So, I’ve got a little confession to make, and I imagine this may be something you’ve run into recently as well.
I’ve been writing this Friday Flex newsletter for over a year now, and I (mostly) enjoy it. It gives me some time to expand on something I’ve been thinking about during the week as a gym owner and gym goer, and it’s a nice opportunity to connect with people.
And yet, I is lazy. And I also like gadgets and new tech, and I’m not afraid of a little shortcut, that becomes a bigger and bigger shortcut, and…
Well let me just cut to the chase. I’ve become over reliant on AI to help me write these Friday Flexes, and I’m over it.
Did you notice? Maybe you did- AI has a certain weird language patois, a way of clipping sentences into easily digestible little chunks that are easy to read, even if they are somewhat artless. Maybe you didn’t- I mentioned before I love playing with tech, and I trained my AI pretty good- I fed it hundreds of pages of my previous writing, had it analyze that writing for stylistic tendencies and then had it use that analysis to inform its future generation. Sometimes I was honestly shocked with how much it sounded like me.
But it wasn’t ALL me, at least not in a way I feel awesome about. I didn’t just have it create articles whole cloth from the aether, I would normally write a pretty lengthy skeleton outline and then heavily edit the response. Still, it did a lot of the heavy lifting in the middle stages, the creative and challenging part of writing where you have to put your shoulder into it, dig your feet into the earth, and start manually getting the ball rolling, breaking the inertia of our natural human tendency to seek the cold comfort of void. (In my case, void looks a lot like playing FIFA.)
What I’ve noticed over this year is some degree of deskilling– when I have tried to write on my own I find it a little harder. Words come to me more slowly when they used to leap unbidden into my head. I find it tougher to knit ideas together in artful ways. My writing has suffered, and I still do harbor the dream of writing a fantasy novel about intergalactic soccer players one day, and it’s not gonna write itself (nor do I think AI, even in all of its power, can fathom the concept of a corner kick in zero gravity.)
I digress (and this is how you can probably tell it’s me writing, and not AI), but I do think there is a fitness and life lesson here. First is the clear analogy to any worthwhile pursuit- the old mantra “if you don’t use it, you lose it.” I am a good writer, and I have been guilt of treating that as an irreducible constant and not a result of work and practice and interaction. Nothing we do is un-perishable, and the most worthy and rewarding things are often the most vulnerable to deskilling. As I like to tell my gym members, “you don’t own your fitness, you rent it.” The same goes for many pursuits, and rent will always come due.
Second, ask yourself; what challenging but rewarding things have I “shortcutted” out of my life to the point that I now get none of the benefits of their pursuit? What have I smoothed down, streamlined, or hedged against all risk, to the point that the joy, the challenge, and the benefit of the practice has been diminished. I’m sure there’s something- in writing this I’ve thought of some other areas of my life that could use some re-skilling, and I’m planning on tackling those too.
Finally, I want to apologize to you- you deserve better. My thought process tumbled down the hill of “well nobody reads these things anyway” to “if nobody reads them, and I’m busy, then I should just save time and knock them out quickly.” That certainly isn’t a formula for getting more people to read them, and in an age where more and more and more and more and more (get it yet?) of our content is AI generated slop, it certainly doesn’t need more. Also, people do read this- I have a group of friends who discuss the Flex each week in great detail on a text chain each week (shoutout to the Icy Boys) and I feel like I’m letting them down.
In all, like Rocky said about Drago, “”If I can change – and you can change – everybody can change!” Thanks for reading a long flex (again, a firm piece of evidence that I’m back at the helm) and if there’s an aspect of your life where you feel like you’ve “deskilled” I hope this helps you find your way back.
