Hi,
It’s been a little while.
Partly summer. Partly life. And partly because I’ve been thinking about a few things that I couldn’t quite connect.
Then last week Penelope and I went kayaking in Desolation Sound.
At one point we were out in open water, the wind had picked up, the tide was working against us, and we had managed to paddle right past the island where we were supposed to camp.
So things were going well.
I like a plan. Probably more than is healthy.
And I had one.
I had studied the tides, checked the weather, mapped the route, packed properly. All useful things when you’re heading out into the Pacific in a kayak.
But eventually you get out there and discover that the Pacific is completely indifferent to your itinerary.
The weather gets a vote.
The tide gets a vote.
Your increasingly tired shoulders get a vote.
And you adjust.
There was something strangely liberating about it.
You can’t growth-hack the tide.
I’ve been thinking about that line ever since.
Over the last few months I’ve written here about attention, friction, place, AI, the good life, and this question of what it means to live fully.
I think I’m starting to see more clearly what connects them.
We live in a world increasingly shaped by the logic of machines.
Speed matters. Scale matters. Efficiency matters. Things that can be measured get measured. Friction gets removed. Systems get optimized.
Obviously, this has done a lot of good.
I’ve spent most of my career in technology trying to make things easier, faster and more scalable. I’m not suddenly planning to become a Luddite.
But I’m starting to think machine logic works much better as a tool than as a philosophy for life.
Because once you start looking for it, you see it everywhere.
I see it in myself.
I can turn meditation into something to improve. My health into a dashboard. A holiday into an itinerary. Apparently I can paddle through one of the most beautiful places on earth and still wonder whether we're making good time.
The same instinct shows up in bigger ways too.
We optimize companies for output. Platforms for engagement. Cities for throughput. Food for convenience. Our days for efficiency.
Eventually even the parts of life that have nothing to do with machines start taking on their logic.
And now we have AI.
This is where I think things get really interesting.
And consequential.
Because AI gives us the ability to accelerate all of this dramatically.
The default path seems pretty obvious. Make more stuff, with fewer people, faster. Generate more content. Automate more decisions. Remove more friction. Increase margins. Raise expectations.
There are very powerful incentives pointing in that direction.
And this is where I get uncomfortable with the sunnier version of the AI story that says: don't worry, AI will do all the boring work and we'll have more time to be creative, see our families and live wonderful human lives.
Maybe.
I hope so.
But there is nothing about the technology itself that guarantees that outcome.
If a company suddenly becomes twice as productive, everybody doesn't automatically get Friday off.
Maybe the company needs fewer people. Maybe the targets double. Maybe the gains mostly accrue to the people who own the company and the technology.
That isn't some anti-capitalist argument. It is just how incentives work.
If we want AI-driven productivity to translate into a better quality of life for more people, we're going to have to choose that.
How the gains are shared matters.
Who owns these systems matters.
The kinds of companies we build matter.
What governments and institutions do matters.
And underneath all of that is a question I keep coming back to:
What is all this new capability actually for?
This feels like the fork in the road.
We can use AI to build an astonishingly efficient version of the world we already have.
Or we can use this moment to question some of the assumptions underneath it.
What if some of these productivity gains bought people time?
What if smaller companies could create enormous value without needing to become enormous organizations?
What if technology gave us more agency rather than finding ever better ways to capture our attention?
What if progress were judged partly by whether life actually got better?
I don't know exactly how we get there. And I'm wary of anyone billionaire who says they do.
But I do think this is the choice in front of us.
Which, strangely enough, brings me back to being blown around in a kayak.
I've been listening to a lot of podcasts about Taoism lately.
One of its central ideas is wu wei, often translated as non-forcing.
I used to hear "non-forcing" and think: that sounds nice, but somebody still has to get shit done.
I understand it differently now.
It isn't passivity.
It's paying enough attention to the actual conditions that you don't waste all your energy trying to impose your preferred version of reality on them.
Pretty useful when you’re in a kayak.
Probably useful elsewhere.
I've spent a lot of my life setting the goal, making the plan, pushing, figuring it out.
That has served me well. I have no interest in getting rid of ambition.
I'm more interested in getting better at knowing when to push and when to move with what's already happening.
Nature forces that lesson on you.
You can want the wind to die down. It doesn't care.
You can wish high tide came an hour earlier. Nope.
You can decide you're definitely going to paddle another ten kilometres. Your shoulders may have another opinion.
There is intelligence in responding to conditions rather than always trying to control them.
And I think this is where nature has started to mean something different to me.
I've always loved being outside. But increasingly I don't see nature simply as a place to escape the modern world and recharge before going back into it.
It offers a different way of seeing the world.
Nature has rhythm. Limits. Seasons. Interdependence. Uncertainty.
It can be incredibly productive, but it doesn't seem obsessed with productivity.
A forest doesn't look inefficient because every tree isn't growing at maximum speed.
And resilience in nature often comes from exactly the things an efficiency expert might want to remove: redundancy, diversity, slack, adaptation.
I'm not suggesting we organize our companies like an old-growth forest.
Although, actually, that meeting might be fun.
I'm saying that when you spend most of your life inside systems built around efficiency and control, it might be healthy to regularly enter a world that couldn't care less about either.
That may be part of why these experiences affect me so much.
Cold water.
Weather.
Cooking something with people you love.
A fire.
A hard trail.
Trying and mostly failing to surf.
Paddling somewhere you can't drive to.
Swimming through bioluminescence.
Eating crab you pulled out of the water a few hours earlier.
None of these things are particularly efficient.
They are incredibly real.
That word aliveness keeps surfacing for me.
Why does swimming through bioluminescence affect me so differently from watching an incredible 4K video of it?
Why can a difficult day outside, where plans go sideways and I'm cold and tired, somehow leave me feeling better than a day when everything was easy and frictionless?
Maybe it's because for a few hours there is almost no abstraction between you and your life.
You're not watching.
You're not scrolling.
You're not measuring whether the experience is performing well.
You're in it.
And maybe that's the larger idea I'm working toward with The Calm Society.
I used to talk more about slowing down. I don't think that's quite it anymore.
I don't want to live slowly all the time. Sometimes I like moving fast. I like building things. I like technology. I like ambition.
What I care about is not allowing the logic of the machine to become the logic of my entire life.
And I think AI makes that question much more urgent.
We are about to get extraordinary new capabilities.
We can use them to make the machine faster.
Or perhaps some of those capabilities can help create a world with more room for the things that make being human worthwhile.
I suspect that future will require more than better prompts and agents.
It will require choices about ownership, incentives, work, technology, community and what we actually value.
Which is a much bigger question than I expected to bring home from a Desolation Sound kayak trip.
But out on the water, at least one part of it felt pretty clear.
Pay attention to the conditions.
Respect the things you can't control.
Move with the tide when you can.
And every once in a while, put the paddle down and look around.
More soon(ish),
Cameron