Sixty Unsent Drafts

A sauna, an eight-minute voice memo, and the pledges I keep declining.

Right now I am lying down, speaking into my phone. This is how most of these begin. Sometimes I’m in the sauna. Sometimes I’m on a long walk. The message runs eight minutes, ten. I already have the story in my head — I’m just working through it out loud, the way you’d tell it to a friend who isn’t interrupting.

Then I leave it as a draft in my inbox. There are about sixty of them sitting there now. Some are a month old, some are a lot longer. When I come back to one, I read through it, check that the details are right — who was there, what was actually said — and then I work it over. Some get flourished. Some get funnier. Some never make it out at all.

The working-over is done with AI. I like knowing how things get made, so I’ll tell you how this one does.

Here is my honest relationship with the thing: I love it and it scares me. I love the immediate feedback. I love that I can iterate quickly, try a sentence three ways in the time it used to take me to doubt one. It has become, of all things, a way of journaling — I encounter something, I process it out loud, I shape it, and on Thursdays I share it. The joy is mine first. Some of you get it secondhand.

It scares me for almost the same reasons. It’s quick. The insights that are so quickly and easily shared are not necessarily earned. I see it in the software developers I know, watching their own field move under them. I see it in my editor, a man who never once considered using AI, now figuring out how he will.

Take last week’s post, “Concentrated Regret.” It happened. I had dinner. The two men across the table exist, and before the essay went out I sent it to them, and they read it and recognized the evening. That’s my fact-check. Nothing in this or other pieces is made up. This is a practice, not a product.

If my life is anything, it is transparent, so none of this has ever felt like something to hide. It’s just how this work gets made.

But I also understand that for some people, AI in the mix is the whole story. I have friends who are firmly anti-AI, and I love them. If it makes this uncomfortable to read, I understand — skip it, no hard feelings. I’m not looking to create a platform for debate. This has always been about vulnerability, about staying conscious of what’s going on in myself. Life is short and there’s plenty else to read. I’ve got several books that were written without AI.

For the rest of you — the ones who figure AI is part of life now, and the question is only whether we use it in ways that bring meaning or ways that hollow it out — I’ll be here Thursday. There are sixty drafts in the inbox. One of them is about to get lucky.

P.S. I spent the week in Bali, somewhere I first knew in 1992. I’m still deciding how I feel about that for another post. I flew my drone. Here it is.