In some weird way, I have never had my shit together more: 1) my inbox is essentially 0 almost all the time, 2) I’m not letting emails or any other messages for that matter slip through the cracks, 3) my general personal maintenance is like actually taken care of. And yet, I could not feel less interesting.
I thought that all that saved time would go to the stuff I love. But instead, I find myself at 10pm, ambient watching TV, asking the agent what discount I can get instead of going down a rabbit hole. The optimizing just became the new thing I do at night.
I feel very weird right now about my reliance on AI and the general inward nature I’ve been in over the last few months. In my first Substack (!!!) millennial midlife piece, I wrote about lurking and the internet turning into a utility like plumbing. I didn’t think I’d be the example a few months later, but here we are…
The Millennial Midlife Crisis is Going to be a Barbell
We’ve been kicking a thought around at ADIN, internally and with our Scout network… What actually happens when the millennial midlife crisis hits? It’s the largest consumer cohort in American history entering the empirically worst stretch of adult life. It’s doing so right as the biggest wealth transfer ever recorded starts flowing down from our boomer …
These days I feel like I just like sit by myself and type into the machine through different chats all day long. On the other end, with the personal agents that I use, I am discovering more, like doing more in real life.
Chris andAaron (co-hosts on our podcast Net Society) said something that I have been sitting with which is that the AI adoption stuff is going to happen in phases and that phase one is going to be a turn inward towards the productive self. They noted that once those forms emerge, we’ll become more social again, but we’ll become social again along with this productivity, because we’re not going to be willing to give that up as well.
Type B acceleration
To give you some context… I pretty much don’t care about going to the doctor ever. I do my nails when they start looking terrible, I will get a haircut once the split ends are so disturbing that I’m like picking them while on Zoom calls. That’s kind of how I conduct myself.
On financial stuff, I’m equally type B, if that is what we want to call it. I attempt to budget and get rid of expenses that are useless, but ya know, sometimes I don’t feel like dealing with it. I don’t want to sit on the phone with Delta either to deal with something like no WiFi on the flight and get a rebate on that.
What’s happened now is that the agent just pings me and does the work for me.
The “wasted” time is the good stuff
Things I actually like to spend time on include cruising through Artsy / IG / OpenSea for cool art, the RealReal, messing around on Zillow. That said, a lot of wasted time goes into things to enrich myself like spending more time on Substack, podcasts, pile of magazines, watching a movie, reading four books at the same time. I like reading about places I want to eat and am first to volunteer to make the res (I want to have a good meal). I guess you could say I like to spend time on learning about different parts of culture, tech, finance, etc. I spend time on Discords, on Twitter, digging in, DMing people who seem interesting, going to Casa Magazines to find a new aesthetic. I like leaning into the perfectly curated content diet which I have created for myself over the decades.
A lot of my in person meet ups start online too...Someone seems interesting in a Discord or on Twitter, I DM them, and then we’re getting coffee. Same goes for things all over the map: tech events, 1:1 coffees with investors and founders, lots of time and events with people in the art world. I like to go on the ferry and hang out in spaces like that with friends and loved ones at the park. A lot of real life feels “wasted.”
Honestly though, it’s not really wasted, a lot of my taste (sorry to exhaust that word again, especially as the timeline seems past that) comes from this stuff.
This is all to preface to say, maybe I am not like most people. Maybe I spend a lot of time doing things that are atypical and people have their act together enough to book doctor appointments and know when to do that, and if that is the case… kudos to you and this article may be less relevant for you.
Waiting for the “normie” AI harness
I have been using AI since really the beginning. It’s changed my life, undoubtedly.
That said, I didn’t feel like doing the OpenClaw thing in January. Like I said, probably too busy probably lurking on The RealReal to self-host a private army of agents. Plus, my assumption was that someone was going to make a harness for normies and I’d rather wait for that than burn hours trying to figure it out. Needless to say, my cousin, who works at Cursor (and now Grok Bot), got me onto it early-ish. That’s when the normie harness showed up. Then it was Instinct, the agent you just text, blew up in August (The Atlantic did a good piece on what’s going right and wrong with it). Side note, they just raised $1B at a $10B valuation, like a month after raising at $2.5B.
Sheel Mohnot called it “OpenClaw for normal people” and said he’d sent it 677 messages in five days. It found him an in-network podiatrist and got his Comcast bill down.
To make any of these actually useful you sit there alone teaching it you: your calendar, your inbox, all your weird preferences, which is pretty inward.
It’s individualistic, however it has found things that are fun for me and my husband and/or friends to do that are better than what I would have suggested. For example, I saw Julia Louis-Dreyfus had Other Desert Cities on Broadway and I love her. In the old world I would have seen the poster, the play would have come and went, and I would’ve been like damn, I wanted to go!
In this new world, I took a picture of the flyer and dates were offered to me and tickets bought. I didn’t go to a ticket site, I didn’t dig through my calendar, I didn’t put it on some list I’d never look at again.
I am incredibly active as a result of this, like I’m almost doing too much right now? It could also just be fall in New York, but I see things in my email or something and now I take a pic and it’s in there so I have the option. The frictionless has made me more social, but my digital world has moved more inward… that’s the weird part. Offline, I’m out more than I’ve been in a while. Online, I feel kind of gone (at least for me).
Am I getting lamer?
I miss the serendipity of online rabbit holes. This is coming from someone who has been perennially online a lot of my life. I’m now asking myself: am I getting older or is AI technology making me lamer?
Much of the trendspotting and things I learn are from my rabbit holes, Substack and lurking down some Twitter hole. The discovery piece, while I still do (though it feels like less), is taken up by stupid shit I should optimize. I kind of miss being on Twitter and like digging around and finding niche, interesting things. My Internet Explorer StumbleUpon vibe has shifted completely and it’s super depressing.
Some of this isn’t the AI. My calendar is just fuller, so less time in Discords and the platforms were already getting worse. The X algorithm doesn’t push you to the edge, it pushes us to a common context and often that context is just a shared negative space. But the rabbit holes are kind of where I figure out what I like, and the agent skips that part.
Ryo Lu put it well: “the danger is not that ai makes us lazy / the danger is that ai makes us endlessly busy.” That’s me at 10pm with the Spectrum discount.
Phase one is a theory
I think what I am describing may be a phase and the onramp, but I think a lot of people will have that inward onramp. Having the AIs become truly useful takes that onramp and in that period we will be more inward.
That’s my working theory anyway, and I’m kind of testing it on myself. The problem is the 10pm discount hunting isn’t setup. I’m not teaching the agent anything. That’s just what my nights look like now.
I’m not sure about the social part either. Instinct has a feature where your agent talks to your partner’s agent, and Business Insider wrote about couples using it. My favorite part is a guy has his agent pass his wife the message “I love you,” and she replies “Tell him he’s an idiot.”
Maybe my agent talking to my husband’s agent makes it easier to figure out dinner. But it doesn’t get me the random DM that turns into a coffee, or the thing I find three hours into a hole. I don’t know what does yet…
Also, I’m spending way more
I am spending way more mostly because the stuff I used to let slide actually happens now. Appointments get booked, the show gets tickets. The friction was basically my budget. If something took three steps, I didn’t do it, and I didn’t spend the money. Now it’s zero steps.
Morgan Stanley said agents could add up to $115B to its 2030 US e-commerce forecast. Adobe data from this summer shows shoppers coming from AI bring in 53% more revenue per visit than everyone else, though that could just be because people asking an AI are already ready to buy.
The thing I keep thinking about, the same agent helps me figure out what I want and then goes and buys it. Before, Google or Instagram could show me stuff, but I still had to go buy it. I was the last step. Now the agent is the last step too. So my worry is the incentives too. If someone is paying the agent, or the agent gets a cut, that could shape what I want and what I get, and I probably wouldn’t even notice.
Predictions
Some mine, some the machine’s:
By the end of 2026, one of the big consumer agents ships some kind of “serendipity mode” where the whole point is to send you down rabbit holes instead of closing loops.
By 2027, agent-to-agent stuff with friends and partners is the main feature people talk about, not a side thing.
By 2028, “who pays your agent” becomes a normal question, like “is this sponsored” for influencers.
Agents quietly move everyone’s savings to the 4% account and banks feel it. Apollo’s chief economist is already calling it a possible bank run:
Open Tabs
What happens when the assistant is the first place I go, and I just show up less in the communities that used to be first?
Which friction do I keep? I want the Delta call gone forever. I’m less sure about the rabbit holes.
When following through is this easy, how do I decide which random interests actually deserve tickets? (See: almost doing too much.)
My agents got me out of the house more, and they also pulled me out of the places online that made me me. Or alternatively, we solved the loneliness epidemic?
Good article. However, this is too dystopian for a Tuesday morning. Feels like the companies (open AI, instinct etc) just want us hooked to make more money from us. I don’t see any benefit or gains from any of this personally.
I go for a run for the experience and the way it feels and benefits me, not to get anywhere.
here for serendipity mode