michael-dean-k/

What is the texture of a day these days? As our life’s inevitably mutate across the decades, we never stop changing, our condition never stops changing: projects die, people die, we learn to look people in the eye, we move, we read and marry and birth. We lose grip of our iterating selves, compress them down to caricatures, characters who also destabilize with time, slightly warping each time we retrieve them from memory; my post-college self is a copy of a copy of a copy, that original self in full-fidelity, irretrievable. Unless, I wrote. Which I didn’t. Will my current self be an equal mystery? Will I know what it was like to get out of bed in July of 2026?

What even is my current self? As fresh and live as it is, it too is ineffable, shaped by cliches that won’t hold if interrogated. It is too dynamic, too complex and thousand-headed to contain in one photograph, or mere words. It takes real effort and skill to see clearly into your own situation, to capture the right essence in the right words. Perspicacity is a depleting resource. If your life is “busy,” as most are, as most new parents definitely are, then the unbroken time to yourself gets thinner and thinner. Those two hours in the morning before the day escapes is met with decision paralysis. I am behind on countless threads; which thing do I save from ruin? Or, do you I use that time to reflect and write, like this, and let everything continue to burn, instead of finding some consolation in it all?

I’m using dramatic words here for what is actually a special and wonderful time. I feel bad to have not put proper words to my love for my daughter. That will come. I’ve had in mind a long letter I want to write her in her first year, but we’re already half way through and nothing is penned. Naturally, I’ve had so little bandwidth this week to write anything. Between consulting work, maintaining Essay Club, watching my daughter full-time, and reading the Odyssey, (all things I cherish) there are little hours left to tend to my hydra of interest and ideas, to keep up with basic responsibilities, to be a good friend and husband, to unpack from New Hampshire, etc.

The reason I wrote this is because I woke up at 6:45 am with a familiar texture, a feeling I’ve been waking up with but not naming, a feeling endemic to this present phase. It’s a guilt for not waking up two hours earlier. Now it’s 7am, and I know not exactly when the day will start, when obligations kick in, when I will have to go to Target to buy children’s Benadryl, more formula, my nephew’s birthday present, etc. It’s this subtle feeling of starting with defeat, which can’t help but color and tamper my energy for the day. I yearn for a 15-hour chunk of focus, just for a single day, to blitz through and catch up on everything, but that then creates a load on my wife. I am becoming more selfless and yet also yearn for selfishness.

The other possibility here is that I’m continuing to fail at understanding prioritization. I just found an essay competition for $50,000, on defining the “new axial age” we are entering. I am intrigued, but deciding to do that would sacrifice everything else. The decision to read the Odyssey already led to a strange kind of obsession that has eclipsed so much else in this last week. I feel guilty for not directing all available attention to my business; I currently make a livable “salary” between consulting and my Essay Architecture project, and while I could just maintain what I have and be “fine,” there is the financial pressure to grow my business around 5-10x in the next 3 years to build the life we envision for our family (without growing it, a simple hiccup could financially destabilize the whole project and kill years of momentum, forcing me to get a regular job). Yet, prioritizing only professional strains feels like creative stasis, the death of mind and spirit, which is probably a normal thing that all adults have to play out. I resist it. I resist it like I resist death, probably since that near-death freak car accident, when I emerged from flipped metal, completely untouched, with a new commitment to take risks (there’s a chance the two are unrelated, but that’s how I mythologized it to myself). I am resisting it in strange ways, which yesterday took the form of rewriting the Odyssey with an opening scene where the cyclops gets castrated.

I still sit cross-legged in bed, writing this, which satisfies my “daily post” obligation that has withered. I want to change my mind before my feet hit the floor. Similar to how the first sentence of an essay sets you in a direction which you cannot retreat from (Didion), so too do your first steps into the day, determine the unfolding of that entire day (the proverbial “right side of the bed”). I know the wisdom I need, I’ve written about it at length, but it’s so easy to forget, to bring the right ideas to the right moment (maybe I need a hypnomnemata). But now I’m seeing a fuzzy outline of what I should remember: escape time, escape chronos (chronological time), and enter kairos. This is my version of “get out of your head.” I find that it’s not my head that traps me, but time itself. I am often trapped in recountings and projections, in personal and societal abstractions, and I derive identity from them without realizing, calcifying into stoned eyes that wake up with me. All issues point back to some version of being stuck in the illusion of time. And so really, my issue is that I’m not “praying” to it; I’m not “meditating” to it; both those terms aren’t quite right; what I mean is that I am not holding that idea freshly in my mind, repeating it and refocusing it throughout the day, to the extent that it shapes my perception. All moods are downstream of past frames of attention. And so this rut I feel is simply the product of not being attentive of the right ideas in the prior days; a forgivable offense when still synthesizing the shards of a new era.

I look to my left and notice this beige mat I bought in Portland, Oregon in 2015. It’s an 18” carpeted square composed of five squares, one in the middle, and then a single line that interlocks and weaves through the middle, creating the illusion of four corned squares. It’s a short step away from my bed. The goal is to wake up, stand on, and meditate on. I forget that I put this here, to remind me to start the day right. I’ve ignored it for the last 200 days. And so despite the chaos and business, perhaps the only thing you can do is take seriously a few simple rituals. And now the babe cries.

Something about the term “knowledge worker” doesn’t settle with me. Some people identify as one, and I’m sure they either grieve of mock the idea that AI will kill email jobs, but knowledge work is the work we should be most eager to shed.

Compared to a factory worker, one who manipulates physical materials and turns them into goods, a knowledge worker does the same with information. It’s computer work. There is a utilitarian air to the phrase, an efficiency. It serves the needs of an employer. It’s about sifting through and repackaging information to create economic value. A better term might be “information assemblers.” An information assembler can go their whole life within a particular domain of specialization and build a strong intuition for how it works, but without knowing Knowledge.

There are many ironies in the phrase. The knowledge worker is so busy setting up meetings and writing reports and filling out reviews and dealing with clients and managing products, that they never have time to touch Knowledge, the thing that matters. It’s an oxymoron. One cannot work and simultaneously gain Knowledge. It’s antithetical to technique, to markets, to legible value. Knowledge is beyond an industry, beyond a process, beyond specialization itself. Knowledge is generalizable insight: how to think or design, when to start over, who to draw from, what’s even worth pursuing, why do anything? It's an inner knowing, a model of the world, and a process for thinking. Virtues, metaphysics, epistemology—I guess I'm describing philosophy.

Knowledge can obviously help a worker be more efficient, but (1) it’s extremely slow and time-consuming to obtain, requiring study far outside of your practical workflows, and so it’s impossible to justify on the clock, and (2) once you obtain Knowledge, you care far less about efficiency because you’re questioned the whole machine. It’s not a surprise this term was coined in 1959 by Peter Drucker, the founder of management theory. I don’t know much about him or his book (The Landmarks of Tomorrow), but I imagine a midcentury worker being honored and proud to operate in the celestial fields of “knowledge.”

The reason I wrote this post is because knowledge workers are being told they need to master AI tools, when it’s precisely those same AI tools that will end information assembly jobs. I suppose there is a transition period where, while the tools are still maturing, you can 2x your efficiency and do fine. But if your job can be broken into a series of machine-legible steps, and all the context needed is documented, then even if you 10x your efficiency, are you not just expensive and now redundant middleware between you and the output your manager wants?

Middleware is part of a software stack that helps two disconnected systems talk to one another. It translates, transforms, and routes. It doesn’t produce anything original, it reformats inputs to outputs, like a knowledge worker. In the last decade, we’ve already seen middleware become automated and commoditized. Instead of custom integrations, companies now build APIs so they can directly call from each other's databases. Marketplaces like Zapier let people string together API calls through a no-code interface. If this trend continues, jobs will become zaps too.

The better move to prep for AI is to dip into humanism, design, philosophy, psychology, intellectualism—things completely outside the paradigm of technique, efficiency, and capitalism. For one, they’re fun and soul-enriching, but also they cultivate a mind more that’s more competitive across labor games. To someone in the knowledge work economy, this seems too impractical to take seriously, but specialization is a losing game. Instead, you should figure out how to give yourself a liberal art education. It’s free if you have internet. Learn to think, doubt, model, and visualize; how you rotate a problem in your own head will define how you use AI.

It's a mistake to think of effort as a single spectrum between a Gary Vaynerchuk grind-till-you-die flip-slop-on-Facebook-marketplace vibe and a Wu-Wei, non-effort, sabbatical-brained, Netflix-and-chill vibe. Something not on that spectrum is obsession. It's not work for work's sake, or work for status climbing, but work by seduction, by tinkering, by vision, by purpose or duty or whatever. It often can look like grind work in terms of focus and intensity and prolificness and hours spent, but it feels different because it comes from a different place.

I framed this question to my cousins: would you rather work hard for 8+ hours a day on something you feel compelled and intrinsically motivated towards, or, go into an office for 8 hours a day for a bullshit job that only requires 1-2 hours of simple work, mindless and purposeless work, and then spend the rest of the time socializing?

The word "work" itself is a bit tainted, because there's a sense of obligation ("I have to do this to get paid"), sacrifice ("I'm doing this at the expense of things I love to support us"), and utility ("I'm making things that are functional for other people"). The work that I'm most drawn to is something like the inverse of this. It's pleasurable ("I lose track of time doing this"), primary ("There's nothing else I'd rather do"), and visionary ("I'm doing this because I see the value in it, and even if others can't see it now, they may eventually.")

I’ve lived in New York my whole life, but I have nothing to say about it. Meaning, in Manhattan at least, I have no recommended pizza spots, no bagel stores, no upscale restauraunts. Almost every out of towner I meet seems to know the city better than me. I am willfully and unwillingly, an idiot in my own home. I stumbled in and just gawk at the mystery, still, every time. I mean of course I know some trivial facts (like how the skyline mirrors the bedrock), and I show them off when I can so my national and international friends don't get suspicious. 

Really, New York is a metropolis, a city of cities of cities. Austin is equivalent to Astoria, just one of several downtowns in Queens, one of five Burroughs. And so you’ll find whatever you need here, meaning, aside from the obvious places, you can surrender to the city and get swept into some odd and novel experience each time (alternatively, you can get caught in identical loops, only going to the same places). When I was in the psychedelic society I found myself in Gowanus, Brooklyn in the apartment of a 70-year philosopher with cancer as he took LSD and hallucinated St. Teresa Avila. When I was trying to start a virtual reality company, I was in Zillow’s headquarters putting headsets on executives, telling them we’d “put Manhattan in a briefcase.” When I needed money, I walked the same path every morning through Bryant Park, to the same corporate job. Now, as I start a family, I’m in a suburb at the edge, moving a little farther east every 3 years, and now I take the LIRR in to meet traveling writers. After many years, you realize New York isn’t one thing. Your take on New York is a reflection of yourself at that phase in life, and the city changes a lot less than you do.

When someone tells me New York is this particular thing or that, they're telling me who they are.