When I was in my last year of sixth form, I met a guy called John. We got together, loved young dream, and I went to university. Spent the all of the first term with both of us going back and forth to Loughborough and it was fun, but then over Christmas break he suggested we took some time apart….and then we never spoke again.

I took a break from dating for about 10 years (more on this another time, but suffice to say that actually I didnt know that I was taking a break), and went on a few dates with different people and then I met Ben, my husband.

That’s the extent of any break ups that I have had, the equivalent of Burger’s post it note rather than the emotional back and forth of Ross and Rachel. Until this weekend.

As Ben starts to work from home more and more so too our internet struggles under the weight of everything we are asking it to do. Me, video calling and getting Claude to do thing

Things came to a head on the 2nd October where I started to search for a better option - and, it turns out it can be faster. And not by a bit - by up to 50x?!?! I could download an HD movie in 13 seconds that is how fast this internet has promised to be. There were a few things that had to happen - an outside engineer would come and an inside engineer would come and the final piece happened with the inside engineer on the Friday just gone.

The night before, when I looked to the app to check the engineer was still coming, I had this wave of realisation: of course, the hub wasn't going to come with him because he had nothing to do with Sky. At no point did I recall what had to happen for the internet to be connected, just like every other time we have booked to get a new broadband provider I just assumed having 2 engineers coming out meant that they would bring the hub with them.

The engineer arrived and fitted what he needed to make the internet work, and then he said, "If the hub hasn't arrived, I won't complete the job. We'll keep you connected to your old provider until you've got your hub." Fine. Ben and I went about our merry way on Monday. On Saturday, when we were out for breakfast, Ben got a phone call from a different Sky engineer who was obviously following up on jobs that had not been signed off. He said, "I can see that your job needs finishing. I'll come and finish it now." Ben said, "Well, wait, wait, wait. It has been finished, but he left it open because we don't have any internet if you complete it and we're not even there for you to come and check". The guy said no worries he would make sure we didn't get another call.

On the way home, I get a message saying, "Your Sky internet has been activated," and lo and behold, we've had no internet all weekend.

What was I going to do with no internet? The irony is, I'm writing this currently hotspotted to my phone, so I think I took the no internet thing a little bit too seriously. However, it's made me really consider my relationship with LLMs and how I use them in my business.

This isn't some sort of shitty segue. I did a reel on Instagram yesterday that dived into it a little bit more, but I've been feeling in a rut and really down in the dumps about everything that I'm doing. It's because I've completely lost my sense of autonomy with everything that I'm putting out.

I downloaded a freebie last week that was like, "How to create red flag content so you call people in and repel people you don't want to work with." I was like, "Fuck yeah. That's exactly what I want to be doing," because I am far too deep in the rabbit hole of trying to optimise every single thing I put out there so that everything is a hit.

But then, living with the fact that maybe one in four things I do is a hit, so what's the point in optimising if it's not a hit every time?I would much rather put stuff out there that people enjoy reading and consuming, and actually help people, rather than try to come up with the best hooks that work for me on my account (because, if I'm honest, I don't even understand what a hook is).

Over the weekend, I broke up with ChatGPT, and I'm going through my breakup with Claude. Where I've landed is that I'm no longer going to outsource my thinking, my content creation, my email writing, or any kinds of ideational brainstorming that I need to do with an LLM. I need to do it with another human, or I need to do it myself.

I verbally process, so that makes things easier, but a lifetime of undiagnosed autism has led me to believe that no one is going to understand anything that I say unless I optimise it for clarity and virality. I need to trust in myself that people loved me before ChatGPT was even a thing, and I know exactly what to say and how to say it. I just need to exercise that muscle again.

Can I tell you that it's currently 1:45pm on Monday afternoon, and I currently haven't used any LLM to write anything for me since Friday? I think that's pretty good going.

I think I would have been pretty good if I'd had to have more breakups in my time, because I do tend to compartmentalise things. Currently, Chat GPT and Claude are in a compartment that I just don't go in anymore, and that's kind of how I ended up never speaking to John again. I did look him up quite recently, and of course he now has the most magnificent moustache I've ever seen, but he also has no hair, so that's a payoff I would not be happy to make.

I guess this is my battle cry to everyone who is reading this email. We might have just met, or you might have been in my world for a long time, but I'm trying to get back to who I used to be before the world of AI sanitised me.

Most of you are being told that you need to pump out more content, use Claude to edit your reels, and use ChatGPT to brainstorm and clarify things for you. But I am striving to be proof that there is life and hope on the other side of that model. We can use AI to speed up our world, but we don't need to speed up our thinking.

Where do you land? What are your thoughts?

My excuse for a long time was that my memory was shocking and I struggled to comprehend what people mean in the moment, but that is an excuse because I've written this whole email without having to refer to ChatGPT or Claude once.

My goal is that I'll do that every day this week, and the muscle will become stronger rather than searching for the tap to make things flow

It's a brave new world, and I'm glad that this breakup is going better than Ross and Rachel could ever have hoped for.

Thoughts?
​
Love
​
Zx
​