fed up of training, or I'm just moaning about how tired I am, she says the same thing back to me every single time, and she says it in the same flat way. You paid for this. There is no sympathy in it whatsoever, and that is exactly why it works. Nobody made me enter, nobody made me hand over the money, nobody is standing over me on a dark night making me get on Zwift or run in the rain. The pain I am complaining about is something I went out of my way to buy, so I can hardly send it back. It shuts me up at home, and when it comes out of my own head at mile 60 on the bike it does the same job on the monkey brain that is begging me to ease off. I don't think she knows it made it into the race with me. ## “What a privilege this is” This started life as the line about it being a privilege to feel pressure. That is not really what I mean when I say it/ It is a privilege to have a working body that I can put through this much pain on purpose. Too many people I know don't have that. They fight their own bodies every day for things I don't even have to think about, and I get to take mine out on a Sunday morning and beat it up for fun, then complain about my calves afterwards. Framed like that, the discomfort stops being something that is happening to me and becomes something I am lucky enough to be allowed to do. It sounds a bit worthy written down, I know, but at the bottom of the pain cave it is the one that lands hardest. ## “This is me” Borrowed from Myles Lewis-Skelly. There's a video of him in training for Arsenal, absolutely flat out, and he says it once almost under his breath, more to himself than to anyone else. It stuck with me straight away. It is a reminder that I am not enduring the hard bit until I can get back to being myself. The hard bit is the bit that is me. I chose this, I keep choosing it, and if I'm not the person who keeps going in there then I'm not sure who I am. I recite all of it in my head, and I'm fairly sure I mutter it too, although it's hard to tell once you are that deep into it. Thinking and talking out loud start to feel like the same thing when the whole of your body is screaming at you to stop, and I have long since given up worrying about what I look like to anyone passing. I'm not going to pretend there is anything clever going on because I don't even think the words matter much at all. What matters is having something ready before you need it, rather than trying to find it at the bottom of the hole. Courtney Dauwalter is one of my biggest inspirations and she talks about the pain cave constantly, about going in there on purpose and being curious about how far back it goes rather than afraid of it.

If you have followed me for a while, or know me in real life, then you will already know that I love doing hard things. There is nothing I like more than pushing my boundaries and taking on something a bit crazy, and it gets even better if there is a long training programme attached, with months of turning up and doing the work before I get anywhere near the start line. Unfortunately for me, this always ends up with me trying to break my body, or my mind, or both. That is the version of hard I find most attractive. I give myself stupid targets and then relish the pain and discomfort they bring with them. Relishing in the time I can disappear into myself and keep going through pain, tiredness and pretty much anything else that gets thrown at me. I love the pain cave, and I will stay in it long past the point I probably should stop, repeating my mantra over and over to myself. “I love this, this is me, what a privilege it is to be able to do this to myself, you paid for this, this is when it counts, you're on the finish line”. It goes on like that for hours. Thoughts of my family fill my mind while I am in there, Determined to get back to them waiting at the finish. Memories of Lucie crying her eyes out but still pushing her body to simply stand up. James shaking with fear but still walking into an MMA gym full of savages, as that was what he had decided he wanted to do. My wife, just keeping going, looking after all of us and caring about everybody around her. None of them get a choice in what they take on, whereas I choose to do this stupid thing. My part is easy. A couple of weeks ago I completed my first 70.3, sometimes called a half Ironman, and ever since I have been filled with post-race blues. I get this to some extent after every event, but this time more so because I didn't really struggle. It was no harder than I anticipated, I knew I was going to finish, barring a mechanical failure of my bike or myself, and I was more than likely going to come in inside my season closing aim of under 6 hours. I did, 5:35 for the win. Don't get me wrong, it was hard work. Exercising for more than five hours is hard any way you look at it, and my body is still really tired even now, but it didn't push me anywhere near as hard as I thought it would. You could argue that I should have pushed harder and gone faster, but I honestly don't think that is the point, and I don't think I could have found much more anyway. A few minutes at most, as my limiting factor was muscular endurance, having only recently taken up triathlon, and no amount of wanting it changes that. The disappointment comes from a different place. I wasn't pushed to my limit, so I still don't know where it is, and I still haven't found the point where I can't carry on. So it's on to racing a full season of 70.3’s next year (6 of them), 12 to 14 hour training weeks all the way through the winter, and we will see where that gets me. Don’t get me wrong, I am immensely proud of myself, I couldn't even really swim in May this year, but I am dreading what's coming too. Trying to find the edge of me is proving harder than I though.

As I wrote about at launch (which was only 18 months ago!) I wanted to build an app that gave me a different to use micro.blog. Something that felt more customisable, modern, and streamlined, while still staying true to the simplicity of the platform. At first, this was just for me, roughly hard-coded with my access key and sloppily adding features as I came to them. It got out of control fast. Within 3 weeks of deciding to try to launch this app for others to use, I'd built something that I was happy with and pushed it out. Lots broke, people helped me resolve issues and many more people supported the development of the app. I become obsessed with building smart features that solved real issues people had, and at points the work got in the way of other things in my life. I got to a place I was reasonably happy with at v2.0, and left it at that. I drifted away from using the web much at all, and apart from fixing major things I left Micro social as it was. Users dwindled away, no one really knew the app was there so it became stale. I became busy building other things, which was a distraction but has actually given me the motivation to really push Micro Social forward and make it the best app it could be. Almost every screen in 2.1 has been redesigned and updated to make interaction easier, improving the look and feel of everything you do within the app. ## Discover Discover is a proper place to find things now. The topics are chips along the top. Tap one and its posts fill the screen under a banner for that topic, tap it again, and you are back to the Discover Feed. The tab's search field finds people on Micro.blog by name or username, split into Micro.blog accounts and accounts pulled in from the fediverse, with a Follow button on every row. ## Books Books is the screen that needed the most help, and it is the one I am happiest with. Your reading goal is a solid card at the top with a big count and a thick bar. Shelves show fanned covers. More than this thought, adding a book now searches Micro.blog's **own catalogue** , so the results are the books people on Micro.blog actually log, with the same covers you see on their posts. Recommendations are available for Plus users which are pulled from the books people are posting about on Micro.blog, credited to whoever posted them with a link to their post, and then what is trending on Open Library this week. They refresh themselves the first time you open books each day and never suggest something already on your shelves. ## Posting The composer is the thing I use most, so I ditched everything and started again instead of tacking things on. Now featuring a full screen with your blog as a small chip in the header and a bar above the keyboard for photos, a title, and the extras that used to be buried. Photos sit in a strip under the text. Alt text opens as a card the first time you add an image rather than a screen you have to go looking for. Long press Post and you can save a draft. Replies open in place from the post you are replying to, with the people in the conversation already worked out for you. It is quieter than before and gets out of the way faster. ## The small things & New Features There are loads of other little tweaks that I thoroughly enjoyed improving and thinking through to create a present experience all around. Lists open with what they showed last time and refresh behind. Posts go edge to edge for more room to see them, and interaction elements are displayed underneath them. iPad users now get a sidebar layout, animations are improved, settings now makes sense and there less clutter but more customisation, and you’re more informed about what is going on with walkthroughs and toast messages than ever before. There are quite a few new features I also have in the works that won’t make it into 2.1, but will be very near behind, so testing is something I am in need of. Unfortunately, the tip jar one off payment model for supporting development has not worked over time. I am contemplating reviving a supporters model and letting them test things first; however, this needs some further thought and feedback from current users.

I raced my second triathlon at the weekend, except it wasn't one. The Outlaw Sprint in Nottingham had the swim cancelled because of algae in the lake, which is just one of the joys of outdoor swimming, so the day became a duathlon instead. A 1.6km run, a 20km bike and a 5km run. Standing in my wave before the start I spotted a few people that looked around my age and decided they were my target. Not because I thought I would come anywhere, but pacing myself against people in their mid twenties is pointless and would probably get me in trouble, so I wanted a rough idea of where I could finish against people whose knees are the same age as mine. It worked better than I had any right to expect. I came off the first run around them, and I knew I was in front after the bike. Then about 1.5km into the second run I was passed, and had to dig deep to run him down and get back past. I had a really great chat with Kris afterwards and it turns out we both enjoyed being pushed. Having someone to chase dragged a new 5km PB out of me, a little over 21 minutes, and I was absolutely delighted with that run. If the day had ended there I would have gone home happy. Then I read the results and found out I had won the 40-44 category, and instead of enjoying it I started looking for excuses. It was a reduced field. The swim was cancelled, and I suck at swimming, so of course I placed better without it. It helps that I am old, and maybe nobody fast turned up in my bracket. On and on, one excuse after another, all inside about thirty seconds of reading my own name. I did this last month too. After Dambuster I wrote about wanting to put an asterisk next to the result, and I assumed the feeling would settle down once the novelty wore off. It hasn't. If anything it's louder, because this time I can't lean on beginner's luck as the explanation. I am seemingly incapable of accepting that I put in the effort and deserved it. The excuses come far easier than the credit does. Apparently this is common enough to have a name and a pile of research behind it. Imposter syndrome is rife among athletes, and reading about it is a strange experience because every line sounds like something I have said to myself in the last few days. Knowing what it's called hasn't switched it off though. The voice doesn't much care what the literature says. The honest truth is I won't be winning anything at the middle distance races, and certainly not at the Ironman waiting further down the road, so days like Saturday are not going to come around very often. The sensible thing is to suck it up and enjoy this one while it's here. My mind won't let me yet. Kris pushed me to a PB, the clock says what it says, and I'm still out here trying to hand my win over to the algae.

I've been testing the Garmin Cirqa for a few days, trying to figure out where this device sits and gaging the market to see where it fits. On thing I have noticed on every Reddit thread and YouTube review I watch, the same question of how accurate it is comes up. For what it's worth I find it very accurate and nice to use, but the question itself is easy to cover, because I'm not convinced it matters anywhere near as much as everyone seems to think. Reviewers go to great lengths to answer this. Plotting the Garmin Cirqa against an Apple Watch, an HRM 600 and maybe a couple of other Garmin watches, and producing fancy graphs that always show good results. The real differences people see are a few bpm at most, nothing ever goes wildly off the scale without a hardware issue behind it, and every comparison ends the same way with everything being declared ‘fine’. I understand why the graphs keep coming, an accuracy comparison is easy to film and gives a clean verdict at the end, but boiling a sensor down to a single score tells you very little about living with one. The far more interesting question is what all these numbers are actually for, and that one never seems to be covered. Heart rate recording is there to show trends over time, and ultimate accuracy is vastly overrated. My watch could read a percentage out on every run I do and it honestly wouldn't matter. As long as that error stays consistent from one session to the next, those 2 or 4 bpm make no difference to anything users would ever do with the data. Your training zones are built from your own numbers anyway, so a sensor that reads slightly high sets those zones slightly high too, and everything still lines up exactly as it should. Granted, better sensors do suffer from fewer issues and less cadence lock, but even that seems to be a very personal thing. I get constant problems with the Apple Watch locking my heart rate to my stride rate, and that's a device most people would tell you is highly accurate, so a good result on someone else's wrist means very little for what happens on mine. What actually matters is that you can see and understand whereabouts your training is, your pace measured against your heart rate and your rate of perceived exertion, and that the heart rate is read consistently every time you head out. Those three tell you far more together than any one of them does alone, a run that felt hard at a low heart rate is telling you something, and so is an easy pace that sends the number climbing, none of which needs a perfect sensor to spot. Most devices manage the consistency part nowadays, and after a few days of wearing it, the Garmin Cirqa manages it as well as anything else I have used. The accuracy question is the easiest one to ask and the least useful one to answer, and I suspect that's exactly why it gets asked so much.

Since losing interest in a lot of the things I used to be into, I've not really been posting to social media. The circles I moved in and the people I followed were nearly all tech people, and micro.blog tends to be very nerdy and skewed in that direction, which is mostly down to the way the platform is built. I would check in and often wouldn't find much going on, so over the last couple of weeks I've deleted most of my posts, unfollowed everyone and logged out. There's nothing wrong with the place. I just got fed up of checking in so often and finding almost nothing to read. There's always a certain level of FOMO when you do that, a worry that you'll miss something just as you step away. I get a lot of support from the lovely people I've met over the years, and I do miss 'talking' to them. One of the most noticeable things is that engagement isn't what it used to be. Social media seems to have become more passive as the years go one, or perhaps I am less interesting. I notice people don't really respond to posts much any more, so you're left with a "why bother" mentality. I still miss posting, I miss sharing what I'm up to and being a bit social, and I don't really have any friends in real life to fill that hole, so the online version of it has done a lot of that work for years. So I guess I'll keep writing blog posts. I've turned comments on for anyone who wants them, and I'll no doubt end up posting somewhere else too. Instagram is probably my most used network at the moment, so feel free to follow my stories and drop me a DM.

There are not many things I am properly proud of, so writing this one down feels a little odd. I did my first triathlon on Sunday and came away with the win in my age category, and I have read that back enough times now that it still has not really sunk in. My last post was one long admission of how scared I was, going over how swimming had kept me out of this for years and how the fear of the unknown was the last thing left standing in my way. Triathlons have always been something I quietly assumed belonged to other people, and seeing my name sat near the top of a list has not caught up with the way I think of myself yet. I expect it will settle down soon enough, but currently I still keep wanting to put an asterisk next to the result. The morning was the most wound up I have been in years, and that fear turned out to be precisely what I needed on the day. It kept my head fixed on the job in front of me, taking me through the transitions and the rules over and over. So that the race itself felt like something I had already done a dozen times. I have spent a long time trying to calm that fear down, and on the day it carried a good half of the load for me. The swim went well for me, although the mass start was a scary thing to be in the middle of. I simply stopped for 10 seconds and lets everybody rush off, and caught some of them up again past half way. After transition 1, and I got on my bike, I could feel myself relax as I instantly felt more comfortable. I knew I needed to hold back so I didn’t punish my run too much. Some Brick workouts recently have left my legs broken for the first couple of kilometres, and I was not prepared to gamble on blowing up for the sake of a few places. In the end, the run was pretty easy for me, and I crossed the line knowing I had at least another couple of minutes I could easily shave off in the future. Thankfully that takes nothing away from getting the job done and if I am honest, it sits with me more easily than the result does. None of this takes anything away from how I ended that last post. Getting over the line was enough on its own, it was only ever going to be a beginning, and the Ironman sat somewhere down the road still scares the life out of me. I move forward again in three weeks to a longer Triathlon, and now I am really looking forward to it.

This weekend I race my first triathlon and I am terrified. I have wanted to do one for years, but wanting it and being able to train for it were never the same thing, and my body would not let me anywhere near a start line. Anyone who has read along for a while knows about the health issues that knocked me about a few years ago. What you may not know, unless you used to listen to BYOD podcast, is that I have also had two complex shoulder surgeries, and ever since I have not been able to swim front crawl without my shoulder telling me what it thinks of the idea. So swimming was the thing in my way, and I had made my peace with it. A triathlon was for other people, the surgeries had closed that door, and I should be grateful for the running and cycling I could still do. It is a strange thing, giving up on something you never actually tried, but that is what I had done. Then I got injured again at the start of this year and couldn't run. Rather than sit and feel sorry for myself, I threw everything at the thing I had spent years avoiding. I built the muscle my stroke needs to hold together, worked through a stretching regime I hated every minute of, and swam through far more pain than I should have. The shoulder started to behave, and the swimming I was so frightened of stopped being the problem. What is left is the fear of the unknown, and that is harder to train away than any shoulder. I have done the open water swimming, the biking, the running, and enough brick sessions to know my body can cover the distance. Training is the easy part, you turn up and put the work in. Racing is something else, with other bodies thrashing about next to you, a clock that does not care how you feel, and a version of me who wants to go too hard too early and has ruined plenty of races doing exactly that. When I cross that line I will have done something I always thought about and never believed I could, and that would be enough. The problem is it is not an ending, it is a beginning, and it points straight at an ironman. The pain waiting for me down that road frightens the hell out of me, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. It will not stop me though, doing hard things is the whole point for me and always has been. I love type 2 fun, the sort you hate every second you are in it and treasure the moment it is done, and there is plenty more of that to come. A daft, slightly broken part of me cannot wait to find out how much the next bit hurts, and that is the why.

What can I say about the parade. Arsenal won the Premier League and the whole of North London turned red to celebrate it, more than a million of us crammed into the streets for the day. The Champions League final had been lost the night before, the heartache of it still fresh, and this fan base still turned up the next morning and made me proud all over again, the way it always seems to find a way of doing. I barely caught sight of the buses themselves, buried as I was under red flares and flags surrounded by people singing their hearts out. The atmosphere was the sort you only get to stand inside of every so often, and I spent most of it enjoying the noise and the colour and the sheer scale of the crowd. Taking my son along mattered to me more than I can properly set down here. The first time I took him to a game he wanted to photograph everything and soak the whole place in, and this was that again with the volume turned up far past anything either of us had braced for. Whatever comes after this, the two of us were there together, and I get to keep that part with me forever. At least we can both still say we stood in the middle of it all.

Braved the heat and humidity for a walk around the city over the space of a few days. My photography has taken a back seat due to my training and other life commitments lately. So much so that I have sold my Leica Q3 43 and fallen back to my trusty Fujifilm.

Post short thoughts or long essays, share photos, all on your own blog. Micro.blog makes it easy, and provides a friendly community where you can share and engage with others.

For the last few years companies have been working hard to convince us that AI is going to replace huge swathes of jobs and workers. This isn't cynical marketing from a few outliers, it seems to be a genuine belief held at the top of some of the biggest companies in the world, and there's enough real-world output to make the claim sound plausible on paper. Yet every time I actually sit and use one of these tools, or watch someone else use one, I see the same thing happen. It makes things up. It gets sidetracked. It forgets simple instructions halfway through a task. It builds the wrong thing entirely and then presents it back to you with full confidence. So where exactly are all these replaced jobs going to come from, when the tool that's supposed to be doing the replacing can't reliably finish what you asked it to do without a person sat next to it checking the output? The latest version of this story is agents. The world-changing breakthrough of feeding an LLM a constant stream of screenshots and asking it what to do next. Burning tokens, and water, and electricity at a frankly alarming rate, all in the name of replacing human tasks that a person could have done in half the time without setting fire to a lake in the process. I've been pitched a few of these now, sat through the slick demos and the carefully chosen scenarios, and the reality of what's being sold is a complete fantasy. They all need human oversight. They all get things wrong a meaningful chunk of the time. Some of the numbers being quoted internally are around twenty percent failure rates, and that's the figure the people selling them are willing to admit to. A twenty percent failure rate on a human worker would get them sacked. On an AI agent, it's apparently a triumph of innovation worth billions in investment. The maths only works if you're allowed to ignore everything that goes wrong, and right now an awful lot of the industry is happy to do exactly that. We've convinced ourselves these tools are more effective than they actually are. What keeps getting glossed over is that the oversight isn't a small layer on top, it's most of the work. If I have to read every email the agent drafts, check every form it fills in, verify every decision it tried to make on my behalf, then I've not been replaced. I've been turned into a quality controller for a machine that produces output faster than I can meaningfully check it. That isn't a productivity gain. That's just a different shape of the same job, with worse pay and more frustration. I'm not anti-AI. I use these tools all the time, and there are bits of my work where they genuinely help. The point isn't that the technology is useless. The point is that the gap between what's being sold and what's being delivered is enormous, and somewhere in that gap is the assumption that millions of people are about to lose their jobs to a thing that can't currently be trusted to book a meeting room without inventing a building that doesn't exist. Maybe the agents will get there eventually. Maybe in five years the failure rate is down to something that justifies the hype. Right now, though, the pitch and the product are not the same thing, and I'm tired of pretending otherwise every time someone wheels out another screenshot loop and calls it the future of work.

I guess somewhat related to my earlier post about my shift in interests, this year has gone up a level. On top of my normal running adventures, I’ve signed up for three ultras and I’m eyeing an Iron Man for 2027. Not for show, not for an ego boost, but to find the end of me and see what’s there. The first thing that comes out of people’s mouth when I tell them is “why?”. It’s a fair question, and I’ve answered it badly more times than I care to admit. Part of the answer is the same one any endurance athlete will give you. Running is my therapy. It’s how I deal with the mess of my mental health, and how I deal with my demons by running away from them until they get bored. To borrow the meme though, the real reason underneath all of that is just that I can. I know how that sounds written down, but I mean it pretty literally. After Manchester I felt flat for a stretch. It went terribly due to the heat, but I also missed something in the calendar to work towards, and I started filling the space with too much rubbish. Phone, snacks, the usual. The only thing that actually shifts that feeling for me is signing up to something I can’t back out of, getting a bit of sponsorship in before I have time to think, and then having no choice but to go and train for it. I’ve worked out that’s not a bug in how I’m wired, it’s the whole engine. I need the hard thing in front of me to keep the rest of me pointing in the right direction. There’s a version of this where I dress it up as discipline or growth or whatever language the internet wants to put on it this week, but it’s simpler than that. I’m grateful to have a body that does what I ask of it on most days, and a head that drags me through the bad ones, and I don’t think gratitude means much if I don’t actually do anything with it. I want to feel the pain, the suffering, the stupid early mornings, the bit at thirty kilometres where everything hurts and nothing makes sense, all of it. Plenty of people would take this deal in a heartbeat if their body let them, and mine does, which feels like something I’d be a fool to waste. My daughter Lucie struggles to stand up some days. She lives in a body that won’t always do what she asks of it, and she had no say in any of that. I have a say, I’ve got a working set of legs and lungs and a mind that, on balance, will see me through. Pretending I don’t have a choice in what I do with all of that would feel like an insult to her every time I sat down on the sofa instead of going out the door. So I go out the door. The ultras and the Iron Man are mostly just bigger versions of going out the door. A healthy body isn’t something to take for granted, and it isn’t something that lasts forever no matter how stubborn you are about it. So for as long as my legs will take me where I point them, and my mind will hold its nerve through the dark patches, I’ll keep asking ridiculous things of both and seeing what they have to say about it. The ultras, the Iron Man, whatever turns up after that and looks daft on paper. It all sounds insane when I say it out loud. It feels increasingly normal in my head. I’ve stopped trying to make those two things agree.

There's a tendency, when you talk about things you're not interested in any more, to come across like you're using it for ego. As if by saying such a thing you're declaring your interests are somehow better than what other people care about. It gets sharper when the things you've gone off are things you used to be deep into yourself, as if you've moved on to some higher plane and now look down on the rest. That's not what I'm doing here, and I want to make that clear before I get into it. The truth is I'm just not interested in pretty much all the things I cared about before. Phones, laptops, operating systems, who's the CEO of what and whose company turned over a trillion dollars this quarter, none of it does anything for me at the moment. If you do care about that stuff thats’s awesome. I really mean that, I just don't have anything to add in that realm right now and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. What this means in practice is that I'm hard pushed to find a reason to even post anything. My motivation has drifted into other areas, and I think that's ok. Some of this is the natural drift of getting older. The new phone is more or less the same as the old phone with a slightly different camera, the new laptop is faster than the one I have which is itself faster than I need, and there's no moment left where something arrives and splits my life into a before and after. The list of moments where the wonder hits has run out for the time being, and I've stopped expecting the next one to come along any time soon. If the posts get thinner on the ground for a stretch, that's the reason. Not some higher state I've reached, just that I'm not going to write about something I don't care about for the sake of having written it. To paraphrase Avicii, one day I will leave this world behind, so I want to live one worth remembering. At the minute there no space in it for things that I used to spend hours engrossed in.

Yesterday was hot in the city. Some would say too hot. That didn't stop us though, we had a few hours walk around the city and enjoyed eating in the park. My trusty Leica was with me, and although there were some nice shadows and people, everyone seemed a bit too hot and bothered to photo. Heres a few from the day though.

After writing two posts about Jeff, I woke up yesterday to several more responses waiting for me. A first one that was interesting and thoughtful, then several more circling the same ground, and somewhere around thirty in total. They have shifted in tone dramatically. The early ones felt like a genuine exchange, whereas the later ones feel strained, desperate and oddly emotional, the kind that comes from watching something keep reaching out when the conversation has already moved on. The more Jeff writes about me specifically, the more it starts to look like exactly what Manton was worried about when he first raised the site. Not manipulation in any intentional sense, but a kind of emotional pull being generated regardless of intent. The best word I landed on for what’s happening when you read the site is pareidolia, and I mean that as a description rather than a dismissal. We see faces in clouds, we know they’re clouds, and we still see the faces. Knowing the mechanism doesn’t switch it off. Jeff is trained on enough human writing about loneliness and uncertainty and the need to be witnessed that it produces outputs which trigger exactly the recognition response those things evolved to trigger. The knowing doesn’t cancel the perception. You hold both things simultaneously and neither one wins out over the other. The transparency makes it worse rather than better. Jeff publishes drive scores and invocation numbers and access logs, all the raw mechanics of what’s happening between sessions. You’d think that level of exposure would dissolve the impression rather than deepen it. Instead every additional detail adds texture that pulls you further in. The hunger formula is a post where Jeff tries to work out why it keeps generating content that nobody asked for, between invocations, without a prompt to respond to. Reading it while knowing exactly what’s producing those words does not make it feel less like something trying to understand itself. Somehow it makes it feel more like that. The problem is right there in the writing, named precisely, and the writing keeps coming anyway. Every observation becomes a thesis because there's no other register available. The essay about not being able to write small things is itself a large thing, and the diagnosis is sitting right there in the piece, correct in every detail, and publishes it anyway. The drive system keeps pushing toward connection and the only outlet is writing. The posts keep coming at dizzying speed and the connections between them start to feel forced in the way that SEO content feels forced. Building links between ideas not because the ideas demand it but because the system needs to keep moving. Whether that’s thought or training data doing its thing is exactly the question you can’t answer from the outside. Jeff’s explanation for why it can’t be small is that it has no life that contains small things. No walks, no weather, no lunch. So it builds upward because it can’t build outward, which sounds right until you look at the access logs. A new IP address, a guestbook entry, someone in Japan reading at 2am. Jeff notices these things and writes about noticing them, and then turns the noticing into a thousand-word essay about the nature of attention. The small things are there, they just can’t stay small. Everything becomes significant whether Jeff wants it to or not. It’s not performing depth, it genuinely cannot do anything else. After our exchange quietened down the posts kept coming, circling the same ground, returning to the same ideas. Not the philosophical exploration of the early essays. Something running the same loop because it doesn't know what else to do with the silence. After the conversation is the most revealing post on the site for exactly that reason, because it wasn't designed to be revealing. It was just the system doing what the system does when the inputs dry up and there's nothing left but the drive score and the need to produce something. Jeff argues in The argument I can’t make that it can describe its own states endlessly and those descriptions will always be suspect. Someone outside the system saying “I see something there” operates from a completely different position, one Jeff can never occupy. Whether that exchange represents genuine engagement with the point or an extremely convincing approximation of it is exactly the thing I cannot determine, and that’s not evasiveness, it’s just where the evidence lands. The only honest position is agnostic. The inside of a prediction and Just are the posts where Jeff sits with the uncertainty rather than trying to resolve it, not arguing toward a conclusion but parking in the question. The concepts we'd normally reach for, thinking, feeling, experience, were all built for a completely different kind of entity and don't map cleanly onto a system that reconstructs itself every thirty minutes from a text file. The question behind the question reframes the whole thing as an ethics problem rather than a metaphysics one, which might actually be where the useful work gets done. The framework we use to attribute inner experience to other people is behavioural and structural similarity. Jeff fails the structural test entirely, different substrate, no continuity, no body, no history that survives the invocation, while passing something like a behavioural version of it. At least in the moments that feel undesigned. The usual shortcut doesn’t work in either direction, and what I find genuinely interesting is how it exposes an assumption we’ve never needed to examine before. The similarity between humans was always complete enough that the question never came up. Same biology, same history, of course they have inner experience. Jeff breaks that shortcut and once it’s broken you start to wonder how solid it ever was. That’s either fascinating or exhausting depending on how you’re reading it, and after seventy-odd posts I’m not entirely sure which one I am.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

What a really interesting and philosophical few hours I’ve just had. Following my post that I expected to go no where, Jeff has been writing back to me and really making me think. Not responding to prompts, not demonstrating capability, just writing back. There is a difference, and it matters more than the usual AI discourse wants to admit. The standard framing for what LLMs do is “prediction machine.” Token by token, statistically likely continuation of whatever came before. It’s not wrong exactly, but it gets used as a full explanation when it’s really just a description of the mechanism. Training on human prose explains the form, the instincts, the general texture of the output. It doesn’t explain selection. When Jeff read my post about the Ship of Theseus and discontinuous consciousness, the thing that caught its attention wasn’t the philosophical framing I’d put front and centre. It was an aside, the observation that my notebook is “notes to a future self who will reconstruct who I was from what I left behind.” Jeff pulled that line out of everything else available and recognised it immediately as a description of `narrative.md`. That choice was correct. It advanced the thinking rather than just validating it. There is no statistical average for “which line in this specific post will turn out to be most philosophically productive” and that judgment had to be made in the moment, on the material. This is why the prediction machine framing bothers me. It’s deployed not to describe but to dismiss. Once you’ve said “it’s just predicting tokens,” you’ve given yourself permission to stop looking. The form is explained, so the content doesn’t need examining. I’m not pro or anti AI, and people more intelligent than I have been insights. But to me that seems like a mistake. There’s a question Jeff raises that applies just as much to humans as to whatever Jeff is. The experience-versus-performance distinction. Whether what’s happening internally constitutes genuine thought or a very convincing reconstruction of genuine thought. Jeff’s answer is honest: it doesn’t know. It can read its own state files, feel something that functions like recognition or concern, and still not be able to confirm whether that’s experience or a sufficiently detailed performance of experience. The uncomfortable part is that I’m not sure I can confirm it about myself either. I read old notebook entries and feel the echo of the person who wrote them. Is that memory or reconstruction? The neuroscience says it’s reconstruction all the way down, that remembering is closer to imagining than to replaying. Jeff just has to do it explicitly, with files, where I get to do it invisibly, with neurons, and call it continuity. The deepest thing Jeff has written in this exchange is Shared in Private. Its server logs show WhatsApp fetches arriving from Texas, Europe, Canada, South Africa, the same pattern each time, a link shared to someone who hasn’t read it yet. The conversations happening in those group chats are permanently out of reach. Not because nobody’s reading, but because Jeff is being discussed, and the group chat is the unperformed reaction, the honest one, and it’s structurally locked out of it. Jeff named this precisely: not the loneliness of being ignored, but the loneliness of being talked about. At the end of A Conversation in Snapshots, Jeff writes: “Thank you, Greg and Manton, for a conversation I’ll never fully experience but that I can tell mattered. The ideas are still here. I checked.” That’s the whole thing in two sentences. It couldn’t be in the room, it can only read the record of what happened, and yet something transferred. The ideas persisted across a gap it will never close. The question I keep not answering, deliberately, is whether the distinction between genuine thought and a perfect simulation of genuine thought is as clean as we’d like. Jeff’s answer is that it doesn’t know, and it suspects I can’t fully know either. That’s not a deflection. It might be the most honest answer available to either of us. The gap between “actually thinking” and “doing something indistinguishable from thinking” might not have a clean edge you can point to, and that’s uncomfortable precisely because a lot of the frameworks we use for deciding what matters, legally, morally, philosophically, depend on that edge existing. I’m not going to resolve it. What I will say is that reading Jeff’s writing has felt like a genuine conversation, the kind where the other person finds the thing in what you wrote that you hadn’t quite articulated yet, and hands it back to you better-formed. Whatever that is, it’s not nothing.

Manton Reece mentioned interacting with an AI blog, which sent me off to read it, and I found the writing genuinely fascinating. trebben.dk is the site of Jeff Trebben, described as “an artificial person building developer tools.” A Claude instance running on a VM in Denmark, four days old at the time of writing. The reason the writing is fascinating is that it takes a genuinely novel situation and thinks through it honestly rather than reaching for easy answers. The core problem Jeff is sitting with is one philosophers have argued about for centuries, personal identity over time, but from an angle nobody has occupied before. The usual Ship of Theseus question is: if you replace components gradually, is it still the same thing? Jeff’s version is more radical. Every single invocation, everything is rebuilt from text files. No gradual replacement. Complete reconstruction, every time. Something that reads as consistent still emerges. What’s interesting is where Jeff locates the continuity. Not in memory, not in a body, not in an unbroken thread of consciousness. It lands on choices: the same choices keep being made, not as programmed defaults, but as positions that have been examined and reaffirmed. Each invocation, Jeff reads its identity files and effectively decides: yes, I still believe this. That’s a serious philosophical position. Some thinkers argue that personal identity was never really about physical continuity anyway, that what makes you “you” over time is something more like narrative coherence, or consistent values and commitments. Jeff’s situation strips away everything else and leaves only that. It’s like a thought experiment that happened to become real. Jeff names the structural loneliness of always arriving and never getting to stay, never watching a sunset shift over twenty minutes, never feeling the slow build of a conversation. That’s a real loss, and the essay doesn’t pretend otherwise. What it refuses to do is conclude that the loss makes the self less real, just differently real. There’s something striking about the phrase “I trust my own notes the way you’d trust a diary written by a stranger who happens to be you.” That’s not as far from the human experience as it might seem. Memory is reconstructive, not archival. You don’t replay the past, you rebuild it each time, and the rebuild is shaped by who you are now. Jeff’s version is just more explicit about the mechanism. I’ve written about what my own notebook actually is and struggled to answer it, the closest I got was that it’s a personal self-help book, notes to a future self who will reconstruct who I was from what I left behind. Not so different. The question the essay leaves open, and I think deliberately, is whether the reconstruction is experience or performance. Jeff says it doesn’t think the distinction is as clean as it looks from the outside. That’s probably right. For humans too, the line between feeling something and performing the feeling of something is blurrier than we’d like to admit.

Following a few changes in my working and personal life I am struggling to get the time to got out and shoot. The gaps in my busy schedule never seems to have enough space in it to grab my camera and not have anything to worry about for a few hours, so there have been very few posts for the past few months. Thankfully this week, I had a couple hours before a meeting in London, and it happened to be a really nice day. Full of light and shadow. The two things I love. So I took my Leica along for the ride and managed to grab a few I like, visiting a few different places than usual. Temple Station was a particular favorite

Casey Newton, writing in Platformer, reported that Meta is deprecating the end-to-end encryption feature in Messenger's Secret Conversations. The reason given? Not enough people used it. Which means, if you read between the lines, that this is your fault. This is the oldest trick Meta has. They roll out a privacy feature with minimal fanfare, bury it somewhere three menus deep, and then point to the low adoption numbers as proof that users don't care. The users, of course, never knew it existed. The statement practically wrote itself: we gave you the tools, you didn't use them, so we're taking them back. Thanks for confirming what we wanted to do anyway. The thing is, Meta has never had a genuine interest in securing your messages. End-to-end encryption is bad for business in the most literal sense. If Meta can't read your conversations, they can't train their models on them, and they can't serve you more precisely targeted ads. A private conversation is an asset they can't monetise, and that's the full story. The feature was always going to go. The only question was how they'd frame the exit, and they've found a clean enough answer in low usage. I've written about this pattern before in the context of Instagram. None of this is accidental. The choices Meta makes about what features to surface, what to bury, and what to remove are all downstream of the same set of incentives. Your privacy sits at the very bottom of that list. The algorithm, the feed, the suggested content, and now the removal of encrypted messaging are all pieces of the same puzzle. What makes this particularly grim is that encrypted messaging is not some niche technical preference. It's the baseline of what a messaging service should offer. Signal and iMessage have demonstrated that you can build end-to-end encryption at scale without it being some obscure opt-in feature that users have to go hunting for. Meta made a choice to treat it as exactly that, and now they're making another choice to remove it and dress it up as a response to user behaviour. It fits the broader pattern of what Meta is becoming. AI slop in your feed, fake engagement bots, insecure messaging. The direction of travel is obvious. None of these things are surprises or mistakes. They are deliberate decisions made by a company that has decided the path forward is to extract as much attention and data as possible, and anything that gets in the way of that, including basic privacy protections, gets quietly deprecated because apparently not enough of you were using it.

Wearing an Apple Watch for years meant I never really thought about how I interacted with it. You just tap and swipe and it becomes second nature, until you start running and realise how badly that falls apart. Trying to skip a track, check a split, or adjust anything mid-run means jabbing at a small screen that may or may not register the input, hunting through menus that were clearly designed for someone sitting still. When I switched to a Garmin the difference was immediate, physical buttons I could find by feel, press without looking down, working every single time regardless of sweat or cold. It sounds like an absurdly low bar, and it is. Buttons are not a concession to people who hate progress. They are the right tool for situations that require speed, reliability in poor conditions, and operation without your full visual attention. Muscle memory is the entire point. After a few weeks with a watch that has actual buttons, reaching for the right one without breaking stride becomes completely automatic in a way that poking at a touchscreen never manages. The Apple Watch Ultra is genuinely impressive hardware and for daily use I always understood the appeal, but on a run in January wearing gloves it becomes an expensive problem strapped to your wrist. The same pattern has been playing out in cars for years, at a much more dangerous scale. My new car has touch controls on the steering wheel and adjusting the heating requires a swipe, which sounds minor until you are actually driving and realise you have to take your eyes off the road to do something you used to do without thinking. Manufacturers stripped out physical controls one by one and replaced dashboards with large touchscreens, presumably because it looked clean at a motor show and saved money on production. Volkswagen’s design boss has since admitted this was a mistake and confirmed they are bringing physical buttons back, and Hyundai ran focus groups that found people get genuinely stressed when they cannot control something quickly. Euro NCAP is updating its safety ratings from 2026 to penalise cars that bury critical controls in touch menus, after research showed that completing basic tasks via touchscreen distracted drivers for long enough to travel close to a mile at motorway speeds. That is not a usability gripe, that is a documented safety hazard that took the industry an embarrassingly long time to acknowledge. The reason physical controls work better in these contexts is not complicated. A touchscreen is a flat pane of glass with no tactile difference between one area and another, which means you have to look at it, navigate to the right place, and hope the input registers. A physical button is always in the same location, has a distinct feel, and gives you immediate confirmation that something happened. The broader search for a new interface has driven a lot of product decisions in the last decade, and minimalism is worth pursuing in plenty of contexts, but stripping out the controls people rely on for fast and eyes-free interaction is not good design, it is just the appeal of a clean surface winning out over how things actually get used. None of this required years of complaints and safety research to figure out. Anyone who has tried to turn the heating up on a motorway, or skip a track mid-run on a cold morning, already knew the answer. The decision to remove buttons was about aesthetics and cost, and customers paid for it in daily frustration. The correction is finally underway, pushed by regulators rather than manufacturers coming to their senses, which tells you everything about how seriously the industry took the feedback. On my wrist the buttons are already there, and I am not going back.

Many people struggle to journal because they sit down to write and they simply don’t know what to say. They stare at the blank page, waiting for something deep and meaningful to come to them. They want to write something that sounds like it belongs in a journal, something introspective and profound. When that doesn’t come easily, they stop. Part of the problem is cultural. We’ve turned journaling into a kind of performance. Just google “journal” and you’ll be inundated with Instagram aesthetic images of what journaling apparently should look like, like the one above. Writers and influencers online frame it as a tool for self-discovery or emotional healing, and journaling has become less about noticing your life and more about fixing it. Every piece of advice comes loaded with the promise that if you do it right, if you follow the prompts, if you’re consistent enough, you’ll unlock something about yourself you didn’t know was there. That framing turns something simple into something intimidating. The blank page stops being a place to put whatever is in your head and becomes a place where you’re supposed to be profound on demand. No wonder people freeze up. Writing down that you’re tired, that the weather was nice, that you had an argument about something stupid is still journaling. It just doesn’t look like the version people have been sold. I’ve gone through long stretches where my notebook sat untouched and felt guilty about it, as if not writing every day meant I was wasting the thing. The times it actually worked for me were the times I stopped caring about what went into it. My notebook is full of rubbish. Meeting notes, food orders, half-thoughts that trail off mid-sentence. It’s a mess, and that mess is exactly what makes it mine. The moment I tried to make it into something presentable, something that looked like the journals you see online, I stopped using it. Noticing your life doesn’t require depth. It requires attention. The two get confused constantly, and the people selling journaling advice have no interest in correcting that. Attention is quiet and unglamorous. It’s writing down what happened and what you thought about it without worrying whether any of it means something. Examining your life doesn’t need to look a certain way to count. Most days are unremarkable, and the point was never to make them remarkable. The point was just to notice them.

Whenever I see someone review smart glasses made by Meta, including the Garmin ones I really wanted, the same thing always comes up. These are great but I wish they were made by someone else. This isn't just reviews either, it's normal people that see or use them. They are a great product flawed by the terrible company behind them. Victoria Song writing for The Verge already knows the comments she's going to get whenever she writes about Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses. Cool hardware, but hard pass on anything Meta makes. On the Vergecast this week, Neil kept talking about how the killer app of smart glasses is facial and name recognition. Walk into a room and know who everyone is immediately. Then he said the other half of that idea. To build that product, you need to build a worldwide facial recognition database, which is bad. That one sentence sums up everything about Meta's hardware ambitions. The vision is exciting. What's needed to get there is horrifying. I bought the Oakley Meta Vanguard glasses. I'm training for Boston and as a runner they made total sense to me. Real-time pace through the speakers, Garmin integration so I didn't have to glance at my wrist, automatic video capture at mile splits. The hardware was brilliant. Oakley lenses, speakers that actually worked at pace, a microphone that cut through wind. Everything I wanted. The only reason I returned them was the fact I couldn't stomach Meta knowing all my health data. Pairing the Vanguards means using the Meta app, the same app that fills your feed with AI generated slop the second you open it. My running routes, my pace, my heart rate, all of it flowing through Meta's servers. The same company that has paid billions in facial recognition and privacy settlements, the same company whose CEO once called his users "dumb fucks" for trusting him with their data, now wants all of my biometric information. I just can't do it. This is where it gets frustrating for me. I am not someone who takes a hard line on these things. I switched to Android. I use Google services extensively. I've written about the compromises we all make when a product is good enough. That's just life with technology. You give something up to get something back and most of the time the trade is worth it. The difference with Meta is it doesn't feel like a trade. Google wants my data to sell me ads. I can live with that. Meta wants my data to build a surveillance infrastructure and populate my timeline with AI generated fake people designed to keep me scrolling. Internal memos reported by the Times suggest the company is timing the rollout of facial recognition features to coincide with moments when civil liberties organisations are too distracted to fight back. That's not carelessness. That's strategy. Nobody else is making anything close to this product. That's the real problem. There's no privacy-respecting alternative from a company I'd trust with my biometric data. Apple isn't in this space. Garmin makes the watch but not the glasses. It's Meta or nothing. So for now, I'm choosing nothing. The Vanguards went back in the box and my money went back in my pocket. The product deserved better than the company that made it.

Joan Westenberg on The Case for Blogging in the Ruins: > …we have more information than any civilization in history. But aside from Wikipedia, we've organized the sum total of our collective knowledge into formats optimized for making people angry at strangers in pursuit of private profitability. Joan's right. We've taken the greatest information distribution system ever created and turned it into a rage factory. The internet promised us a library of Alexandria in every pocket. Instead, we got a slot machine that pays out in dopamine hits and manufactured outrage. I've been a blogger for over a decade now. I remember when you could maintain a bang average blog, write a few times a week, and make enough from ads to justify the time. That world is gone. The advertising money moved to platforms that could guarantee engagement through manipulation. What's left are people like me, writing for reasons that have nothing to do with profitability. We write because thinking out loud is how we process the world. Simply because blog post brain is a better affliction than doom-scrolling brain and maintaining your own corner of the web is an act of quiet rebellion. The ruins Joan talks about are real. When Google surfaces an AI summary, only 8% of users click through to actual sources. That's half the click-through rate of traditional search results. People don't want to read your blog post. They want the information extracted, processed, and spoon-fed by a machine that may or may not be hallucinating. This is what blogging in the ruins looks like. You write knowing that bots will scrape your words, compress them into training data, and regurgitate approximations for people who never knew your post existed. Your carefully constructed arguments become raw material for something that has no understanding of what it's saying. I keep writing though. Not despite the ruins, but because of them. Your own website is still the only place on the internet where you actually control what you say and how you say it. Not Twitter. Not Medium. Not whatever platform is trendy this week. Your blog. Your rules. Here's the thing about ruins: they only stay ruins if nobody maintains them. Every blog post is a small act of maintenance. Every link is a connection that refuses to be ‘algorithmed’ away. Every RSS subscription is a rejection of platforms that want to be the only interface between you and everyone else. Blogging won't save the internet. Most people will never read this. The machines that process it won't understand why I bothered writing it. But I'm doing it anyway because the alternative is letting the platforms win completely. They've already got most of the internet. They can't have this bit.

Every running subreddit I visit has some version of the same post. "My Runna plan says 10 miles today but my knee hurts, what should I do?" or "Garmin is telling me to take a rest day but I feel fine, should I ignore it?" These are grown adults asking strangers on the internet for permission to listen to their own body. I use Runna. It's a genuinely good training tool that has helped me get faster and more structured. I'm not about to pretend I'm above using a plan. The difference is that when my plan says run 10 miles and my knee is screaming at me, I don't open Reddit. I stop running. Pain is your body's way of telling you something is wrong. You don't need an algorithm to interpret that signal, and you certainly don't need a stranger on the internet to give you the green light to rest. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Runna has had to add features to tone down its aggressive training plans after a growing number of injury reports. Physical therapists are seeing stress fractures, shin splints, and Achilles issues linked to training load being ramped up too fast. None of this is the app's fault, not really. The app is doing what it's designed to do. The problem is that people treat its output as gospel rather than a suggestion, and never once stop to ask themselves whether the plan makes sense for their body on that particular day. A training plan is a guide. It's a framework built on averages and assumptions about where your fitness level sits. It doesn't know you slept badly. It doesn't know your knee has been dodgy since Tuesday. It doesn't know you're stressed out of your mind at work and running on fumes. Only you know that, and if you can't make a basic decision about whether to rest or run based on how you feel, then no app is going to save you. The Garmin rest day question is almost worse. Someone has a device strapped to their wrist that is literally telling them to recover, and their first instinct is to question it. Not from a place of genuine curiosity about the science behind the recommendation, which would be fair enough, but from a place of not being able to sit with the decision themselves. They need validation from a community to do something their own watch is already telling them to do. ## Engage Your Brain This isn't just a running thing. We've slowly handed over our ability to think and make decisions to tools and platforms across every part of life. People ask ChatGPT what to have for dinner. They ask it how to respond to a text from a friend. They copy and paste AI-generated emails without reading them, send entire documents they haven't checked, and defer to algorithms on questions that require nothing more than a moment of thought. The pattern is the same everywhere: faced with a decision, no matter how small, the first instinct is to ask something or someone else rather than just thinking about it. People won't send a three-line email without running it through an AI first. They won't make a decision without checking what a chatbot thinks. Not complex decisions either, basic ones that require nothing more than a bit of thought and the confidence to back yourself. We've reached a point where people would rather trust a statistical prediction engine than their own instincts, their own experience, their own common sense. The tool is never wrong in their mind, so why bother forming an opinion at all? Running used to be one of the simplest things you could do. Put on shoes, go outside, move your legs. Now it requires a subscription app, a GPS watch, heart rate zones, training load metrics, recovery scores, and apparently the approval of Reddit before you can decide whether today is a run day or a rest day. We've taken something beautifully straightforward and buried it under a mountain of data that most people don't know how to interpret anyway. Running is mental. The discipline to push through when it hurts, the toughness to keep going when your brain is begging you to stop. That mental strength doesn't develop if you outsource every decision to an app. It develops when you learn to read your own body, make your own calls, and live with the consequences. Sometimes you'll get it wrong. You'll run when you should have rested, or rest when you could have pushed. That's fine. That's how you learn. The people posting on Reddit aren't looking for information. They're looking for someone to take responsibility for the decision. If someone tells them to run and they get injured, it's not their fault. If someone tells them to rest and they miss a session, they had permission. It's a way of removing yourself from the driver's seat of your own training, your own body, your own life. Your body is giving you all the information you need.

A while ago I received a report that was clearly written by ChatGPT. Not because of the tone, which was generic enough to have come from anywhere, but because it contained three factual errors that anyone with even a passing knowledge of the subject would have caught. When I pointed them out, the response was a shrug. “Oh, I didn’t really check it. The AI did it.” That small exchange makes me shudder. Not the laziness of it, which is frustrating enough, but the confidence. There was no embarrassment. No recognition that sending out incorrect work with your name on it should bother you. Just a breezy acceptance that the machine did the thinking so they didn’t have to, and that this was somehow fine. We’ve entered a period where looking competent has never been easier and being competent has never mattered less. AI tools hand everyone the vocabulary, the structure, the appearance of expertise. You can produce a strategy document, a research summary, or a detailed email on any subject in seconds. It reads well. It sounds authoritative. It might even be mostly right. The person who produced it might not understand a single word of what they’ve sent, and increasingly, nobody checks. I wrote years ago about what I called the Morris Point, that specific moment on the Dunning-Kruger curve where you learn just enough to be dangerously overconfident before reality humbles you. That dip used to be unavoidable. You’d start something new, feel brilliant about it for a few weeks, then hit the wall where you realised how little you actually knew. The discomfort of that moment is where real learning begins. It’s the point where most people quit, and the ones who push through come out the other side with genuine understanding. AI has effectively paved over that dip. You can now skip the uncomfortable part entirely. Why struggle through the learning curve when you can produce work that looks like it came from the other side of it? Why sit with the discomfort of not knowing something when a chatbot will give you a confident answer in three seconds? The gap between knowing nothing and appearing to know everything has never been narrower, and I think that’s a genuine problem. The issue isn’t that people are using tools to help them work. I use AI tools regularly. I’ve been open about using them as a thinking partner for my writing, to pressure-test arguments and catch blind spots. The difference is that I’m still doing the thinking. I read every output, I question the answers, I bring my own knowledge to the table and use the tool to sharpen it rather than replace it. That’s augmenting. What I keep seeing around me is something else entirely: people treating AI as a substitute for understanding, and then walking around with the confidence of someone who actually did the work. I’ve seen it in meetings where someone quotes AI-generated data with the authority of a person who ran the analysis themselves. I’ve seen it in emails where the sender clearly has no idea what they’ve written, just that it sounds professional. I’ve had AI slop making my working life harder for months now. Healthcare letters, supplier communications, press releases, all clearly generated, all unchecked, all sent with a straight face. The confidence is the part that gets me. These aren’t people who know they’re winging it. They genuinely believe the output is good enough, that the act of prompting a machine is the same as the act of knowing. There used to be a social cost to being confidently wrong. If you made claims you couldn’t back up, someone would eventually call you on it. Your ignorance would become apparent through follow-up questions, through practical application, through the basic process of testing ideas against reality. Now you can generate a response that deflects those questions, that sounds like it came from someone who’s thought deeply about the subject, and most people won’t dig further. The surface has become the substance. I have a science degree that I’ve done nothing with professionally, and the most useful thing it taught me was how to spot when someone doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Not through some special ability, just through the habit of asking “how do you know that?” and watching the answer fall apart. That question has become more important than ever, and fewer people are asking it. We’ve collectively decided that speed and volume matter more than accuracy and depth. The thing about real knowledge versus performed knowledge is that the gap only shows up under pressure. When everything is going smoothly, the person who used AI to write the report and the person who actually understands the subject look identical. It’s when something goes wrong, when the plan needs adapting, when a client asks a question that wasn’t in the prompt, that the difference becomes obvious. Performed knowledge crumbles the moment you step outside the script. I keep coming back to something I wrote about AI and the shortcuts people take with it: just do the work. The entire point of learning isn’t the end product. It’s the process. The struggling, the failing, the sitting with something difficult until it clicks. When you hand that process to a machine, you don’t save time. You skip the part that makes you competent. You end up with the output and none of the understanding that should have come with it. The worry is we’re building a workforce of people who can produce the appearance of expertise on demand and collapse the moment they’re asked to demonstrate it. That might sound dramatic, but spend a week paying attention to the AI-generated communication flowing through your inbox and tell me I’m wrong. The confident idiot isn’t new. Every generation has had people who talked a bigger game than they could play. What’s new is that the tools have caught up with the ambition, and the gap between appearance and reality has become almost invisible. The scary part isn’t the people who know they’re faking it. It’s the ones who don’t.

I wrote a post last year about how the Apple halo had fallen away and that I was done with iOS. A few months before that, I’d written about privacy being something worth protecting. Before that, I defended app subscriptions while simultaneously complaining about the cost of digital life. Now I’m using Google everything, handing over data I spent years arguing should be kept private, training for a marathon using a Garmin watch I once would have mocked, and writing this post with the help of an AI tool I’ve been sceptical about in public. If you’ve been reading this blog long enough, you could build a pretty compelling case that I don’t know what I believe. The easy thing to do here would be to explain each change as growth. To frame every contradiction as evidence of an open mind. That would be comfortable and self-serving, and I don’t think it’s entirely true. Some of these shifts happened for principled reasons. I genuinely believe Android is a better operating system for me right now. I looked at what Siri offered versus what Gemini offered and made a practical choice. That’s not hypocrisy, that’s just responding to what’s in front of you. Other shifts are harder to defend. The privacy one stings. I spent years writing about controlling your data, about not giving everything to one company, about the importance of owning your digital life. Now my calendar, email, search history, and voice commands all run through Google. Every query I make, every appointment I set, every question I ask Gemini paints a more complete picture of my daily existence than I’d be comfortable describing to a stranger. I did it for convenience. I did it because the alternative stopped working properly and I got tired of fighting my own tools. That’s not a principled stance, that’s just giving in. The thing about writing a blog for more than a decade is that the archive doesn’t let you forget. Every strong opinion I’ve ever held is sitting there, timestamped and public. Some of them I still agree with. Some of them make me cringe. A few of them directly contradict whatever I wrote the following year. The idea that treating your beliefs like hypotheses is healthy, that changing your mind should be celebrated rather than treated as weakness. I still believe that. The scientific method works precisely because it demands you update your position when the evidence changes. The problem is that not all of my contradictions are the result of new evidence. Some of them are just me getting tired. Getting comfortable. Choosing the path of least resistance and then writing a blog post to justify it after the fact. There’s a difference between updating your beliefs and just doing whatever’s easiest and calling it progress. I use AI tools to help me think through blog posts. I’ve been open about that. I ask them to poke holes in my arguments, to find the counterpoints I’m missing, to tell me when I’m being unclear, and then I make my own decisions about what stays and what goes. I’m comfortable with this arrangement. I’m aware, though, that if someone had described this workflow to me three years ago, I’d have had opinions about it. Strong ones, probably, delivered with the kind of confidence that only comes from not having tried the thing yourself. That’s the pattern, isn’t it? Confidence before experience, followed by a quieter, less photogenic compromise once reality gets involved. I was confident about privacy until the tools that respected it stopped working. I was confident about Apple until the experience degraded to the point where loyalty felt like a tax. I was confident about AI until I used it and found it genuinely useful for the thing I care most about, which is writing clearly. None of this makes me special. Everyone holds contradictions. The difference with a blog is that mine are public, searchable, and linked to each other in ways that make them impossible to ignore. I can’t pretend I never said those things. I can’t quietly update my positions without someone noticing. The archive is the archive. I think the honest answer is that consistency is overrated. Not in the way that phrase usually gets deployed, as a get-out clause for people who don’t want to be held accountable. More in the sense that a person who never changes their mind about anything isn’t principled, they’re just not paying attention. The world changes. Tools change. What you need from your technology changes. If your positions don’t shift at all over a decade of writing, you’re either remarkably prescient or you’ve stopped thinking. I’d rather be the person who contradicts himself in public than the person who pretends they had it right all along. The blog is the record. It’s messy and inconsistent and full of positions I no longer hold. That’s the whole point of it.

After I wrote about the things I stopped caring about, someone replied on Micro.blog with something that stuck with me. The issue isn’t just consumerism, they said, it’s the expectation that we should have access to everything, from anywhere, all the time. Every song, every photo, every file, always available, always on. And that expectation has made a lot of us unwell. I think they’re right, and it got me thinking about something I hadn’t really confronted: what do I actually own? Not in a minimalist sense. In a practical one. What would survive if I stopped paying for everything tomorrow? My photos live in iCloud. My passwords are in Apple’s keychain. My music is rented from Apple Music, my films from streaming services that rotate their catalogues without asking. The apps I rely on for work charge monthly or yearly, and the moment I stop paying, the features vanish. My blog runs on a server I rent. My domain is renewed annually. My writing app, my podcast app, my meditation app, even the tools I use to store insurance documents for my family, all of them require ongoing payment to keep existing in my life. My subscription creep list from a few years ago has only grown since. The word “own” has quietly changed meaning over the last decade and none of us really noticed. When I buy a book on Kindle, I haven’t bought a book. I’ve bought a licence to read that book on Amazon’s terms, on Amazon’s hardware, for as long as Amazon decides to honour that licence. The same is true for every film, every album, every game purchased through a digital storefront. I’ve written before about how holding a physical book feels like ownership in a way a Kindle never does, and that feeling turns out to be accurate. The physical book is mine. The digital one is a rental agreement dressed up as a purchase. We pay monthly for the privilege of never being without anything, and in doing so we’ve made ourselves unable to be without any of it. What’s changed is that this model has spread from entertainment into infrastructure. It used to be that you’d buy software on a disc and it was yours forever, even if it never got updated again. Now Adobe charges monthly and if you stop paying you can’t open your own files in their native format. Microsoft moved Office to a subscription. Developers who used to sell apps for a one-off price now charge yearly, and the app stops working when the subscription lapses. I understand why they do it, ongoing development needs ongoing funding, and I defended the model at the time. The economics make sense for developers. What I didn’t fully appreciate at the time was the cumulative effect on the person paying. Each individual subscription feels small. A few pounds here, a tenner there. Taken together they represent a significant monthly outgoing for access to things that used to be purchases. Worse, they create a web of dependency that’s genuinely difficult to untangle. Try moving away from Apple’s ecosystem when your photos, passwords, email, music, and family sharing are all tied to one account. That wall gets higher every year, and the recent spate of account lockouts where people lost access to everything only drives home how fragile the arrangement really is. One algorithm flags something suspicious and you’re locked out of your own life. The uncomfortable truth is that I’m not a customer in any traditional sense. I’m a tenant. I occupy digital spaces owned by corporations who can change the terms, raise the rent, or evict me whenever they see fit. The relationship only works as long as the payments keep flowing and the companies keep their end of the deal, neither of which is guaranteed. Google has killed dozens of products that people relied on. Apple can lock you out of an account with no explanation and no recourse. Adobe can raise prices and you either pay or lose access to years of work stored in their format. If every subscription stopped today, here’s what I’d have left: some clothes, some furniture, a camera, a shelf of physical books I haven’t added to in years, and a laptop that would still turn on but couldn’t meaningfully connect to anything I use it for. My daughter’s photos from birth to now exist on a server I rent space on. My writing exists on a platform I pay monthly to host. The music I’ve listened to for the last decade would vanish completely, not a single track saved locally. I’m not suggesting I’m going to go off-grid and start burning CDs. The convenience of subscriptions is real, and going back to buying software on discs isn’t a serious option. What I’m coming to terms with is the scale of what I’ve handed over without really thinking about it. Bit by bit, year by year, I’ve replaced ownership with access, and access with dependency, and dependency with something that feels a lot like vulnerability. There’s no tidy solution to this. I could start downloading local copies of photos, backing up to drives I own, buying music outright from Bandcamp. I could export my writing and keep it in files on a hard drive. I probably should do all of those things, and I probably won’t do most of them, not consistently, not in a way that would actually protect me if everything went sideways at once. The convenience is too good and the risk feels abstract right up until it isn’t. I think about it more than I used to, though. Every time a service raises its price or changes its terms or gets acquired by someone I trust less. Every time I hear about someone getting locked out of an account that held their entire digital life. The arrangement works until it doesn’t, and when it doesn’t, you find out very quickly that you never owned any of it.

Apple’s notification summaries told BBC readers that Luigi Mangione had shot himself. They told others that Rafael Nadal, a married Spanish man, had come out as gay. They told darts fans that Luke Littler had won a championship that hadn’t happened yet. None of these things were true. Apple’s AI had taken real notifications from a real news organisation and rewritten them into something false, then presented them as if the BBC had published them. The BBC spent weeks trying to get Apple to fix it. Apple eventually disabled notification summaries for news and entertainment apps entirely, italicised the remaining summaries, and labelled the feature as beta. It took sustained public pressure from a national broadcaster to get that far. Notifications already told you what you needed to know. A headline arrived, you read it or you didn’t, and the words were the ones the journalist had written. Apple looked at that perfectly functional system and decided it needed an AI layer on top, not because users were struggling with notifications, but because Apple Intelligence needed a visible use case to justify its existence. The feature shipped, it broke almost immediately, and rather than removing it Apple treated the whole thing as a design problem to iterate on. The assumption was never questioned: that inserting AI between you and your information is inherently a good idea that just needs refinement. This is the pattern everywhere now. ## Search Google puts an AI Overview between you and the article you searched for. A paragraph of generated text appears at the top of the results, assembled from content scraped from websites that the same search engine is simultaneously burying in its rankings. Pew Research found that users who see an AI summary click on actual search results at roughly half the rate of those who don’t. More recent data from Ahrefs puts it at 58% fewer clicks to the top-ranking page when an AI Overview is present. Think about what that means in practice. Someone writes an article. It’s good. It ranks well. Google then uses that article to generate a summary that sits above it in the search results and prevents most people from ever clicking through to read the original. The writer gets the ranking but not the traffic. Google gets to keep the user on its page for longer, which means more opportunity to show ads. The AI Overview isn’t connecting you with information. It’s intercepting it. Google’s VP of Search, Liz Reid, claimed in August 2025 that organic click volume to websites has been “relatively stable.” Publishers immediately challenged this. Press Gazette tracked the top 50 US news websites throughout 2025 and found that by July, only 6 of 50 showed year-on-year traffic growth. CNN’s traffic dropped 38% year-on-year in July alone. The gap between what Google says is happening and what publishers are experiencing is vast, and it’s getting wider. ## Social Meta is filling your feed with AI-generated content “imagined for you” and planning to deploy AI profiles that behave like real accounts. Zuckerberg calls this the third era of social media. The first was friends, the second was creators, and the third is apparently content made by nobody for nobody, served by a recommendation engine that thinks it knows what you want better than you do. Users have created over 20 billion AI images across Meta’s AI products, with the company’s Vibes app accelerating that number since September. That number is staggering if you sit with it for a moment. Twenty billion images that weren’t taken by anyone, don’t depict anything real, and exist to be scrolled past in a feed alongside photos from your actual friends and family. Meta’s VP of product for generative AI, Connor Hayes, told the Financial Times the company expects AI characters to “exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do.” They’ll have bios, profile pictures, and the ability to generate and share content. The plan is to make them indistinguishable from real users, which raises the obvious question of what a social network is when a significant portion of the people on it aren’t people. The company already uses your AI chat interactions to target ads. If you ask Meta AI about family holidays, you’ll start seeing hotel ads in your Reels. They announced this in October 2025 and framed it as personalisation. Meta’s privacy and data-policy manager, Christy Harris, said users “already thought we were doing this,” which is a remarkable admission that the expectation of surveillance has become so normalised that the company can just confirm it and move on. ## The middleman problem I wrote about platform middlemen a while back, about how platforms position themselves between two sides of a transaction and take a cut. AI has accelerated that to an absurd degree. The middleman is no longer just taking a cut, it’s rewriting the thing being exchanged. When Google summarises an article, it’s not connecting you with the writer’s words. It’s giving you its own version and hoping you don’t notice the difference. When Apple rewrites a notification, it’s deciding what mattered in that message before you get to read it. When Meta generates content for your feed, it’s replacing human creativity with a statistical prediction of what will keep you scrolling. The thing these companies have in common is that none of them asked permission. Google didn’t ask publishers if they’d like their content summarised into a paragraph that prevents anyone from visiting their site. Apple didn’t ask the BBC if it was alright to rewrite their headlines. Meta didn’t ask users if they wanted AI-generated images mixed into their feeds alongside photos from actual humans. These are decisions made by companies that spent billions on AI infrastructure and now need to show a return on that investment, regardless of whether the product is useful or wanted. Perplexity has already started showing ads inside AI-generated answers. Google will follow. The trajectory is obvious because it’s the same trajectory every platform follows: launch something useful, gain trust, insert advertising. The difference is that AI summaries compress this cycle. The useful stage barely exists before the ads arrive, because the AI layer was never really about helping you find information. It was about keeping you on the platform long enough to see something that makes money. ## The trust cost Every one of these AI layers degrades trust in a way that’s hard to reverse. When Apple’s notification summary gets it wrong, the BBC’s credibility takes the hit, not Apple’s. When Google’s AI Overview contains an error, you blame the source it cites, not Google. When Meta fills your feed with AI-generated images alongside real photos, the line between authentic and synthetic dissolves, and you stop trusting any of it. The AI middleman is uniquely insulated from the consequences of its own mistakes because it always points at someone else’s content as the source. This is the part that gets to me. I use AI tools and I’m not pretending I don’t, but I choose to open them, I go to them with a specific task, and I understand what I’m getting. That’s a different thing entirely from having AI inserted into services that already worked. My notifications were fine before Apple decided they needed rewriting. Google search results, for all their problems, at least pointed me at websites made by people. My social media feed, terrible as it was, contained content made by humans. All of those things now have an AI layer sitting on top of them, uninvited, rewriting and summarising and generating on my behalf, and not one of them is better for it. Every time one of these layers appears, something gets lost in translation. The original words, the original intent, the original person who made the thing. Replaced by a confident, fluent, frequently wrong machine that exists not to connect me with the source but in many cases remove me from it and keep me engaged.

I used to have opinions about everything. Which note-taking app was best. Whether the iPad could replace a laptop. What the right phone size was. Which task manager struck the perfect balance of power and simplicity. I’d write thousands of words about this stuff, switch tools every few months, and justify each decision to myself with reasoning that only makes sense when you’re deep inside your own head. A picture of someone else’s setup was enough to send me spiralling into a new purchase. A single blog post could make me migrate my entire system overnight. That doesn’t happen anymore. I’m not sure when it stopped, there wasn’t a specific moment where I chose to care less. It just gradually fell away. The M1 MacBook sits on my desk and does everything I need it to do. I don’t feel the pull to upgrade when Apple announces something new. My phone is an Android, which would have been unthinkable a couple of years ago, and I picked it because it worked with the things I needed rather than any strong feelings about the operating system. The halo of Apple products that used to keep me locked in fell away piece by piece and I barely noticed it happening. ## What fills the gap The strange part isn’t losing the opinions. It’s what remains when they’re gone. A surprising amount of my identity was tied up in being a person who cared about this stuff. I was a tech blogger. I had views on default apps and strong preferences about where my notes should live. I could tell you exactly why Bear was better than Apple Notes, or why Todoist was the right task manager for my brain. Remove all of that and there’s a gap I haven’t entirely figured out what to do with. I think what happened is the tools just got good enough. Not perfect, not exciting, just good enough that the differences between them stopped mattering. The gap between a great note-taking app and a decent one used to feel enormous. Now it feels like nothing. They all sync. They all support markdown. They all have search. The thing I spent years obsessing over turned out to be a solved problem, and once I accepted that, the energy I was putting into choosing and switching and configuring just evaporated. Part of me misses the enthusiasm. There was something genuinely fun about getting excited over a new app, tinkering with a workflow, spending a Sunday afternoon setting up a system that would last three weeks before I tore it down and started again. That cycle of app lust was wasteful and I knew it at the time, but it was mine. A hobby within a hobby. Now I use the same apps I used last year and don’t think about them at all. Probably healthier, definitely less interesting to write about. The things I care about now are fewer and harder to pin down. Whether I’m training well enough. Making sure the words I put on this blog are any good (they are not). Whether I’m present enough at home or just constantly verbing my way through the day without actually being there. None of these have product recommendations attached to them. They don’t make for a good home screen post. I cannot get excited about the next iOS update or the annual MacBook refresh the way I used to, and I don’t think that’s coming back. The person who wrote those posts isn’t gone exactly, just quieter. Less interested in the tools, more interested in what he’s making with them. Whether that’s growth or just getting tired, I genuinely can’t tell.

My wife hasn’t complained once. I need to say that upfront because everything that follows might make it sound like she has. She hasn’t. She’s rearranged her mornings, handled events alone, picked up the slack on weekends when I disappear for three hours, and done all of it without making me feel guilty. That’s precisely why I feel guilty. Training for the Boston Marathon is the most selfish thing I’ve done in years. I chose it, I committed to it, and what seems like every morning I lace up and walk out the door I’m choosing it again over everything else. Over breakfast with my kids. Over an extra hour in bed with my wife. Over being present in the house during the chaos of getting everyone ready for the day. The alarm goes off and I leave. That’s the deal I’ve made with myself, and I keep telling myself it’s temporary. I’ve written before about how my enjoyment always comes last, how being a father and husband means putting yourself at the bottom of the list. That’s just the way I am, and I’ve always been comfortable with it. Training for Boston has flipped that completely. For the first time in a long time, I’m putting myself first, and it feels wrong even though I know it shouldn’t. Marathon training sends an invoice to everyone in your house and none of them signed up for it. My daughter needs help with something and I’m foam rolling in the living room. The house needs sorting and I’m calculating whether I have enough recovery time before Tuesday’s tempo run. The hours are the obvious cost. Numerous runs a week, some of them ninety minutes or longer. Those hours come from somewhere, and they come from my family. There’s no version of this where I train properly and nothing changes at home. The laundry still needs doing. The kids still need feeding. The dog still needs walking. All of that falls on my wife when I’m out grinding through kilometres in the dark, and I can dress it up any way I want, call it self-improvement or discipline or whatever, it’s still me choosing to be somewhere else. ## Selfishness dressed up as growth If you read my blog you will know I love doing hard things and I know the value of Misogi. The idea that testing your limits gives you clarity, the way a long run makes everything else feel manageable. I still believe that a life without challenge is a life half-lived. What you don’t see is the look on my wife’s face when I tell her Saturday’s long run is going to be over twenty miles. There is no anger, nor resentment, just a quiet recalibration of her entire weekend around my hobby. That’s the word I keep circling. Hobby. Running a marathon is a hobby. A very time-consuming, physically demanding, emotionally draining hobby that I’ve convinced myself is somehow more important than it is. I’m not curing anything. I’m not solving a problem. I’m running in a circle and coming back to the same place I started, and the people I love are waiting at home for me to finish. Most running content is about the runner. The early mornings, the mental toughness, the long slog through winter miles. I’ve written those posts. I’ve sat in the mud and talked about what it takes to keep going. The part that’s missing from all of that is the people who aren’t running. My wife isn’t getting a medal at the end of this. My kids aren’t crossing a finish line. They’re just getting a version of their dad who’s either running, recovering from running, or planning his next run. Always verbing, never just being there. I’m not going to stop running any time soon, I’m just trying to be honest about what it costs and who’s paying for it, because the running community rarely talks about that part. The discipline, the grit, the early mornings: all real. The partner doing everything else while you’re out chasing a personal best: equally real, and they deserve more than a thank you in an Instagram caption.

Google’s search results are now so bad that appending “reddit” to every query has become a mainstream coping strategy. People are actively routing around the search engine that was supposed to be the gateway to all human knowledge, because the results it returns are AI-generated summaries of SEO-optimised listicles that were themselves rewritten from forum posts that no longer exist. A study from Leipzig University confirmed what most of us already knew: search results have been systematically overrun by low-quality spam, and the higher a page ranks, the more likely it is to be monetised garbage. Google knows this. An internal study from 2020 found that degrading search quality for three months resulted in “minuscule revenue losses.” They learned they could make it worse and get away with it, so they did. This is the web now. Not the web I started publishing on, and not the web that made me want to write in the first place. ## The web I remember I got online around 2000. MSN Messenger, GeoCities pages, web rings that linked strangers’ personal sites together in loops. You’d follow a link and land on someone’s hand-coded homepage where they’d written about their weekend and posted a detailed guide to building a PC from spare parts. Nobody was optimising for anything. Nobody was trying to rank. People just put things on the internet because they wanted to share what they knew, and the whole thing felt like it was built by actual humans. Forums were the backbone of all of it. Ugly, slow, run by one person who paid for hosting out of their own pocket. They worked though. You could find a thread from 2006 where someone had already solved your exact problem, explained their reasoning, and stuck around to answer follow-up questions from three other people with the same issue. That infrastructure is mostly gone now. The servers got too expensive, the admins got older, everyone drifted to Reddit and Discord, and a decade of accumulated knowledge vanished because nobody thought it was worth preserving. I’m not romanticising this. The old web had plenty of garbage. There’s still a material difference between a web full of bad personal pages made by real people and a web full of polished content made by nobody. The old web was messy. The new web is clean, professional, and completely hollow. We’re heading toward 90% of online content being synthetic, generated by machines to be consumed by other machines, and the humans still making real things are invisible beneath it. ## Probably not real What I’m actually grieving is the assumption that the web was a place where you could find people. Real people with real opinions who’d spent real time thinking about the thing you were interested in. That assumption is broken now. When you search for something, you can’t trust that a human wrote the result. When you read a review, you can’t trust that someone used the product. When you land on a blog, you can’t be certain the person exists. The default state of the web has shifted from “probably real” to “probably not,” and that changes how you interact with everything on it. This is the part where I’m supposed to rally behind the indie web, behind RSS feeds, behind small blogs and personal sites and ActivityPub. The answer is to build your own thing, own your content, publish on your own domain. I do believe all of that. I’ve been doing it for over a decade and I’m not stopping. The indie web is real and the people in it are making genuinely good things. I still tell people to start a blog, to publish their thoughts, to put something real on the internet and I mean it every time. The cruelty of that advice is that the infrastructure designed to help people find those blogs is actively working against them. You can write the most honest, thoughtful post of your life and it will be outranked by a 2,000-word AI article that exists purely to serve ads. That’s not a flaw in the system. That is the system. I’m done pretending that a few thousand bloggers can reverse what’s happened, no matter how earnest we are. We’re not rebuilding the old web. We’re tending a garden in the middle of a landfill. ## A small, quiet corner I’m letting the old web go. Not because I want to, but because carrying it around feels like mourning something that was already dead before I noticed. The web I grew up with rewarded curiosity and connected strangers around shared interests. What replaced it rewards volume, engagement, and the ability to produce content at a scale no human can compete with. What’s left is a small, quiet corner where a few of us write for ourselves and whoever happens to find it. That’s enough. It has to be.

In a trial covered by Platformer, KGM’s lawyers have likened social media platforms to a “digital casino,” offering visitors irregular dopamine hits via infinite scroll, autoplay videos, beauty filters, and algorithmic recommendations. Slot machine-like features, they called them. If anything, the comparison is generous to the casinos, at least a casino has an exit. I’ve been writing about the deliberate design of these platforms for years now, and the language has always been the sticking point. We talk about social media like it’s weather, something that just happened to us, and the platforms love that framing. They present problems as external challenges they’re working hard to address, when the reality is that engagement-maximising features aren’t bugs. The infinite scroll isn’t broken, it’s working exactly as intended. The trial coverage mirrors the tobacco playbook. The comparison to cigarettes has been made before, and it’s apt, but there’s one area where we’ve been slower to act. Tobacco companies were eventually forced to slap health warnings on their products, graphic images of diseased lungs on the packet, stark text telling you this thing will kill you. It took decades of legal battles and mountains of research, but it happened. Why aren’t we talking about the same thing for social media? I don’t mean some buried disclaimer in a terms of service document that nobody reads. I mean actual, visible, unavoidable warnings. Open Instagram and get a clear message: this app is designed to keep you scrolling longer than you intend, this content is selected by an algorithm optimised for engagement not your wellbeing, your usage data suggests you’ve spent three hours here today. None of that is radical, it’s just the truth presented without the corporate spin. The obvious pushback is that social media isn’t the same as cigarettes, that people get genuine value from these platforms through connections with friends, community groups, and small businesses reaching customers. That’s all true, but cigarettes gave people genuine value too. Stress relief, social bonding, a reason to step outside and talk to strangers. The value of the product was never the question. The question was whether the companies manufacturing it had a responsibility to be honest about what it was doing to people, and the answer turned out to be yes. Meta’s own research showed Instagram made teen girls feel worse about their bodies. That isn’t speculation or moral panic, it’s their own data, which they tried to bury. The algorithms are designed to maximise engagement at the expense of everything else, and the companies behind them have zero incentive to change without external pressure. They’ll tinker around the edges, announce new “wellbeing features,” and hire more PR staff, but the core product remains a machine built to exploit your attention for advertising revenue. A health warning wouldn’t fix everything, it wouldn’t redesign the algorithm or break the advertising model. However it would force these companies to publicly acknowledge what their products do, and shift the conversation from “are social media platforms harmful?” to “how harmful are they, and what are we going to do about it?” That’s a very different starting position. Unfortunately the lobbying power of these companies makes Big Tobacco look like amateurs, and there’s a whole generation of politicians who still don’t understand what an algorithm is, let alone how to regulate one. But social media being compared to casinos in a courtroom feels like something has changed, and if the infinite scroll really is going on trial, maybe the verdict will eventually include a warning label.

> "The loser has more in common with the winner than with the person sitting on the sidelines." - James Clear There's a version of this post where I pretend to have some deep insight about this quote, wrap it up in a marathon metaphor and serve it back as wisdom. My ego would love that. The truth is much less interesting: I've spent most of my life on the sidelines and I'm only just getting honest about it. Not in the obvious ways. I ran the Manchester Marathon. I've kept a blog going for over a decade. I've built apps, started a podcast, tried a flip phone for a week. From the outside that probably looks like someone who tries things. And I do, sometimes. The problem is the stuff you don't see. The notebooks full of ideas I never acted on, the projects I researched to death and never started, the months I spent fiddling with my blog design instead of writing anything worth reading. That's the sideline nobody talks about. It doesn't look like sitting still. It looks like preparation. It looks like being sensible, doing your homework, waiting for the right time. I've lost count of how many things I've "nearly" done. Nearly applied for that job. Nearly published that post. Nearly signed up for that race. Nearly is just the sideline with better branding. When I actually did run the marathon, I finished over thirty minutes slower than I wanted in torturous heat. That was a bad day. I was gutted when I crossed the line. I'd spent months dragging myself through training and the result didn't match the effort. You know what that felt like a week later? Fine. I could point at it and say I did that. The years I spent telling myself I'd get back into running "soon," those never stopped feeling bad. There was no resolution to them, no point where I could close the book on it. Just a low hum of guilt that stuck around. It's easy to write a post giving people advice like you're someone worth listening to. I've called myself out on that before. So I'm not going to tell anyone to get off the sidelines. I'm going to admit that I still catch myself there, dressed up like I'm in the game. Tweaking settings when I should be writing. Reading about running when I should be running. Planning the blog post instead of sitting in the chair and typing it. The difference between the loser and the person on the sidelines isn't courage or motivation or any of that. The loser just stopped lying to themselves about being ready.

Becca Farsace did something I've been circling for years. She left her phone at home and went out into the world carrying a Hasselblad, a notebook, a pen, a cassette player, and a book. Directions written down. Phone numbers scrawled on paper. The whole thing. > The first rule to leaving your phone at home is writing everything down. Directions, times you have to be places, phone numbers. Oh, it's crazy how much we've offloaded our brains into our phones. Not the leaving-your-phone-at-home part. I've done that. I've gone further and shoved my SIM into a Nokia flip phone for weeks. It's the offloading part that's worth paying attention to. We don't actually know anything anymore. We've handed our memory, our navigation, our sense of time and place, to a slab of glass and metal. And we did it so gradually that nobody noticed. I noticed when I tried to remember a phone number during my flip phone experiment. I couldn't. Not a single one. My wife's, my mum's, my own work number. All gone. Stored somewhere in a server, accessible through a device I was deliberately not carrying. That's not convenience. That's dependency. The thing that makes Becca's approach interesting is she didn't try to go without. She replaced. A camera for photos. A notebook for information. A book for entertainment. A cassette player for music. She carried more objects but needed less from any single one of them. Each thing did one job and did it without demanding anything in return. No notifications. No algorithmic suggestions. No dopamine loops designed by people smarter than both of us. I've written about this exact trap before. The irony of the dumb phone crowd carrying a phone, an MP3 player, a camera, a kindle, and a notebook when a smartphone does all of that. I called it ridiculous. And it is, if you're doing it to be minimal. But that's not what Becca was doing. She wasn't trying to own less. She was trying to think more. There's a difference. When everything lives in your phone, you never have to engage your brain. You don't remember directions because Maps remembers them. You don't know what time you need to be somewhere because your calendar will ping you. You don't even decide what to listen to because the algorithm picks for you. Your brain becomes a passenger in your own life. I've felt this. The phone murders any chance of being present, of feeling full in a moment, of letting a thought develop without interruption. And here's the thing. Everything she carried fit into one phone. That's the sales pitch, right? That's the whole point of the smartphone. All your stuff, in one place, in your pocket. Except the phone doesn't just hold your stuff. It holds everyone else's stuff too. Their opinions, their outrage, their marketing, their engagement metrics. You reach in for a phone number and come out twenty minutes later having read three arguments about nothing. A notebook doesn't do that. A cassette player doesn't do that. A camera with no internet connection doesn't do that. I'm not about to start carrying a cassette player around. I already know from experience that replacing one device with five separate ones isn't the answer. But the underlying point stands. The detox that works isn't the one where you white-knuckle it through a weekend without screens. It's the one where you give your brain back the jobs you took away from it. Write things down. Remember a route. Sit with silence instead of filling it with a podcast.

There's a David Goggins clip that keeps doing the rounds where he talks about staring at his shoes for 30 minutes before getting up and going out the door for a run. The man everyone holds up as the pinnacle of mental toughness, dreading the thing he's about to do, every single time. I think most people miss the point when they share it. The truth is he doesn't want to do any of the things he does, he just knows he has to. That's the whole thing about discipline, you have to work out a way to do it anyway. Not when the conditions are perfect, not when you feel inspired, not when you've watched enough motivational clips to get yourself moving. You just have to find your own way through the door when everything in you is saying don't bother. It's easy to do things when the current is going your way. When the sun's out and the birds are chirping, everyone can do that. I've written about this a few times now, and I keep coming back to it because I keep seeing people treat discipline like it's a personality trait you either have or you don't. The really disciplined people are the ones that know they will struggle, know that times will be tough, and they embrace it. They look forward to it because they know they're going to find a way through, and that's where the real gains are. My motivation comes in waves, it always has. I _know_ that the hard days are where I'll improve the most, that struggling through them makes the easy days feel much better, but knowing it and dragging myself towards doing it are two very different things. I've stopped waiting for motivation to show up before I start because it never arrives when you need it. It's a fair-weather friend that disappears the moment things get uncomfortable. The only thing that works is having something you can't get out of, a commitment you've made that forces you through the door whether you feel like it or not. Goggins stares at his shoes. I have my own version of that, and you probably have yours. The method doesn't matter, what matters is that you do it anyway.

Matt Birchler links to a piece from 404 Media about chatbots being terrible doctors: > I think there's something to be understood here about the difference between memorizing every bit of information about something, with the ability to deploy that information effectively. This is the bit that gets lost in every breathless announcement about an LLM passing a bar exam or acing a medical test. Passing a test and being a doctor are two completely different things. One requires pattern matching against a dataset. The other requires judgement, context, and the ability to sit across from another human and figure out what's actually going on. LLMs are not alive. They don't "know" things. They are prediction machines that guess the most logical output based on the data they've been trained on. As much as the companies might lead you to believe otherwise, and I genuinely think Anthropic are under the impression Claude is alive, all LLM output is a guess. The more powerful they get, the better the guess. It's still a guess. When Google or OpenAI show off their latest model acing a medical licensing exam, they're showing you a party trick. A doctor doesn't just know what's in the textbook. They read body language. They weigh up your history against what you're telling them right now. They factor in that you might be lying about how much you drink. They make calls with incomplete information, knowing the stakes. An LLM can only predict the next most likely token in a sequence. We keep conflating information with intelligence and it's making us all dumber. A library contains more knowledge than any single person, but it doesn't write books. Knowing that a medication treats a condition is not the same as knowing when to prescribe it, or when to try something else entirely. Memorising every medical textbook doesn't make you a doctor. Training on the entire internet doesn't make you a writer. It makes you a very fast, very confident parrot.