Should you stop using AI right now?
I hate AI tools. Which is kinda hilarious, actually, because I literally build AI automation workflows for a living. That’s my job. That’s what I do.
But here’s the thing. I just went through something that made me completely rethink how I use these tools. Like, fundamentally rethink it.
I lost my purpose. I lost my spark. And I couldn’t figure out why.
Then I watched this random YouTube video about a Greek word I’d never heard of. And that’s when it clicked. That’s when I realized what was actually happening.
Wait. Let me back up. I’m not here to tell you AI is bad. I’m not one of those people. I love AI. I use it every single day.
I’m saying I let it make me lazy. Or actually, maybe it just exposed how lazy I already was. I don’t know which one. Maybe both.
But here’s why this matters to you. This might be happening to you right now. And you don’t even realize it.
I Used to Be a Reader. Then AI Got Good.
Let me give you some context about who I am. Or at least, who I used to be.
I’ve always been a reader. A learner. The kind of guy who would actually read the user manual. You know those people? I was one of them. If I didn’t understand something, I’d dig in and figure it out. That was just me. That’s who I’ve always been.
I liked learning. I liked the process of figuring things out. There was something satisfying about wrestling with an idea until it made sense. Like, genuinely satisfying. Not in a performative way — I wasn’t trying to be the smart guy in the room. I just liked knowing things. I liked understanding how stuff worked.
When I got into tech and building things online, that curiosity was actually a superpower. I’d spend hours going down rabbit holes. Watching tutorials. Reading documentation. Trying things, breaking things, figuring out why they broke. That’s how I learned to build. That’s how I learned to automate. That’s how I eventually turned it into a business.
Then AI tools got really good.
And I started using them more and more. ChatGPT, Claude, all of them. I got better at prompting. Got better at getting results. And somewhere along the way, something changed.
I just didn’t notice it happening.
Here’s what started to happen. I stopped actually reading what the AI was giving me. Like, I’d skim it. Think “yeah, that looks good.” And move on.
I wasn’t digesting the information. I wasn’t thinking critically about it. I just kinda accepted it as good enough.
And I didn’t even realize I was doing this.
It’s weird, right? You’d think you’d notice yourself getting lazy. But that’s not how it works. It’s gradual. It’s like you don’t notice you’re gaining weight until your pants don’t fit anymore. Same thing. You just slowly stop doing the hard stuff. And it feels fine because the output is still decent. The work still gets done. Nobody’s complaining. So you keep going.
Here’s how it showed up for me specifically. My prompts started getting more generic. And I couldn’t figure out why. I kept thinking I needed better prompts. More detailed instructions. Better frameworks.
But the AI kept giving me generic responses back. And I’d get frustrated. Like, why isn’t this working? I’m doing everything right.
Except I wasn’t.
The real problem wasn’t my prompts. The real problem was me.
I wasn’t giving AI enough context about what I actually wanted. Because I hadn’t really thought about what I wanted. I was just asking it to figure that out for me. Which is kind of insane when you actually say it out loud. But that’s exactly what was happening. I was outsourcing my own thinking to a machine and then getting frustrated when the machine didn’t read my mind.
And that’s a completely different thing.
When I Lost My Spark (And Didn’t Know Why)
So the first sign something was wrong? I stopped feeling excited about my work.
And look, I’m a content creator. I build things. I help people build things. I run automation workflows, I make YouTube videos, I work on products. That stuff used to fire me up. Like genuinely. I’d wake up excited to work on projects. I’d be in the middle of something and lose track of time because I was so into it.
But I just wasn’t feeling it anymore. The spark was gone. Everything felt like going through motions. I’d sit down to work and just feel… flat. And I had no idea why.
I thought maybe I was burned out. Maybe I needed a break. Maybe I was working on the wrong things. I ran through all the usual explanations.
None of them felt right.
Then I watched this video from a guy named Network Chuck. And he talked about this Greek word: telos. T-E-L-O-S. It basically means purpose — your end goal, your reason for doing what you do. The thing that gives your actions meaning.
And he was talking about creating a file that defines your purpose. What excites you. What bothers you. What you want to fix in the world. So you can give that context to AI and get better, more personalized results.
And I was like, okay, cool. Better prompting technique. Makes sense. I was ready to take notes on a new AI workflow.
But then something else hit me.
It wasn’t just about better prompts. That wasn’t the insight.
The insight was that I didn’t actually know my own telos anymore. I couldn’t have told you, in that moment, what genuinely excited me. What bothered me. What I was actually trying to build. Not with any real specificity. Not from a place of conviction. I would have just given you the surface-level stuff. The stuff I say in YouTube intros. The rehearsed version.
And that scared me a little.
I realized I had been letting AI figure things out for me. Instead of me telling AI what I wanted.
There’s a huge difference between those two things. And I had completely missed it.
I was asking AI, “What should I do?” Instead of saying, “Here’s what I want to do. Help me do it better.”
Do you see the difference?
One of those puts you in charge. The other one doesn’t. One of those is using AI as a tool. The other one is using AI as a replacement for your own brain. And I had crossed that line without even noticing.
I had given AI the steering wheel to my life. And I didn’t even realize it.
The Part That Really Messed With Me
And here’s the part that really messed with me. Like, I’m still thinking about this.
Maybe AI didn’t make me lazy.
Maybe AI just exposed how lazy I already was.
Was I always kinda on autopilot? Was I always looking for something or someone else to tell me what to do? I honestly don’t know which came first anymore. The chicken or the egg.
But here’s what I’ve realized. It doesn’t really matter.
What matters is I saw it. And I couldn’t unsee it.
There’s this thing that happens when you rely on something too much. You stop developing the muscle yourself. It’s like using a calculator so much that you forget how to do basic math in your head. The skill atrophies. It doesn’t disappear overnight — it just slowly gets weaker. And you don’t notice because you don’t need it. The calculator is always right there.
And I think that’s what happened to me with thinking. With deciding. With knowing what I actually want.
I outsourced it. And the muscle got weak.
Here’s a really concrete example of how this showed up. I was working on a content strategy — like, a whole document about what I should be making and why. And I just… asked Claude to write it. I gave it some context about my channel and my business and what kind of content I’d been doing, and I asked it to figure out a direction.
And it gave me something. It was coherent. It had structure. It had logical recommendations.
And I almost just ran with it. Like, I almost just said “yeah, this is my content strategy now.”
But something felt off. It didn’t feel like mine. It was a reasonable answer to a generic version of my question. Not an answer to what I actually needed.
Because I hadn’t actually told the AI what I cared about. I hadn’t told it what excited me or what I was sick of making or what I secretly wanted to try. I just described my situation and asked it to solve it. Which is like handing someone a map of your town and asking them to plan your life. They can give you options. But they don’t know where you actually want to go.
That’s when I realized the problem wasn’t the tool. The problem was that I had stopped being a person with opinions and preferences and convictions, and I had started being a person who just waits for input.
The Greek Word That Changed How I Think About All of This
Let’s go a little deeper on telos, because I think this concept is actually really valuable and I don’t want to just gloss over it.
Telos in Greek philosophy — specifically in Aristotle — refers to the final cause, or the ultimate purpose of something. Like, a knife’s telos is to cut. An eye’s telos is to see. Everything exists toward something. Everything is aimed.
And Aristotle applied this to humans too. He thought humans have a telos — a purpose we’re aimed toward. The life well-lived, the full expression of what a human being can be. He called it eudaimonia, which roughly means flourishing. Being fully alive. Actually becoming the thing you’re capable of becoming.
Now I’m not a philosophy professor. I’m a dude who builds AI workflows and makes YouTube videos. But this landed on me in a way I didn’t expect, because I started thinking about my own telos and drawing a blank.
What am I aimed at? What am I actually building toward? Not the business metrics. Not the subscriber count. Like, what’s the thing that, if I achieve it, I’ll feel like I did something with my time here?
And the more I sat with that question, the more I realized I had kind of stopped asking it. I was executing. I was producing. I was optimizing. But I wasn’t really living with intention about where all of that was pointed.
And AI had made it really easy to stay in that mode. Because AI is great at execution. Give it a task and it’ll do it well. But AI doesn’t ask you what you’re building toward. It just helps you build. And if you’re not the one asking that question, nobody is.
The Three Things I Changed
So what did I do about it?
Three things. And I want to be really practical here because I think you can apply this today if you’re feeling anything like what I was feeling.
1. I Sat Down and Actually Thought
Not ask AI to think for me. Just think.
I asked myself: What are the things that really bother me in the world? What are the injustices I see that I wish I could fix? What are the things that actually excite me?
And I wrote them down. Pen and paper. No AI involved.
Now here’s something important. You don’t need some grand life mission figured out to do this. That’s the trap most people fall into. They think they need this big, world-changing purpose before they can move forward. Like, “I can’t define my telos until I have my whole life figured out.” No. Stop that. That’s perfectionism dressed up as wisdom.
Start small.
Start with the smallest, simplest things you can think of. “I like working on computers.” “It bothers me how expensive groceries are getting.” “I love spending time with my kids.” “I get excited when I see someone figure out something they thought was impossible.”
Even basic stuff like that counts. Actually, that stuff counts more than you think. Because nobody figures out their whole life purpose in one sitting. You iterate. You refine. You learn as you go. Your telos at 25 is different from your telos at 35, and that’s fine. That’s not inconsistency. That’s growth.
And whatever you write down? You can change it anytime. There’s no permanent record. No commitment. Stop putting pressure on yourself to have the perfect answer.
The point is to start thinking for yourself again. To sit in a room with no input from any tool and just ask: what do I actually care about? That might feel uncomfortable if you haven’t done it in a while. Lean into that discomfort. That’s the muscle waking back up.
2. I Changed How I Interact with AI
I stopped skimming.
When AI gives me something now, I actually read it. All of it. I think about it. I ask myself: Is this what I meant? Is something missing? Is there context I didn’t give that would make this better?
It sounds simple. It is simple. But I wasn’t doing it before.
I was in this weird mode where I trusted AI more than I trusted myself. Like, the AI said it, so it must be right. Which is insane when you think about it. AI hallucinates. AI misses nuance. AI doesn’t know your full situation — it only knows what you told it. But I was treating its output like it came from some all-knowing oracle and I was just the person who clicked submit.
Now I read everything with a critical eye. Not because AI is wrong — it’s usually not wrong. But because I need to stay engaged. I need to stay in the conversation. I need to keep my thinking muscle active. And honestly? When I actually engage with what AI gives me, I catch things. I add things. I make it better in ways I wouldn’t have if I’d just published the first draft.
There’s also something that happens when you read critically — you start to notice patterns in your own dissatisfaction. Like, I started noticing that whenever AI gave me something that felt generic, it was always because I hadn’t told it something specific about what I wanted. The AI wasn’t failing. I was giving it a vague prompt and expecting a specific output. That’s on me, not the tool.
3. I Became the Editor, Not Just the Prompter
This is maybe the most important one.
Here’s the thing about using AI for content. Whether it’s emails, blog posts, scripts, YouTube outlines, whatever. You can’t just prompt and publish. That’s how you end up with generic garbage that sounds like everyone else. And there is so much content out there right now that sounds like everyone else. It’s remarkable. Like, a wave of beige sameness just washed over the internet.
You have to be the editor. You have to add your perspective. Your voice. Your context. Your experience. The thing that happened to you specifically that nobody else has. The opinion you hold that might be a little controversial. The tangent you want to go on because it genuinely interests you.
AI gives you a draft. You make it yours.
That extra effort? That’s what separates good AI-assisted content from the stuff that all sounds the same. And I say this as someone who has published content that all sounded the same. For a while there I was cranking out stuff and it was fine. It was competent. But it wasn’t me. It didn’t have anything in it that you could only get from me specifically.
The editor mindset changes that. When I sit down now and look at something AI gave me, I ask: what do I think about this? Where do I disagree? What would I add that only I could add? What story from my own life actually illustrates this point better than whatever example the AI generated?
That’s the work. And it’s not that much more work, honestly. It’s maybe 20% more effort than just copying and pasting. But the output is ten times more yours. And ten times more interesting to the people who actually want to hear from you specifically.
What I Actually Do Now (The Practical Version)
Okay so let me make this really concrete. Here’s the actual workflow shift I made, because I’m a systems person and I think in workflows.
Before, my process looked like this: Have a vague idea → Open AI → Ask AI to help me figure out the idea → Skim what it gives me → Move on. Which is just… delegating my thinking entirely.
Now it looks like this: Have an idea → Sit with it for a few minutes before touching any tool → Write down what I actually think about it → Ask AI to help me build on what I already have → Actually read what it gives me → Add my own stuff → Publish something that actually sounds like me.
The key step is that second one. Sit with it before touching any tool. Even five minutes. Even just jotting a few bullet points in a notes app before you open ChatGPT or Claude. That tiny delay makes a huge difference because it forces your brain to engage before the AI does. You’re not starting from zero when you get to the AI — you already have something. And having something, even something rough and half-formed, completely changes the quality of what the AI gives you back.
Because now you’re telling the AI: here’s what I think, help me think better. Instead of: I have nothing, please do the thinking for me.
I also started keeping a document — kind of like the telos file Network Chuck talked about — where I write down the things that genuinely excite me, the things that genuinely bother me, and what I’m actually trying to build. Not in some polished mission statement way. Just in a “here’s what’s real for me right now” way. And I reference that when I’m starting a new project or stuck on a direction. It sounds almost too simple to work. But it works. Because it keeps me anchored to what I actually care about instead of what seems strategically optimal.
What Changed After I Did All This
So what changed after I did all this?
My content started to shift. Ideas started flowing again. That spark I was missing? It came back. Not all at once — it wasn’t like a switch flipped. More like the lights slowly came back on. I’d sit down to work and actually feel something. Have a real opinion about something. Want to make something because I wanted to make it, not because the algorithm said I should.
My prompts got more specific because I had more to say. And when I have more to say going into a conversation with AI, the AI gives me better stuff coming out of it. The quality of what you get from AI is directly proportional to the quality of what you bring to AI. That’s just true. Better input, better output. And “better input” doesn’t mean longer prompts or fancier frameworks. It means you actually knowing what you want and being able to articulate it, even imperfectly.
And I know why. I was driving again. I was the author of my own direction. And AI was back to being what it should be: a tool that helps me get there faster. Not the thing deciding where I’m going.
My relationship with my work got better too. Which honestly surprised me a little. Like, I thought the problem was purely about productivity or output quality. But it wasn’t. The real problem was that I had been a passive observer in my own creative process. And that’s exhausting in a way that’s hard to describe. You’re doing the work but you’re not really present in it. You’re just… there. And when I came back and started actually being present — actually having opinions, actually making choices, actually adding my own stuff — it felt like waking up.
The Question Nobody’s Asking
End of the day, here’s what I want you to take from this.
AI is going to keep getting smarter. It’s going to be able to do more and more. And yeah, you could probably let it run your whole life at some point. Like, that’s not even science fiction anymore. That’s where we’re heading. AI agents that manage your calendar, make your decisions, plan your goals, respond to your emails. It’s all coming. I’m literally building some of that stuff.
But would it be the life you wanted?
That’s the question nobody’s asking. Everyone’s so focused on what AI can do. Nobody’s asking what it should do. Or more importantly, what you should still be doing yourself.
There’s a version of AI adoption that makes your life better — where you’re more capable, more free to focus on what matters, more able to do the things that are uniquely yours to do. That version is great. That’s the version I want.
And there’s a version where AI slowly takes over more and more of your cognitive life until you’re just a person who approves things. Who clicks submit. Who consumes the output of machines without ever generating anything genuinely your own. That version is, I think, a kind of death. Not dramatic death. Just the slow dimming of something.
No matter how intelligent AI gets, it cannot design the life you want to live. Only you can do that. And for me personally, I believe that’s with God’s guidance. That’s my framework. That’s how I think about it. I believe I’m here for a reason that’s bigger than my content metrics, and that the way I figure out what that reason is involves prayer and scripture and stillness — not a language model. AI can help me execute. It can help me communicate. But it doesn’t have access to that deeper layer. That part is between me and God.
But whether you share my faith or not, the principle is the same. AI is not a replacement for you leading and directing your own life. It’s not a replacement for you deciding what matters. For you figuring out what excites you and what bothers you and what you want to do about it.
If you’re not the author of your own story, someone or something else is.
Don’t let that be a language model.
How to Know If This Is Happening to You
Before I wrap up, let me give you a few signs that you might be in the same place I was. Because like I said, this doesn’t announce itself. It sneaks up.
You might be in this place if: You open AI before you’ve thought about the problem at all. If the first thing you do when you have a task is open ChatGPT, without even pausing to think about what you actually want, that’s a sign.
You might be in this place if: The AI’s output keeps feeling off but you can’t explain why. That’s usually because the AI is doing exactly what you asked, but what you asked doesn’t actually match what you needed, because you didn’t really think through what you needed.
You might be in this place if: You feel vaguely dissatisfied with your work even when it’s objectively fine. Output is decent. People seem to like it. But something feels hollow. That hollowness is usually because it’s not really yours.
You might be in this place if: You struggle to articulate your own opinions on things you used to have strong opinions about. Not because your opinions changed — but because you stopped practicing having them.
If any of that sounds familiar, you’re not broken. You just drifted a little. The fix is simpler than you think. It starts with sitting down, putting the tools away for a few minutes, and just thinking. About what you care about. About what you want. About who you actually are and what you’re trying to build.
That’s it. That’s step one. Everything else flows from there.
Your Turn
So here’s what I want you to do. Real simple.
Next time you use AI, actually read what it gives you. Think about it. Add to it. Make it better.
And if you’ve been feeling like you lost your spark lately, if you’ve been going through the motions, if you’ve been feeling like something’s off but you can’t put your finger on it…
Maybe ask yourself: Have I been letting AI drive? Or am I the one with my hands on the wheel?
The tool is not the problem. The tool is great. I’m going to keep using AI every single day. I’m going to keep building with it, creating with it, automating things with it. That’s not changing.
But I’m going to keep showing up as the person who knows where we’re going. The one who has the map. The one who says “here, help me get to this specific place” instead of “just take me somewhere.”
That’s the difference. And it’s everything.
What’s one thing that excites you, and one thing that bothers you about the world? Just one of each. Keep it simple. Drop them in the comments. Because that’s where it starts. That’s how you take the wheel back.