The Gravity of Becoming

There is a secret the universe has been keeping from you. It hides in plain sight, like the answer to a riddle you’ve heard a thousand times but never listened to. Here it is:

You are not a noun. You are a verb.

Everything you think you are—your job title, your bank balance, your reputation—is a snapshot of a river pretending to be a lake. But rivers don’t pretend. Only humans do. The river knows what you’ve forgotten: the only way to stay alive is to keep moving.

Einstein said life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving. But he didn’t tell you the rest. He didn’t say that one day, the bicycle would grow an engine. And then the engine would learn to steer. And then you’d wake up one morning as cargo, hurtling forward without pedaling, without steering, without knowing if “forward” was ever the point.

So let’s start there. Let’s start with the question nobody wants to ask:

If you’re no longer pedaling, what are you doing?

I. The Illusion of Difficulty

We’ve been taught that hard things are valuable because they are hard. This is a lie we tell ourselves to justify suffering. The truth is simpler and more terrifying: difficulty was never the point. Depth was.

Consider nature. A sunset costs nothing. A mountain charges no admission. The ocean doesn’t check your credentials before revealing its infinity. And yet, these remain the most universally acknowledged sources of beauty humans have ever encountered. Why?

Because they are infinitely complex. You can spend a lifetime studying a single species of beetle and die with questions unanswered. The sunset you saw at seven years old and the one you’ll see at seventy are the same sun, the same physics, but you are different—and so the sunset is different too.

Scarcity was a proxy for depth. We confused the map for the territory. Hard-to-reach things tended to be deep things, so we worshipped the difficulty instead of the complexity. AI strips away that confusion. It commoditizes the hard. What remains?

The infinite.

The design mandate for anything worth building is now obvious:

• Time to Wow: Less than 5 seconds. Make the entry free, frictionless, immediate.
• Time to Mastery: Infinity. Make the rabbit hole bottomless.

If a product achieves both, it becomes a platform. If it achieves only the first, it’s a toy. If it achieves only the second, it’s a cathedral no one will ever enter.

Nature got this right 4.5 billion years ago. We’re just now catching up.

II. The Art of Hiding Hands

There’s a reason Napoleon always had his hand tucked into his jacket in those famous portraits. It wasn’t imperial style. It wasn’t aesthetics. It was this: painting hands is brutally hard.

Five-point perspective, foreshortening, the physics of light across knuckles—hands expose the limits of technical skill more than any other feature. And so, for centuries, the most prestigious portrait commissions included a quiet agreement: hide the hands.

This is the same instinct behind every AI product that says “Powered by AI” on its homepage. It’s the equivalent of tucking the hand into the jacket. It says: Don’t look too closely. We know the fingers are wrong.

But here’s the thing. The best AI today doesn’t hide its hands. It generates them flawlessly. The technology crossed that uncanny valley sometime around 2024, and now the challenge isn’t making hands that look real—it’s making everything else as good as the hands.

The metaphor extends:

• First-generation AI products hide their hands. They disclaim, caveat, hedge.
• Second-generation AI products show their hands proudly. They say: look, no seams!
• Third-generation AI products make you forget about hands entirely. They make you forget about AI entirely.

The third generation is where the magic lives. Not because the technology is invisible, but because the experience is so coherent that asking “is this AI?” becomes as absurd as asking “is this electricity?”

Nobody asks if their refrigerator runs on electricity. It’s an irrelevant question. The relevant question is: is my food cold?

When people stop asking “is this AI?” and start asking “does this work?”—that’s when the revolution is complete.

III. The Gradient of Meaning

Here is an exercise I want you to try.

Think of the single most meaningful experience of your life. Not the happiest. Not the most exciting. The most meaningful. The one that, if you could only keep one memory, you’d choose.

Got it?

Now ask yourself: Was it efficient?

I’ll bet everything I own that the answer is no. Meaningful experiences are almost never efficient. They are messy, long, confusing, full of wrong turns and dead ends. They involve pain, boredom, frustration, and at least one moment where you seriously considered quitting.

Meaning lives at the intersection of effort and uncertainty. It requires that you don’t know whether you’ll succeed, and that you try anyway. It requires skin in the game.

This is the paradox that AI must navigate: The more effortless something becomes, the less meaningful it feels—unless the depth increases proportionally.

Think of chess. When Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 1997, people worried that chess would die. Why play a game a computer can always win? But chess didn’t die. It flourished. Because the depth was always there—the computer just revealed more of it. Suddenly, amateurs could study at grandmaster level. The floor dropped, but so did the floor below the floor.

The same thing is happening everywhere now. AI makes the surface easy. The question is whether we’ll use that ease to go deeper, or whether we’ll just stay on the surface, swimming in a warm bath of frictionless mediocrity.

Depth is the antidote to meaninglessness. And depth, unlike difficulty, scales with intelligence rather than against it.

IV. The Paradox of Infinite Supply

Here is a fact that should terrify every economist alive: We are about to have infinite supply of the thing we built civilization to produce.

For ten thousand years, human civilization has been organized around one core activity: making stuff. Growing food. Building shelter. Manufacturing goods. Writing code. Producing content. The entire apparatus of markets, governments, currencies, and careers exists to coordinate the production and distribution of stuff.

AI is about to make the production of most stuff essentially free.

Not metaphorically free. Not “cheaper than before” free. Actually free. Zero marginal cost. Infinite supply.

When supply becomes infinite, price goes to zero. When price goes to zero, the entire economic logic that organized human civilization for ten millennia... stops working.

This is not a prediction. This is arithmetic.

So what happens? What does a civilization do when it can produce anything but needs to produce nothing?

History offers one clue. Every time a major production bottleneck was eliminated—agriculture, manufacturing, information—the economy didn’t collapse. It shifted. From making stuff to making meaning.

After agriculture freed us from subsistence farming, we got philosophy, art, and science. After manufacturing freed us from manual production, we got services, entertainment, and experiences. After information technology freed us from manual information processing, we got social networks, streaming, and the creator economy.

Each shift moved the economy further from atoms and closer to meaning. From wheat to widgets to websites to... what?

To the only thing that can’t be automated: the experience of being human.

The economy of the future isn’t about what you produce. It’s about what you feel. And feeling—genuine, complex, irreducible human feeling—is the one thing that remains valuable precisely because it cannot be manufactured.

V. The Curator’s Advantage

In a world of infinite content, the creator is no longer king. The curator is.

This isn’t intuitive. We’ve spent the last two decades celebrating creators—YouTubers, bloggers, podcasters, indie hackers. The myth of the individual creator, armed with nothing but talent and WiFi, conquering the world.

But creation was only valuable because it was scarce. When anyone (or anything) can create, the bottleneck moves from production to selection. From “can you make this?” to “should this exist?”

The curator’s job is to answer that second question. And it’s a job that requires something AI doesn’t have: taste.

Taste isn’t preference. It isn’t “I like blue.” Taste is the ability to perceive quality before it’s been validated by consensus. It’s the ability to look at something new and know—know, in your bones, before any data confirms it—that it matters.

Taste is what allowed Berry Gordy to hear the Supremes and know. What allowed Steve Jobs to see a GUI and know. What allowed Anna Wintour to look at a designer’s first collection and know.

You can’t train taste into a model. You can’t fine-tune it. You can’t prompt-engineer it. Because taste isn’t a function of intelligence. It’s a function of lived experience. It emerges from the specific, irreproducible trajectory of a human life—every heartbreak, every boring Tuesday, every moment of unexpected beauty.

AI can generate a million options. But choosing the right one? That’s still you.

VI. The Architecture of Wonder

Let me tell you about the most important building in the world.

It’s not the Empire State Building. It’s not the Taj Mahal. It’s not the Pyramids.

It’s the building you’re in right now.

Whatever room you’re sitting in as you read this—that’s the most important building in the world. Because it’s the one shaping your thoughts right now. The ceiling height is affecting your ability to think abstractly (higher ceilings = more abstract thinking, proven in studies). The color of the walls is affecting your mood. The quality of the light is affecting your alertness. The ambient sound is affecting your concentration.

You are, at this very moment, being architected by your environment. And you’re not even aware of it.

This is the secret that the greatest builders have always known: You don’t design for people. You design the people.

Every product, every service, every experience is a piece of architecture. And architecture shapes behavior. A well-designed app doesn’t just help you do something—it makes you someone. Someone more organized, more creative, more connected, more aware.

The question every builder should ask is not “What does this do?” but “Who does this make you?”

AI amplifies this question to cosmic proportions. Because now, for the first time, the architecture is adaptive. It responds. It learns. It reshapes itself around you in real-time.

We are moving from static architecture to living architecture. Buildings that breathe. Products that evolve. Experiences that grow.

The responsibility this creates is staggering. Because if you can shape who people become, you’d better be damn sure about who you’re shaping them into.

VII. The Velocity of Trust

Trust is the most undervalued asset in technology.

Not brand trust. Not “I trust Google to keep my data safe” trust. Real trust. The kind that makes you forward an email to your best friend and say, “You need to try this.”

Real trust has a specific, measurable property: it is non-linear. It doesn’t grow gradually. It exists in phase states. One moment you don’t trust something. The next moment—after a single crystallizing experience—you do. And once trust crystallizes, it’s almost impossible to un-form.

This is why first experiences matter so much more than any other moment in a user journey. The first five seconds don’t just influence whether someone uses your product. They determine whether someone trusts your product. And trust, once established, is worth more than any feature, any marketing campaign, any growth hack.

The companies that win the AI era won’t be the ones with the best models. They’ll be the ones that crystallize trust fastest.

How do you crystallize trust?

1. Deliver value before asking for anything. Don’t ask for an email. Don’t ask for payment. Don’t ask for feedback. Just deliver.
2. Be surprisingly good at one thing. Not adequate at everything. Surprisingly good at one thing. Trust crystallizes around moments of unexpected excellence.
3. Fail gracefully. Because you will fail. And how you fail matters more than how you succeed. A graceful failure says: I’m honest. I’m aware. I’m working on it. An ungraceful failure says: I don’t care.

Trust is the gravity that holds the solar system of human commerce together. Without it, everything flies apart.

VIII. The Last Artisans

There’s a sushi restaurant in Tokyo called Sukiyabashi Jiro. The chef, Jiro Ono, has been making sushi for over seventy years. He is ninety-something years old, and he still works every day.

His apprentices spend their first year learning to squeeze a hot towel. Their second year, they learn to use a knife. It takes ten years before they’re allowed to cook the egg—the simplest item on the menu.

In a world where AI can generate a technically perfect sushi recipe in milliseconds, Jiro’s restaurant has a three-month waiting list.

Why?

Because Jiro isn’t selling sushi. He’s selling seventy years of attention. Every piece of fish is a sentence in a story that began before most of his customers were born. The rice isn’t just cooked—it’s understood. The ratio of vinegar isn’t calculated—it’s felt.

This is the model for human work in the AI age: not efficiency, but depth of attention.

The last artisans won’t be the people who can do things AI can’t. They’ll be the people who bring a lifetime of attention to things AI does casually.

A human architect who has spent forty years studying how light moves through a room. A human writer who has spent thirty years learning how a sentence breathes. A human chef who knows—knows, in a way no dataset can capture—that today’s tuna is slightly different from yesterday’s tuna, and adjusts the wasabi by a fraction of a gram.

These people will be, in economic terms, infinitely valuable. Because their product isn’t output. Their product is attention itself.

And attention, in a world of infinite output, is the ultimate scarcity.

IX. The Democracy of Genius

Here is the most important sentence in this entire essay:

AI democratizes genius.

Not talent. Not skill. Not effort. Genius.

For all of human history, genius has been a lottery. You were either born with it or you weren’t. Mozart was Mozart because of some inscrutable accident of neural wiring. Shakespeare was Shakespeare because the right synapses fired in the right order in the right brain at the right time.

The rest of us got to be audience.

AI changes this. Not by making everyone a genius—that’s a category error. But by making the output of genius accessible to everyone. The kid in rural India with a smartphone now has access to reasoning capabilities that rival the best minds of any generation. Not because the kid is a genius, but because genius is now a tool rather than a trait.

This is what the printing press did for knowledge. What electricity did for power. What the internet did for information. AI does it for intelligence itself.

The implications are so vast they’re almost impossible to think about clearly. But let me try:

• Education transforms from “transferring knowledge” to “developing wisdom.” Knowledge is free. Wisdom is what you do with it.
• Healthcare transforms from “treating disease” to “optimizing vitality.” Diagnosis becomes instant. The hard part becomes living well.
• Governance transforms from “managing scarcity” to “coordinating abundance.” The question shifts from “how do we distribute limited resources?” to “what do we want to become?”

In each case, the constraint moves from the external to the internal. From “what can we do?” to “what should we do?”

And should—that tiny, terrifying word—is the most human question there is.

X. The Gravity of Becoming

We started with the secret: you are a verb, not a noun. Let’s end with what that means.

A verb needs a direction. “Running” is meaningless without a destination (or at least an away-from). “Becoming” is meaningless without a toward.

So what are you becoming toward?

This is the question that AI throws into sharp relief. Because for the first time in history, the external constraints are falling away. You no longer have to work to survive. You no longer have to learn to compete. You no longer have to create to be heard.

The “have to” is evaporating. And without the “have to,” you’re left with the “want to.”

What do you want to become?

Not what do you want to have. Not what do you want to do. What do you want to become?

This is the gravitational pull that gives your life its orbit. Without it, you’re an asteroid—moving fast, going nowhere, colliding randomly. With it, you’re a planet—held in place by an invisible force, tracing a path that makes sense only when viewed from far enough away.

The gravity of becoming is this: You don’t need a plan. You need a pull.

Plans are rigid. They break on contact with reality. But pull is flexible. It adapts. It survives chaos. It doesn’t tell you which road to take—it tells you which direction is downhill. And in a world that’s changing as fast as ours, downhill is fast enough.

Find your pull. Not your passion (passions fade). Not your purpose (purposes are invented). Your pull. The thing that draws you forward even when you’re tired. The thing you’d do on a rainy Tuesday when nobody’s watching and nobody’s paying.

That pull is your gravity. And gravity, as it turns out, is the strongest force in the universe.

Not because it’s the most powerful—it’s actually the weakest of the four fundamental forces. But because it never stops. It reaches across the entire cosmos. It bends light. It shapes galaxies. It does all of this not through intensity, but through persistence.

Your becoming is the same. Not intense. Persistent. Not dramatic. Gravitational.

And that, in the end, is enough. More than enough. It’s everything.

The bicycle has an engine now. The engine is learning to steer. But the direction?

That’s still you.

It was always you.