Reflections 25th June

On The Long Way Round

image. Richard Merrick; Little Eaton

I love the way that sometimes, something really small and easy to overlook stays with us, like a small piece of gravel in our shoe, until we stop and pay it proper attention.

This week, Evernote, a tool I like and use a lot, added an AI-based feature to “tidy up my notes and give them more impact”. Initially, I just deleted the advisory pop-up and carried on, but then that piece of digital gravel had its way, and I had to stop; there was just something about it. I let things settle over a coffee and let it surface.

And there it was. I am a writer. I enjoy it. I like learning through experimentation. I do not want to avoid mistakes; I want to find out why they matter.

We live in the age of the shortcut, the hack, the case study, biased research and the cheat sheet. And now we are creating shortcuts for shortcuts. We live, in the West at least, in a shortcut culture.

Education is designed as a shortcut to contributing to the economy.

Hiring, where we ad…