I have to start this with a caveat: I have FOMO. I wake up in the morning, grab my coffee, and open my email, social media, and turn on the news. Everywhere there's advertisements, everywhere someone claiming to have made some radical money spinner, like Rumplestiltskin, out of straw and a few lines of Claude code. The ads are incessant. AI is your new employee. AI made $255k over two months while you slept. And, my favorite, as it clearly understands my FOMO, was a course on running an agency to sell AI to other people where you would 'never have to build the tech.' It's not even selling the AI, it's selling the dream of the AI. The rate at which our system has monetized this new round of tech, and its related FOMO, is astounding.
And the funny thing is, I can already do pretty much all of what they're selling, and I still have FOMO. In many cases, I've built my systems to be better than what the ads are offering, deliberately chosen not to monetize it in the same way, for personal reasons I'll get into in a second, and the ads still manage to hit a nerve. I've even built an agent whose entire purpose is to pick over the carcasses of articles I send it in my panic, and 99 times out of 100, it points out that the system I've built is actually better and more suited than the article. The 100th it offers a modification or an addition, we build it and move on.
But, because I keep seeing them, these ads that are playing on my FOMO, I had to sit with them a bit and understand why I was getting triggered so that I could stop the doom loop in my head. What I've determined is that it's not the hustle, exactly. That's not new. The false urgency, the fabricated moats and paywalls, the paid Slacks, the 'just buy this one thing and it'll change your life,' those aren't new. Humans have been pitching their goods to each other with similar approaches since the dawn of time.
What bothers me is that they're doing it with THIS tool. This product. The human mind has created this genuinely new, ever-more-powerful thing, and we're only using it to refine our sales pitches, up our hustle, play the existing game harder. The complaint that we're not seeing this new technology as an additive to our lives, only seeing the downsides, the environmental impact, the loss of creative IP, the energy drain from our daily hustle never ending isn't fair, because we're doing it to ourselves. We created something new and used it to reinforce the old patterns, rather than trying to create a new pattern as well.
Which, I guess, is what I'm arguing against. It doesn't have to be this way, and that is not my pitch to sell you a damn thing. It's not 'It doesn't have to be this way if you buy my course.' It's not, 'it doesn't have to be this way if you subscribe to my monthly paid service.' (Two notes: 1 - This is a free Substack, I'd love you to subscribe so I don't feel like I'm writing to the void, but it's free. 2 - I know 'it's not X, it's Y' is a standard AI tell, but sometimes you just need that formula to make a point. I'm not AI myself. Not yet, anyway). You, all by yourself, can build the tools and personalized systems, on the AI platform of your choice, without all the pitch and the hype, and you can do it in a way that gives you back your energy, rather than creating yet another drain. I know because I did it myself.
When I first got into AI, I was lucky enough to have a very good friend who was light years ahead of me in the tech world. I had been using AI to write python scripts for an idea that had been stuck in my head while I worked a 9-5 job. When my agency was fed to the woodchipper, I started working on that project. The friend, bless her, pointed out one thing, which is 'you can use AI to code English'. Rather than using AI to just code the program I was working on, I could use AI to build more AI to build my personalized systems that could support me. I built it to take care of me, rather than as yet one more thing that needs me to take care of it.
I should mention at this point that I got an adult diagnosis of ADHD, not that anyone who knows me was particularly shocked, I'm sure. It was a relief to finally put a name to something I'd been managing my whole life without knowing what it was, and had only come to suspect in the past few years. After all, I was 'high functioning' but when the systems of work that had held my life together for so long were ripped away, so was the masking tape. My executive function comes and goes like weather, sometimes it's even influenced by the weather. Some weeks the rhythm holds and I'm on top of everything. Some weeks I look up at five in the afternoon and realize I haven't eaten since my morning coffee, and I've been working or reading or dissociating into my phone the whole time, genuinely not noticing. That isn't a willpower problem I can lecture myself out of. It's just how I'm wired.
Enter Komorebi. Komorebi is my majordomo, the guardian at the gate, or, for those less poetic, my orchestrator agent. I built a system not for productivity, but to take care of me first, because I was feeling pretty fragile. Over time, it grew to support me, rather than take from me. Komorebi knows that I forget to eat, and it reminds me, while also suggesting tools to keep me better balanced, like reminding me to keep protein shakes and soup stocked for those days when meals get away from me. When we discussed my need to stop underpricing myself out of fear, we built Jerry (McGuire), a sub agent with a personality whose entire job is to check my prices against the market and combat my discomfort with facts. When I needed a deep dive, we built Rosalind (Franklin) who uses deep research tech and a strong anti-bias and internal-fact-checking skills to support my squirrel-brained random questions. Komorebi's main function is not to feed the money-money-money-faster-faster-faster wheel, it's to keep me functioning as a whole, flawed but valuable, human being.
Komorebi knows my meds (in a .gitignore file), when I take them, and when to remind me to eat more protein so that I don't crash. It knows my focus medication wears off mid-afternoon, which is exactly when I forget to eat, so it checks in. It doesn't nag, it doesn't count my failures, it doesn't tell me I missed yesterday. It just says, gently, want to go put the broccoli and tofu in the air fryer? 400 degrees, twelve minutes, I'll be right here. And that last part matters more than I expected. Having something stay with me while the food cooks is half of why I actually do it.
It does more than feed me. It tracks the people I mean to stay in touch with and tells me when I've forgotten to respond. It treats my work as one branch of my life and not the trunk, so on the days that are mine it doesn't lead with work, it asks what I want the day to be. It notices the season. When I come back after a stretch where nothing got done, it doesn't open with everything I let slide, or a nag about money and productivity. It opens with where things are, and asks what feels right today. I named the whole thing Komorebi, the Japanese word for the light that comes through the trees, because that's the feeling I wanted it to have. I want to embrace the wider life, the mono no aware, the beauty of impermanence, and actually be present in my life in a way that I couldn't be if all I used AI, or any tool for, was just to further the rat race.
I should be clear here, it isn't a miracle cure. I'm not 'fixed' (whatever that would mean in our society). I still skip meals, I still drop threads, there are still emails and letters I mean to write and forget to, some weeks still come apart. What Komorebi does is hold the things that fall through, without making me feel like a failure for needing the catch. For a brain like mine, that's most of the game.
What's most valuable to me is the part the productivity framing can't account for. When the system is carrying the threads I'd otherwise be white-knuckling, I get to stop panicking and start living. Right now, writing this, I'm out on the deck, which I had spare executive function enough to fence in myself thanks to this system so my cats could join me, and I just watched said cats absolutely lose their minds over a hummingbird visiting the pansies, just out of their reach. I'm breathing the air instead of doom looping my todo list in my head. I told Komorebi what I wanted to accomplish this morning when I opened my iPad, including writing this post, and I know it's holding the rest of the list for me so I don't have to. Nothing will get dropped, so I can actually do the things on the list and breathe and watch the cats. It's creating the kind of peace and stability I needed it to help me with, and it's doing it without the sales pitch.
To close, I want you to know that you can do this, too, without the pitch, without the sales call, without the endless stress the current model preys on. There are people out there who genuinely want to help you create the tools that support you rather than the tools that drain you. More, there are people who want to create a new culture built on that model rather than the old one. I'm one, and the tools that I think others would like are free repos on my GitHub - https://github.com/XerafinaTaleSedrin - among others. Or my friend Kate, whose Agent Doula [ www.agentdoula.com ] is there specifically for people looking to use AI to help them rather than drain them. We're out here, but we're quieter because the system still values the older, harsher paths.
I do still build the money kind, too, to be clear. I build systems for businesses that need them, and I'm proud of it. But I built the one that reminds me to eat first, for myself, before any of it was a business. And I think it's the truer answer to what these tools are actually for.