Never Enough | Dark Thoughts
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Never Enough
written on July 21, 2026
Two recent<br>stories<br>about Silicon Valley are hard to read without wondering if everyone involved has<br>lost their mind. Once a place that celebrated "the crazy ones, the misfits and<br>rebels who saw things differently," it now seems to have found a new kind of<br>crazy that isn’t born of rebellion but fear of falling behind. Everyone is<br>chasing the person ahead of them, with little time to remember where they meant<br>to go.
One story talks about a couple that earns a combined $550,000 a year and still<br>feels behind because someone at Anthropic might buy the dream house first. The<br>husband asked his wife to take over almost all parenting so he could spend days,<br>nights and weekends becoming his company’s top user of AI. And she did.
The other story covers a founder who has Claude review her first dates and tell<br>her whether she was engaging and empathetic enough, thanks to recording every<br>single one of them. Two people meet and afterwards, rather than talk to the<br>other person or trust her own judgment, one of them sits alone with a machine<br>and asks how well she performed.
Technology was supposed to make room for life but instead for more and more<br>people life is slowly being rearranged around AI. People fear being replaced by<br>machines and respond by giving those machines more of their judgment, attention<br>and time. And for what? Every "saved" hour is returned to a race with no<br>finish line.
If the valley shows us what it means to live in the future, perhaps falling<br>behind is not the worst thing that could happen. Maybe we need the misfits who<br>know when to stop. Who leave a conversation unrecorded. Who play with their<br>children without agents running in the background. Who can admire another<br>person’s success without feeling diminished by it. Who find peace not by<br>getting ahead, but by no longer needing to.
The Great Buddha of Kamakura. (Wikimedia Commons.)
This entry was tagged
ai and<br>culture
© Copyright 2026 by Armin Ronacher.
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