In this episode, I introduce the podcast and welcome our loyal subscribers, readers, and viewers who have supported TEE™ since its earliest days. I also reflect on TEE’s recent transformation, including its unapologetically bright orange identity and the feelings behind it: optimism, energy, playfulness, and possibility. I also share the work involved in creating a new studio and establishing a platform capable of delivering the quality, care, and attention that have become central to TEE™.

This episode is both an introduction and a promise. The podcast will improve with time, shaped by experimentation, community feedback, and a commitment to creating the best possible experience.

In this episode:

• Why TEE™ has embraced a bright orange identity,

• The thinking and preparation behind the new podcast,

• My commitment to quality and continual improvement,

• How paid subscribers make TEE’s work possible,

• The continuing role of free editions,

• The new TEE.ink website and its collections,

• TEE’s foundations in Experience Design and human-centred thinking,

• Plans to bring the podcast to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and other platforms,

• Why an imperfect beginning is still worth celebrating,

• A thank you to our community.

To all our subscribers, thank you. Your support gives us the time, energy, and confidence to keep developing the project. Your feedback has already influenced what we create and how we deliver it.

If you believe in what we are building, please share TEE™ and The Journey Matters podcast with someone who might want to listen in.

Things will not always work perfectly the first time. That is part of starting something new, learning what works, and improving as we go. After all, the journey matters.

Stay thoughtful.

James.

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Three questions we struggle to answer with clarity and conviction

Why do you exist?

Who do you serve?

What’s your contribution?

These are the three questions that every professional and business must answer if they want to cut through the noise. There is so much competition out there that you need both conviction and laser-like clarity if you want to garner sustained attention.

They are also the questions that I’ve returned to, time and time again, throughout my career.

We’re all running in place, struggling to keep up

Industries are reshaping so fast that you cannot develop a skillset before the market loses interest. The consequence is that we are sprinting in place, running on treadmills, and exerting effort just to keep up.

Technology professionals have long experienced blistering change in their daily work. A common complaint of Software Engineers was that they could never thoroughly learn the current hot framework or technology stack before the industry transitioned to the next one. Yet, even for a profession accustomed to a lifelong struggle with change, the pace of advancement, tooling, and re-skilling brought about by Generative AI is exhausting. Efforts to remain current are futile. There is an incessant requirement to restart, reevaluate, and relearn. It’s disconcerting.

Humans like to know where their next meal is coming from

We don’t deal well with uncertainty. We like to know where our next meal is coming from. Unfortunately, the world outside your window is accelerating faster than ever. Each moment that you’re not upskilling, you’re stagnating relative to the specialised competition in the market. How do you maintain an impressive CV or résumé when each day a new tool, workflow, or system lands and upends what made you special in the first place?

You cannot peek behind closed doors, so you never quite know how well you’re performing versus your peers across the industry. If you cannot benchmark your skills against anyone, then it is difficult to know whether you’re performing well and remaining employable. Living under threat of disposability, redundancy, or replaceability is uncomfortable. If you can’t know with any certainty that your work today will be worth paying for tomorrow, then how do you make any long-term financial or family plans?

People tend to keep pace with technological advancements at their place of work

The risk is made ever greater for those who operate in slower-moving industries, or simply in more steady-state organisations. Not all businesses and groups are interested in keeping up with the state of the art. Many companies and public institutions are happy with the status quo provided they continue to make a profit. Whilst this may feel proportionate for the leaders of these organisations, such an attitude fails the employees who are unable to find internal opportunities to push the boundaries, try new things, learn, fail, and innovate. If these employees do eventually look beyond their current employer, then they may discover they’re either entirely unemployable, or, at the very least, worth considerably less than they thought.

People tend to keep pace with the technological advancements at their current place of work. Whilst some particularly entrepreneurial or innovative employees may dedicate personal hours to learning, the vast majority of the workforce believe their employer has a duty to teach them what they need to know. Regardless of your personal viewpoint on learning outside of core office hours, we cannot deny the fact that if you are not being provided with learning opportunities at work, then you must either proactively seek new skills outside the job, or you’re simply not learning at all.

There’s nothing more dispiriting than being replaced by an artificial colleague

Believing that your years of amassed experience, qualifications, and skills have been reduced to nothing is dispiriting and gut-wrenching. Ironically, younger people are now experiencing a phenomenon that older professionals have lamented for many years. For those professionals in their latter halves of their careers, they’ll understand the struggle of securing good work ahead of their younger, cheaper, and more tech-savvy peers. The intriguing shift we’re witnessing today is that younger models are being replaced by cheaper, more tech-savvy artificial models. AI is, by definition, tech-native. Go figure.

• Artificial influencers on Instagram,

• Artificial actors in films,

• Artificial programmers building software,

• Artificial COOs streamlining businesses,

• Artificial designers producing graphics and logos.

• …And all for a fraction of the price of a human.

We’re experiencing a crisis of identity

Why do you exist?

Who do you serve?

What’s your contribution?

Never before have these questions been quite so fundamental to our sense of self, nor so challenging to answer with any clarity or conviction.

In history, your career would have been dictated by your family business. Perhaps you worked on a farm or at your father’s blacksmith’s? Then, as the Industrial Revolution took hold, you may have found yourself labouring at the local factory. In more recent times, you could take more authorship over your work and train to become a Lawyer, an Accountant, a Banker, an Engineer, or a Doctor.

In each aforementioned case, you were your job (at least in the UK and the United States where work and identity are closely aligned). Our second names were often derived from our employment (e.g., Smith, Baker, etc.). There’s a reason people ask “So, what do you do for work?” as their opening gambit when they first meet you. It is because, until now, we’ve been able to guess a fair amount about someone's personality, interests, lifestyle, and ambitions by knowing what they did for work.

But such a question no longer stands the test of time. What you do today may not be what you do next year, next month, or next week.

Did Software Engineers, just five years ago, believe that their job would amount to validating AI-generated code and implementing safeguards for agents? I certainly didn’t. I still vividly remember sitting in my bathroom between 2019 and 2021 reading online Reddit forums and blog articles debating which frontend web framework was the best: React, Vue.js, Angular, and then later Svelte. Programming language wars and cults were alive and entertaining; you described yourself as a TypeScript developer, a Python user, or a Rust programmer. We joined a tribe. We nested within our communities.

You could tell a lot about a programmer based on the tools they adopted, but that’s no longer true. Programming language has, sadly, become a null point for most developers today. Learning the nuances of programming languages is now just a niche hobby or interest for old-school programmers like myself. In-vogue developers are, instead, more concerned with harnesses and token allowance.

Whilst, in theory, traditional programmers could re-skill and adopt the new paradigm, for many it’s just not that exciting for them. Delegating all coding tasks to AI? Where’s the fun in that? It’s just not a game I’m interested in playing.

I accept that for domain experts and business leaders, it’s thrilling to see the barrier to entry fall so considerably and to be empowered to create software solutions that were previously beyond their realms of design and technical capability. But for programmers like myself who genuinely enjoyed understanding the inner-workings of computers, this leap in abstraction away from the underlying source code is unfulfilling.

I’ve read several articles about longstanding, well-established programmers leaving jobs at Google and Meta after deciding that this new world wasn’t for them. They liked the programming paradigm they operated in, not the one they’ve been forced to adopt.

When the work and craft you love are eradicated, no salary or company perks can replace what you’re grieving. You’ve lost your identity and the work you trained for. Your source of intrinsic motivation has been decimated and, regrettably, extrinsic motivation cannot fill that hole for any sustained period of time.

You reinvent yourself from the ground up, only to watch the ground fall away again

Why do you exist?

Who do you serve?

What’s your contribution?

All of the questions are unanswerable whilst in grief.

You reinvent yourself from the ground up, only to watch your newfound future be displaced and superseded, yet again, by another technological advancement. When the world progresses at such blistering speed, how can you ever feel that your future is assured? How can you ever find a stable identity that survives?

You’re not a single-use plastic

Firstly, you must learn to dissociate who you are from what you do. You’re the artist, not the art. Social media, and particularly LinkedIn headlines, encourage us to design ourselves, market ourselves, and then sell ourselves. Influencers and personal branding culture have led us to believe that we are the products that need to be sold.

But how can your particular concoction of interests, fascinations, and unique fingerprint ever be captured within a job title or headline? I promise that I’ve tried. Many times. I’ve tweaked, iterated, rewritten, and discarded my LinkedIn headline more times than I care to count. Why? Because each iteration felt wrong: as if something was missing. I’d present a very narrow view on a small part of me and bury the rest. If I couldn’t tell the world who I am in one line, then do I even know myself well enough? The issue is that you’re not a single-use plastic. You were never meant to be defined by a single statement. You’re a rich, all-encompassing, complex, erratic, and irrational human being. To think otherwise is a toxic and limiting belief to hold.

Consider what happens when, not if, your job or your interests change. What do you do then? If you’re like me, then you likely have a crisis of confidence and identity as you grapple with reconfiguring who you are. You must re-declare to the world that you are no longer the same person: you’ve been reborn. You are, in fact, an entirely new person because your job has changed. That’s a lot to internalise and reconcile. It also sounds rather ludicrous. People didn’t despair or break down when they were promoted from Engineer to Manager. They may have experienced growing pains as their responsibilities shifted, but I’d hazard a guess that they didn’t face an identity crisis thanks to promotion.

Marketing ourselves and believing that we have one true purpose is holding us back. It’s too much to take on. It’s a weight that society and popular culture have instructed us to carry. No wonder we’ve become so fearful of career change; our entire self and being are on the line. We’re like the discontinued iPod being superseded by the iPhone.

You are the maker, the builder, the creator

What you make or build or create is a unique manifestation of yourself, your worldview, and your fingerprint. You’re an artist. Your job is to build and nurture something until it’s self-assured and strong enough to make its own way in the world.

Parents don’t (typically) identify themselves by their children. Parents are the custodians of their offspring. Eventually, the chick flies the nest. Take the same attitude towards your work and your career. Build something external to who you are. You are not your job.

The beauty of this mindset correction is that you’re then free to change style, use different raw materials, pivot what you make and sell, but it will never change who you are. You’re the maker, the builder, and the creator; you’re simply picking up new skills, knowledge, and technologies along the way that augment your capabilities, increase your productivity, and allow you to reach further than you ever believed possible.

By this point, you should feel empowered to answer the three opening questions with satisfactory answers that hold longevity. Here’s what I propose:

Why do you exist?

To life a good, wholesome, and holistic life. To be happy. To love. To learn. To relax. To engage with community. To inspire change. To lead others through tough times. To be an excellent family member. To see the world. And to breathe.

Who do you serve?

Whoever you want to, whenever you want to. That might mean helping out at your allotment, or supporting your miniature railway group, or playing for your hockey team. It could mean serving your customers and clients. Perhaps your priority is to be there for your family. It could even mean serving yourself: when was the last time you stopped to ask how you could serve yourself better?

What’s your contribution?

Anything you produce that’s of value to someone (including yourself) is a contribution. You don’t have to change the world, or launch a VC-funded startup, or lead an enterprise for your contribution to be meaningful. If you produce something (it could be an idea, a thought, or a conversation) that has a positive impact on someone, something, or some place, then you’re contributing.

We’re born into a system our ancestors designed.

We’ve all been pre-programmed by societal norms to pursue activities, routines, and standards that were never our own. Sometimes, all it takes is someone to expose a belief we hold that was never ours in the first place to help us recognise that we’ve been trapped in a game we never agreed to play. We are all born into a system that our ancestors have designed for us. But this system was designed for a different time.

The rules of that system are rapidly breaking down because technological advancement and economic growth are changing what career and work mean. They’re redefining what life means.

Our manifesto

You might be wondering how this article came to be. There was no larger-than-life inspiration that drove me to publish this. I never planned it. I just wrote it: line by line. I sat down pondering how I would answer these questions if someone posed them about TEE.

As I began answering these questions and exploring my own thinking, this article was born as a result. It’s the result of meandering through my own subconscious.

Why does it exist?

Who does it serve?

What’s its contribution?

TEE is what I’d love to see in the world

I want TEE to inspire people to live more authentic lives. If it encourages people to jump off the hamster wheel they’re trapped on and take steps towards a life of authorship, then it’s a success.

TEE is about helping people navigate change

It’s a compilation of my personal thoughts, feelings, learnings, and experiences. It’s my way of helping people at scale. I’ve pivoted many times in my life and each time it’s been hard. People often ask me how I did it. The answer is: I just kept moving forwards, despite the anguish, confusion, depression, and anxiety. I chased what I was curious about, I ignored the noise where possible, and I leaned into who I’ve always been. I reflected on what I used to love and what I continue to enjoy today. I’ve rediscovered interests that I’d left behind.

TEE is a positive, zesty, and refreshing brand

It’s honest, transparent, and human. We publish writing that speaks directly to people to make them feel something, and to help them cut through the noise and see the world differently. TEE is bright, just like your future.

TEE is for those who feel out of step with the world

If your view of the world no longer aligns with what the media is shouting at you to believe, then you’re not alone. In fact, you’re in very good company. If you’re navigating change and want mentorship, guidance, advice, or companionship, then TEE is for you.

TEE is a little bit of comfort and familiarity in your inbox

Each time our email lands, know that we’re with you. You’re part of a community that understands you. We’ve been there, we are there, and we’re travelling with you.

TEE is your permission to breathe

TEE is the permission you so desperately needed to take your foot off the gas and slow down. It’s for those who believe the working world is no longer working for them.

So wherever you’re at today, stick with us.

We’ll get there together.

Stay thoughtful.

James.

One publication, several sections

Substack has an editorial streams feature that it calls “Sections”. They offer three useful advantages:

1. Each editorial strand can have its own identity and dedicated archive, making related articles easier to find,

2. Readers can choose which Sections they receive by email without unsubscribing from TEE™ altogether, and

3. Sections can be grouped together within the navigation bar on the website so readers can dig into themes of interest.

What you’ll see in your inbox

If we assign an article to a given Section then it will alter how it lands in your inbox. This is by design. For example: if an edition belongs to the section called Handmade, then it will appear in your email From field as:

Handmade by TEE™

This should help you quickly decipher what to expect from a given article. Rather than all emails landing as TEE™ regardless of their underlying theme, you’ll now be able to differentiate between subjects at a glance. Sections make the subject matter recognisable before you even open the email.

We’ve adopted Sections in response to your feedback. You told us that you’d prefer to have greater visibility over the topics you subscribe to, so that you can more easily consume the topics you love.

If you already subscribe to TEE™, you don’t need to do anything. All existing subscribers have been added to each of our new sections automatically. Free subscribers will receive only those articles that we have explicitly unlocked for everyone. Paid subscribers will continue to receive all new editions as they are released.

We hope this enhancement goes someway to improving your reader experience.

As always, please leave us a comment and tell us what you think.

Stay thoughtful.

James.

Leave a comment

For independent publishers that’s a misstep.

A publication’s visual identity is often a potential reader’s first touchpoint with the brand. We rarely consider publishing as a form of product design, but it carries remarkably similar characteristics. Particularly when published as a newsletter, a book, a magazine article, or a blog. Your readers’ feelings, emotions, and instincts influence engagement and reach. We’ve all scrolled past potentially great writing because we weren't inspired by the logo, colour scheme, typography, photography, or presentation. A striking visual identity is an engine to stimulate discovery. It’s worth investing the time to create something you’re proud of and thrilled to share.

Now, you may have noticed that The Engineering Experience™ looks a little… different.

My ambition has always been to create something inspiring, engaging, and a pleasure to read. I wanted the brand to be synonymous with vibrancy, clarity, and positive emotion. The iconography and colour scheme needed to be playful, legible at small scales, and eye-catching to attract readers as they scroll through their infinite news feeds and email inboxes.

So I’m excited to reveal our bold new brand identity: TEE™. It’s just three letters. But they mean a whole lot more to us. We’ve simplified the logo and designed a fresh email banner that unifies the publication name, the journey line, and our tagline: The Journey Matters.

Leaning into orange 🍊

Orange has always been a feature of our identity. But we’ve decided to stop treating it like a supporting character: it’s now unmistakably ours.

Leaning into the orange isn’t about making everything louder. It’s about becoming more recognisable and more confident. Orange is warm, optimistic, creative, and playful. Against the quieter colours that dominate engineering, technology, and professional publishing, it gives TEE™ a distinct presence.

The Journey Line carries meaning of its own:

• It represents movement, choices, milestones, and the occasional change of direction.

• It reflects the emotional rises and falls we experience throughout work and life.

• It reminds us that the outcome is only part of the story. How we get there matters, too.

Why the change?

TEE™ has evolved quickly. I’ve spent time learning how Substack works, experimenting with different formats, organising the growing archive, and listening carefully to readers. The refreshed identity and clearer structure reflect what I’ve learned.

This isn’t a reinvention for the sake of it. It’s a clearer expression of something that was already taking shape. TEE™ is becoming simpler, more deliberate, and more comfortable in its own skin.

• I’ve developed a greater awareness of the role TEE™ plays in people’s lives.

• I can see where I can offer the most value to my subscribers.

• I’ve discovered what I most enjoy writing about.

TEE™ is changing, but that’s kind of the point.

Stay thoughtful.

James.

If you claim to be a writer, then you may wonder whether using AI is dishonest. If you are a paying reader, you may question whether AI-assisted writing is worth paying for. If you have spent years developing a craft, you may be (understandably) reluctant to hand any part of it to a machine. Surely, the value is in the effort itself? To delegate to a machine would undermine the inherent value of the work? The answer — as is the case for many complex questions in life — is: it depends.

We are all experiencing the growing pains of change. Generative AI technology has advanced more quickly than the social agreements surrounding it. Our expectations of authorship, effort, originality, and fair use are being renegotiated while we are using the tools.

Our discomfort stems from an inherited belief that valuable work must (surely?) be difficult, slow, and visibly performed by the person whose name appears on the cover. AI is forcing us to ask an awkward question: if the result is useful, truthful, and unmistakably shaped by human experience and judgement, how much should we care about who physically wrote each sentence?

Effort used to be part of the evidence

For most of history, skilled production was scarce. Yet, ever since Generative AI arrived on the battlefield, I’ve been wrestling with painful questions around:

• Identity,

• Professional value,

• Time wasted developing skills that have been absorbed by technology, and

• What does value even mean in a post-AI society?

A carpenter needed years of practice to shape wood well. An illustrator had to learn how to draw. A software engineer had to understand enough syntax and structure to turn an idea into working code. A writer needed to sit with a blank page and construct an argument sentence by sentence.

The labour was not only a means of producing the work. It became evidence that the work deserved respect. We learned to associate effort with care, difficulty with quality, and time spent with value created. Achieving mastery requires sustained time and effort, and hurried work was often poor.

That said: a badly designed report does not become useful because it took three weeks to write. A confusing interface does not become considerate because its codebase is technically impressive. A sentence nobody understands does not become more valuable because its author spent all afternoon wrestling with it.

Effort is an input, but value is an outcome.

This distinction becomes harder to ignore when a machine can reduce the effort without necessarily reducing the outcome. We are left defending not only the quality of our work, but the identity we built around producing it.

I found a story hidden inside 432 posts

I recently analysed an archive containing 270 of my LinkedIn posts and 162 of my Substack notes. Together, they formed a collection of 432 pieces of writing produced across several years.

The archive contained my ideas, experiences, professional interests, recurring themes, and changing priorities. It was a kind of accidental journal, scattered across two platforms and hidden inside hundreds of individual posts.

I wanted to know what the collection said about me. What had I repeatedly noticed? Which subjects had endured? Where had my thinking changed? Could I trace a coherent story through material that had originally been published one fragment at a time?

I could have attempted the analysis manually. I could have gathered every post, cleaned the text, removed duplicates, classified the themes, counted the patterns, created the charts, and compared the findings. In theory, nothing prevented me from doing it. But, in practice, I would never have found the time.

Using AI made the project viable. It helped me process the archive, examine the patterns, and turn a large, messy collection into something I could interpret. The result was the essay linked below outlining what those 432 posts revealed.

The machine did not attend the events I wrote about. It did not build my career, form my relationships, notice the moments, change its mind, or publish the original posts. It did not decide which findings felt significant or what the archive meant for my future. It just helped me to tell a story I had already lived.

AI did not simply replace the hours I might have spent processing the material. It enabled an enquiry that would otherwise have remained an unfulfilled idea in my notebook. AI made the unviable viable. It gave me time back. It unlocked both potential and creation.

The craft is not always the product

There is a difference between loving the craft and loving what the craft produces.

A woodworker may find meaning in selecting timber, sharpening a plane, and shaping every joint by hand. The process is part of the reward. A customer may value the provenance and gladly pay for something handmade. In that case, the method genuinely belongs to the product.

Another customer may simply want a beautiful, durable table that fits the room. They care whether it works, how it feels, how long it lasts, and what it costs. The hours spent making it only matter when they influence one of those outcomes.

Writing contains the same distinction. Sometimes writing is how I think. Slowing down, struggling with language, and discovering the gaps in an argument can be the point of the exercise. Delegating too early would remove the productive friction that helps an idea form.

At other times, the thinking has already happened. I have lived the experience, captured the observation, formed the opinion, and decided what I want to communicate. The remaining work is largely one of production: structuring, connecting, clarifying, and polishing the material so another person can use it.

Why should every project adopt the same methodology?

Software engineers have recited a version of this argument for years: users do not care about your technology stack. They care whether the product is reliable, usable, secure, and capable of solving their problem. The implementation matters enormously to the people responsible for maintaining it (i.e., the programmers themselves, who enjoy debating such things), but the technology stack and architectural decisions are rarely aspects the customer worries about.

The same principle applies to prose. Readers still need the writing to be engaging, clear, accurate, and worth their attention. They do not automatically benefit from knowing that I typed every word without assistance.

This does not mean the method never matters. If something is sold specifically as handmade, human-written, or created without AI, then its provenance is part of the promise. Misrepresenting that process would be dishonest.

But when readers are paying for useful ideas, lived experience, careful analysis, and a perspective they trust, the keystrokes are not necessarily the source of the value.

Human value moves to either side of production

After losing to IBM’s Deep Blue in 1997, Garry Kasparov did not conclude that humans had nothing left to contribute to chess. In 1998, he helped introduce Advanced Chess, in which people played with computers at their side. His model combined human intuition, strategy, and experience with machine calculation, tactics, and memory. Kasparov later argued that we should work with intelligent machines rather than define ourselves by competing against them.

The lasting lesson is not that a human-computer chess team will always outperform the strongest modern engine. Technology has continued to improve. The more useful lesson is that introducing a powerful machine changes the role of the human.

When production is commoditised or mechanised, humans become editors, curators, directors, managers, strategists, thinkers, and instructors.

Before production, we must simply observe: capture experiences, identify problems, ask worthwhile questions, choose a direction, and decide why something should exist. A machine can generate a thousand answers, but someone still has to choose the question.

After production, we must judge: verify claims, recognise weak reasoning, remove what does not belong, protect the truth of our experiences, and decide whether the result is good enough to carry our name.

The middle changes, but the outcome doesn’t. If anything, AI has simply raised the bar for what good enough looks like.

This distinction helps me choose my role more deliberately. Some projects invite me to be the craftsperson, immersed in the pleasure and difficulty of making. Others need me to act as the director or product manager, focused on what we are creating, why it matters, and whether all the parts serve the intended outcome.

Trying to perform both roles simultaneously is difficult. The craftsperson wants to perfect the current component. The director needs to step back and question whether the component should exist at all.

AI gives us the option to move between those roles. It does not decide which role a particular project deserves.

The bargain is not morally clean

None of this resolves the legitimate concerns surrounding how generative AI was developed.

These systems depend on vast quantities of human-created material. Writers, artists, publishers, developers, and other creators have questioned whether their work was used with meaningful consent, transparency, or compensation. The benefits available to users cannot be separated entirely from the contested methods used to create them.

The law has not produced a simple answer. In its 2026 Report on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, the UK Government recognised that frontier models often depend on copyright works, that their outputs may compete with the creators from whom they learn, and that significant uncertainty remains around licensing, transparency, labelling, and reform. It also distinguished between wholly AI-generated content and the more nuanced reality of AI-assisted creative work.

We should resist two convenient stories.

The first is that using AI is automatically unethical, regardless of what the human contributes or how the tool is used. The second is that usefulness absolves us from questioning how the technology was built.

I can object to aspects of the bargain while acknowledging that I would now be reluctant to surrender what the technology enables. That contradiction is uncomfortable, but pretending it does not exist would be less honest than admitting it.

The same honesty should extend to the work itself. “Did the reader receive value?” is an important question, but it is not the only one. Others are:

• Are my experiences genuine?

• Do I actually hold the beliefs expressed?

• Have I examined the argument and checked the factual claims?

• Does the finished piece represent what I intended to say?

• Am I willing to accept responsibility when it is wrong?

If AI invents an experience I never had, introduces a conviction I do not hold, or produces a claim I publish without scrutiny, the work becomes misleading. If I remain responsible for the source material, direction, verification, editing, and final judgement, then authorship is doing more work than typing alone.

Authorship and accountability must walk hand-in-hand.

From a ‘bias for action’ to a ‘bias for thought’

The advice to develop a ‘bias for action’ is useful when organisations can spend months discussing an idea before anybody builds enough of it to learn whether it works. Moving quickly can create an advantage.

But what happens when action becomes almost effortless? When we can generate another article, prototype, image, analysis, or product concept within minutes, producing something is no longer evidence that we chose wisely.

We need to develop a stronger bias for thought. Not endless deliberation. Not hesitation dressed up as rigour. But thoughtful direction:

• What are we trying to change?

• Who is this for?

• Why should it exist?

• What would make it useful?

• What must remain human?

• What are we unwilling to delegate?

This makes the humble notebook more valuable, not less. The observations we capture, questions we record, connections we notice, and experiences we reflect upon become fertile soil for work that AI can later help us develop.

Perhaps that is why this transition feels so personal. We are not merely adopting a new tool. We are revising the story we tell ourselves about what makes us useful.

For years, many of us proved our value by producing. We wrote the sentences, drew the images, constructed the models, prepared the slides, and assembled the analysis. The visible labour helped form our professional identities.

Now we are being asked to believe that noticing, choosing, directing, interpreting, and taking responsibility are not lesser forms of work. In many cases, they were the most valuable parts all along.

I do not want to stop writing. But I do want to stop treating manual production as a moral requirement when another method would let me explore more ambitious questions, conduct richer analysis, or share a useful idea while it still matters.

The words still matter. The hours spent typing them matter less.

When production is mechanised, the work begins with the life we live, the gems we notice, and the questions we pose. It ends with the judgement we exercise, the truth we protect, and the responsibility we accept for whatever carries our name.

Human value has not diminished; it’s been transformed.

In some cases, it’s been unleashed.

Stay thoughtful.

James.

P.S. I counted ~400 orange highlighted words in this article. There are a total of 2430 (excl. this footnote) according to the Editor word count. That means that around 16.5% of this article was manually written or modified by me. Does this shock you? If so, leave a comment below or reply to the email. I’ll read each and every one (manually!) and get back to you.

Archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians spend their careers examining what earlier generations left behind. What looks like waste or scrap can become valuable evidence for someone asking the right questions. As the world moves ever faster, our instinct to consign the past to forgotten archives may cost us more than we realise.

Social platforms teach us, rather unfortunately, to treat writing as temporary. We publish a thought, watch and hope that it gathers a little attention, reply to a few comments, and move on. Within days, it has disappeared beneath everything that came afterwards. The world forgets and so do we. But maybe we needn’t be so hasty in our reckless abandon. With a little effort, curation, and curiosity, you can learn a great deal about yourself and how you’ve evolved by analysing your past writing.

Over the past few years, I have shared hundreds of ideas across LinkedIn and Substack. Some became detailed reflections. Others were brief observations captured in a few sentences before the thought disappeared. Individually, they often felt small and disconnected. Together, I suspected they might tell a story: a developmental archive of the subjects I return to, the questions beneath them, and the gradual shift in my thinking and my interests.

So I grabbed a shovel and started digging.

Building the archive

I collated two original sources:

• A very large PowerPoint file containing screenshots of 270 LinkedIn posts, including the engagement data visible in those captures.

• 57 PowerPoint slides containing screenshots of my Substack Notes.

Whilst reading everything manually would have been possible, turning it into a consistent, searchable archive would have been a far more daunting undertaking. I decided to see if AI could streamline the process.

Working with Codex, I began converting the material into something structured and reusable. The LinkedIn screenshots were extracted, processed with optical character recognition (OCR), and assembled into a structured comma-separated values (CSV) dataset. Every resulting record was then inspected. The 57-slide Substack presentation was examined separately.

Screenshots containing several Substack Notes or LinkedIn posts had to be separated into individual entries. My original writing needed to be distinguished from material I had merely restacked or reposted. Where I had added commentary of my own, that contribution was retained. Each entry received a unique identifier, working title, primary category, supporting themes, source location, and any available engagement data.

The finished Markdown archive contains 270 LinkedIn captures and 162 distinct Substack Notes or commentaries, producing 432 catalogued entries across the two sources. That total describes the archive, rather than 432 entirely unique ideas. Some thoughts appeared on both platforms, and those overlaps were intentionally preserved because the way an idea travels is part of its history.

I had transformed hundreds of disconnected posts into a catalogue.

What have I been writing about?

Every entry was assigned one primary working category, even though many naturally crossed several boundaries. A reflection about AI, for example, might also concern work, identity, design, business, or human behaviour. The taxonomy is not absolute. It is a practical way to expose the archive’s centre of gravity.

Rather than presenting the category index as a table, it is more useful to read it in three broad bands:

The dominant themes were engineering, design, and systems, with 86 entries, followed closely by intentional living, simplicity, and growth, with 76.

A substantial middle formed around social media, platforms, and online community, with 50 entries; technology, AI, and digital tools, with 42; relationships, kindness, and human experience, with 41; and writing, creativity, and publishing, with 35.

The longer tail included work, career, and professional growth, with 26 entries; travel, place, and everyday life, with 21; learning, curiosity, and ideas, with 18; leadership, teams, and culture, with 16; wellbeing, mental health, and rest, with 12; and business, entrepreneurship, and value, with nine.

What surprised me was not the volume, but the coherence. Ideas published months or years apart were often examining the same underlying concerns. Again and again, the archive returned to questions about how we make work feel better, how thoughtful design can reduce friction, what meaningful progress looks like, how we might use technology without losing our humanity, and what it means to live with greater simplicity, clarity, and intent.

Even when the subject changed, the deeper fascination often remained the same. It turns out I have been writing variations of the same few essays for years. I simply did not know that they belonged together.

From technical to socio-technical

The archive also revealed a clear evolution in my thinking. My early writing was heavily professional and technical. I wrote about structural engineering, software, digital tools, projects, industry developments, and technologies I found interesting. The central question was often straightforward: what is useful, new, or technically interesting?

Everyone is capable of both deep interest and boredom. Move toward what interests you and away from what bores you. - Bill Gurley, Runnin’ Down A Dream, p. 31

Engineering and technology accounted for approximately 40% of my early LinkedIn archive. During a later period of deeper interest in AI, software development, and toolmaking, engineering, design, and technology rose to more than 53% of the category mix. It was the most technically concentrated phase in the collection.

Over time, however, the system boundary began to expand. Writing about tools led me to consider the systems around them. Systems thinking drew me towards UX and Experience Design. Experience Design opened questions about psychology, accessibility, motivation, work, and human behaviour. The question was no longer simply whether a system worked, but how it shaped the people using it.

The category mix reflects that movement. In my more recent LinkedIn writing, the combined share of engineering and technology fell to approximately 34%. In my current Substack Notes, it is below 12%. Intentional living, online community, writing, publishing, relationships, and wellbeing have moved towards the centre instead.

These percentages should be treated as directional rather than exact. Nevertheless, the movement is clear. The progression is best summarised as:

tools → systems → experiences → people → meaning

What looks like a radical shift is actually a recognition that engineering is broader than a technical discipline. At its heart, great engineering is socio-technical; it recognises that both people and planet are players within the holistic system and that our artificial constructs must respect that.

Engineers define boundaries so that problems can be understood and solved. Draw a tight boundary around a piece of software and the focus is its code, architecture, reliability, and performance. Expand it slightly and interfaces, workflows, integrations, and operating environments come into view. Expand it again and you encounter organisations, incentives, communication, culture, and decision-making. Eventually, you reach the person experiencing it all.

That person may be confused, inspired, exhausted, motivated, excluded, delighted, or completely indifferent. The technical system cannot be separated from the human experience surrounding it, and my writing appears to have followed the same outward movement. I began with the artefact, then became interested in the system, the experience, and the person. Increasingly, I find myself interested in meaning: what the work is for, whom it helps, how it makes somebody feel, whether it reduces friction, and whether it leaves a person, organisation, community, or world in a better state than it found them.

My gravity has shifted. I now see the person experiencing the system as the key component.

Small ideas compound

Social platforms encourage us to evaluate posts individually and immediately. We publish something, observe its performance, and allow the algorithm to bury it. Yet a short post can be an early expression of something much larger. It may contain the seed of an essay, framework, talk, product, research question, or book chapter. Its value is not always visible when the thought first appears because patterns emerge through accumulation.

One post about workplace frustration may be a passing observation. Twenty posts about friction, motivation, systems, and job satisfaction may reveal a body of work. One note about simplicity may feel inconsequential. Dozens of reflections about minimalism, intentional living, and effort well spent may reveal a personal philosophy.

A post is not necessarily the finished thought. Sometimes, it is only the first sketch. You write something, return to it from another angle, and test it against new experience. The language becomes clearer. Separate ideas begin to connect. Eventually, you realise that you have not been publishing random thoughts at all. You have been circling a set of enduring questions.

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From content graveyard to editorial map

I no longer think of my old social posts as a content graveyard. They form an editorial map: a searchable record of how my thinking has developed, which subjects have remained stable, which interests have faded, and which questions have become more important with time.

It is also valuable source material for future TEE™ essays. I can now gather every observation I have made about a subject, compare older and newer positions, identify contradictions, and combine fragments into a more complete argument. The archive makes it easier to see which ideas deserve a full essay, which themes might become recurring sections, where my thinking has materially changed, and which questions I have repeatedly approached without answering. It can reveal posts that belong together, gaps in my knowledge or evidence, and ideas that may eventually become frameworks, talks, tools, or books.

What might your archive reveal?

If you have been writing online for several years, your archive may contain more value than you realise. Begin by gathering what you have already published. Preserve the original text, dates, links, and whatever performance data remains available. Give each entry a title and category, add a few supporting themes, and flag anything incomplete or uncertain.

Then stop looking at posts in isolation. Look for repetition and movement. Notice the subjects that keep pulling you back, how your language has changed, and where your professional interests have begun to connect with your values and lived experience. Pay attention to the ideas that have become more personal, practical, or ambitious over time.

Your archive may show you what you have been trying to say all along. More importantly, it may show you what you should write next. Small ideas compound when you give them somewhere to live. So your past may teach you more about the person, thinker, or writer you are becoming.

Stay thoughtful.

James.

1. Author’s Note.

2. Words That Move Us.

3. Your Calendar Knows How You Feel.

4. Key Takeaway.

5. Get Well Soon.

6. Book of the Week.

7. The (Un)splash Zone.

8. What Our Readers Say.

9. TEE™ & Coffee.

10. Your Feedback.

Author’s Note.

We have big ambitions for TEE™ and are carefully iterating as we aspire to deliver the #1 publication for Design & Business. So, this week we’re trying something different.

Rather than produce a standalone article, we’re evolving the publication into a more comprehensive newsletter. We don’t want to become noise in your life and spam in your inbox. Instead, we want each issue to land well, and for you to be excited to read and share our content.

1. We’ve introduced a New This Week section which contains hyperlinks to each heading within the newsletter. We’ve also added an Author’s Note to each issue, so that we can bring you personal takeaways, musings, and reflections on the week’s content, whilst shielding the main article. Future editions will also contain an Editor’s Note for an alternative viewpoint.

2. Wellness is close to our hearts. For that reason, we’ve introduced Get Well Soon where we suggest practical steps you can take to improve your mental and physical wellbeing.

3. The body of each publication will be the title post for that issue, i.e. Your Calendar Knows How You Feel. We summarise the article’s Key Takeaway as a dedicated feature, so readers short on time can jump to the main point.

4. So that you can follow along with what our team enjoy reading, each week we will present our Book of the Week recommendations. Let us know what you think!

5. Ultimately, our readership makes the publication what it is. We want to show our gratitude and appreciation to you whenever we can. Where relevant, our issue will deliver a note, comment, suggestion from, or a shout-out to, one of our treasured readers in What Our Readers Say.

6. Our lives are busy and it’s easy to miss great content when it first lands. So, each week we collate a few of our favourite editions and include them for your interest in TEE™ & Coffee. We believe that if you enjoy this article, you’ll probably like one of these others too. So, grab your coffee, relax, and read on.

For our paid subscribers, future issues will bring unique content available just for you. The paid content will deliver value above and beyond the baseline newsletter. We want to ensure our paid subscribers and fellows feel valued and see measurable return on their investment.

We’re constantly evolving our publication to ensure that TEE™ is worth the time and money you so generously spend. Please leave any thoughts and feedback you have, to bring TEE™ the next level.

Stay thoughtful.

James.

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Words That Move Us.

When solving problems, dig at the roots instead of just hacking at the leaves. - Anthony J. D’Angelo

Your Calendar Knows How You Feel.

Are you happy at work?

How many tasks do you despise?

Which activities would you happily delegate?

Every job is a mix of good and bad. There are activities we love, those we detest, and others we endure. You must identify which bucket you place a given task in, because this is the first step to restoring work satisfaction. If you spend a greater percentage of your working hours on activities you intrinsically enjoy, then your odds of workplace satisfaction increase sharply.

A trick I developed was to use my work calendar as a sentiment journal. I already categorise my calendar by colour, corresponding to labels such as ‘Deep Work’, ‘Meeting’, ‘Mentoring’, ‘Travel’, etc. Within Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Teams you can create colourless labels that exist in the metadata but do not change the appearance of the calendar entry. Since you can apply multiple labels to a given calendar entry, it’s possible to combine a coloured label (i.e., for a meeting) with a colourless label for augmented insights.

In the past, I created a colourless label titled ‘Automatable’ so that I could identify how many tasks per week could hypothetically be delegated to AI or automation. I periodically export the calendar entries to analyse the percentage of time I spend on activities that AI or automation could, and probably should, have actioned for me.

Whilst this is great for enhancing your productivity, it doesn’t help you to identify whether you actually enjoy those tasks that remain. What if you took the concept a stage further and created labels corresponding to your feelings towards a given task? For example, ‘Love’, ‘Hate’, ‘Boring’, etc. Retrospectively, you can analyse the percentage of your time spent on tasks you really enjoy (and those you’d happily forget).

This strategy delivers several advantages:

1. We tend towards all-or-nothing thinking, so it’s easy to conclude that your job is either really amazing or entirely awful based on recency bias (i.e., how you feel about recent events). If you’ve had a week filled with tasks you love, then you’ll likely feel positive about your work. If not, you may believe you need a job change. However, if you can assess your week more objectively, on a task-by-task basis, and see where you’re actively spending your time, it becomes easier to evaluate how good or bad your job really is.

2. You may see patterns where certain activities (or people) make your week better or worse. Once you identify the underlying reasons for why you’re feeling a certain way, you can take steps towards designing your calendar more intentionally. Where possible, you can orient your time towards the work and people you like, whilst limiting your time on that which drains you.

3. You may identify opportunities for automation. For tasks that you dislike or feel that you don't bring value to, it raises the question of whether you’re the right person to be completing that task to begin with? Perhaps a colleague, an AI agent, or a Python script could be more effective?

4. Active reflection on your working week helps with memory and processing. We often skip from one task to the next without evaluating our performance and our experience of the work we’ve delivered. Taking time to mark each calendar entry with your sentiment towards it, as soon as practicable after you’ve completed it, provides a more honest and accurate assessment of how you’re feeling about your role. It can offer insights that are valuable for future conversations with your Line Manager and help you to understand the kinds of work you’d be a great fit for.

5. The calendar export, with the various markers, can also be a powerful diary for your favourite Large-Language Model (LLM) to analyse. This is precisely the kind of task that AI does better than humans: unpicking patterns that we’re inclined to miss. Ask ChatGPT, Copilot, or Claude to provide insights on your work. Poke and probe the responses to dig deeper.

Solving a problem we don’t understand is impossible. If you don’t know the drivers that make you feel a certain way, then you’ll be hard-pressed to resolve them. Whether you love your job, or detest it, it’s helpful to know why.

Breaking down your working week into time and activity blocks, and then proactively marking each with your feeling towards it, gives you hard evidence that you can use to take effective action. If you’re happy, then great: you’ll know why and can do more of the same. If you’re miserable, you’ll also know why and can start making a change.

Life is too short to be miserable longer than necessary. The trick is knowing what you’d rather do instead and pivoting in that direction. See our Book of the Week recommendation to learn how you can take concrete steps in a better direction.

Key Takeaway.

1. Create colourless labels in your calendar that reflect your sentiments.

2. Assign each calendar entry a label to build a picture of how you’re feeling.

3. Export your calendar periodically and analyse the narrative.

4. Try to understand why you’re feeling the way you are.

5. Take steps towards the positive.

Get Well Soon.

As part of my day job, I’m an office Wellbeing Champion. On a bi-monthly basis, I give a short, honest briefing to around 200-300 colleagues on how they can make positive changes to their work- and home-lives.

During today’s briefing, I discussed the theme of habituation, inspired by a book I read titled Look Again by Sharot, T. and Sunstein, C. The authors argue that habituation - the process of acclimatising to your current conditions until they become the norm - has pros and cons.

It’s a normal human reaction, and it’s great when you’re in difficult conditions, because it reduces the subjective intensity and severity of whatever it is you find painful. If you’re unpopular at school, you’ll eventually come to accept it (as I did!) and it won’t bother you quite so much each day.

Unfortunately, we also habituate to good things in our lives and we quickly forget how we felt before we had them. For example, in our office we have several decent coffee machines. But over time our staff habituated to having the machines available and now just complain about the quality of the coffee. They forget that for many workers free coffee, and especially a dedicated machine, would be a real treat and novelty. Unfortunately, for my colleagues the novelty’s worn off… They’ve habituated.

The same mechanism is at play when:

• We take our loved ones for granted,

• You lose interest in a job that you were originally so excited to secure,

• A holiday abroad is now an expectation, where before it was a treasured luxury.

So, what’s the fix? Well, I don’t want to spoil the book entirely. But, crucially, it’s taking the time to notice what was always right in front of you. Practice gratitude. Thank your loved ones. Show appreciation to your team. Remember how you felt before you secured your current job. Perform mental gymnastics and travel back, in your mind’s eye, to a worse time in your past that you’re now relieved is behind you.

Ambition and aspiration are obviously good traits. Human society evolved precisely because habituation to our environments kept us striving for better. But just remind yourself, periodically, that whilst better is on the horizon, worse is in the rear-view mirror. So, wherever you’re sitting today and whoever you’re sitting with: be appreciative. Look again.

Book of the Week.

If you’re interested in making a change but don’t know where to start, you might like to read Pivot by Jenny Blake. I’m not sponsored; it’s just a book I’ve returned to time-and-time again whenever I’ve needed tried-and-tested advice.

The (Un)splash Zone

My partner, Sabrina, and I spent nine wonderful days in Barcelona at the end of June. We were recommended to visit the Olympic Pool at Montjuïc. I think you can see why. An absolutely stunning city view, a bustling venue, and a gold-medal experience. What you can’t see behind me are the bars and restaurants that sit at street level, overlooking the pool. The pool entrance is just a short walk after you exit the cable car that brings you up the mountain side. I’d highly recommend checking it out. It was certainly a highlight of our trip.

You can find more independently approved photography on my Unsplash.

What Our Readers Say.

I received very insightful feedback from , who said that he found my thoughts on work, career, and professional development particularly valuable. So, I’ve decided to spend more time writing honestly about these subjects. In fact, in future editions I intend to dedicate an entire section (for paid subscribers only) on this topic. I hope you’ll find it both helpful and relatable. Thank you for your support and suggestions! We’re beyond grateful.

Leave a comment

TEE™ & Coffee.

Our lives are busy and it’s easy to miss great content when it first lands. We get it. So, each week we collate a few of our favourite editions and include them here for your interest. We believe that if you enjoyed this article, you’ll probably like one of these too! So, grab your coffee, relax, and read on.

Your Feedback.

Most days I take the same short walk to one of my local cafés. It’s a beautiful space, with a well-considered décor. The owners have created a welcoming environment that has reinvigorated the feelings of community and belonging.

This café has become a hub for gatherings of young and old.

During the day, you’ll find workers on laptops seeking the company of others for a short while, to escape the isolation of home-working. You’ll see mothers and fathers with pushchairs, dogs, and children, chatting with friends and parents from the local school.

Of an evening, you’ll witness an ambience shift as the café transitions quite naturally into a bar and restaurant. The lighting dims, the music moves, and the people come to unwind, socialise, and just be. You’ll see folk like me with their head in a book, a glass of wine to one side, living in peace and tranquillity.

I took this photo today, because I noticed just how beautiful this wall was. Each day, I visit the same café, see the same faces, and order the same coffee. But, I may also see something new amongst the familiar: if I simply choose to look again.

Life can be extraordinarily simple, if we allow it to be.

Enjoy the everyday.

Find solace in routine.

Build rituals you live for.

And, stay thoughtful.

James.

I didn't feel interesting or attractive enough for Instagram. My views were too moderate for X. I was bored of Facebook. But, I was very ambitious in my career. I wanted to have an impact. Why? I'm not entirely sure. It just seemed like a sensible thing to want at the time.

To this day, I’ve primarily posted content, newsletters, and created community groups. I’ve never sought a job through LinkedIn, I’ve never hired anyone, and I’ve never sold a course. I’ve used LinkedIn Learning occasionally, but more often than not I forget about it.

Nevertheless, LinkedIn has done a few marvellous things for me.

1. It taught me how much I enjoyed sharing my journey, promoting others, and creating beautiful, engaging, and authentic content.

2. It honed my writing, helped me find my voice, and discern what really mattered to me.

3. It led to my online publication The Engineering Experience™ (abbr. TEE™) where I write about simplicity, clarity, and effort well spent. With TEE™ I'm growing an online community and readership, whilst generating monthly revenue for my writing.

The first time someone became a paying subscriber was a little surreal: I was literally a paid writer. I never take my readers for granted and do everything I can to ensure every article leaves a thoughtful imprint on their lives and provides a great experience.

None of this would have been possible if I'd never got started on LinkedIn. No, I've never gone viral. No, I'm not an influencer. But, I am happy. I get to write about topics that fascinate me, I get to connect with industry leaders across the globe, and I have a space for creative self-expression.

I share this with you because I want you to see that journeys are rarely linear. Mine certainly wasn’t. Did I anticipate in 2016 that I’d be writing on Substack in 2026? Of course not. But each step honed my craft, and helped me to discover what I love, who I am, and who I want to be.

Sometimes a platform isn’t your ultimate destination. It’s the training ground for what comes next.

Thank you LinkedIn.
Thank you friends, peers, and mentors.
You’ve genuinely shaped my life.

Stay thoughtful.

James.

I’m going to make a bold and depressing prediction: regret is on the horizon for a large percentage of our population, and our social media habits are partly to blame.

It will come as no surprise that too many people spend too much time looking at too much content of too little consequence. We invest our finite time, energy, and attention scrolling through endless reels of visual noise and psychological pollution.

We lovingly begin each day with an intoxicating dose of novelty and stimulation, denting our focus before we’ve even left bed and often damaging our mood in the process. Then, at night, we inject another dose for good measure, elevating our anxiety just enough to interfere with our precious sleep.

If we’re out and find our hands empty and our minds momentarily idle, we reach for our phones as if they were boxes of cigarettes. In one smooth motion, facial recognition unlocks the device and grants us access to the wonderful world of endless refresh.

It doesn’t matter that we read that post or watched that video thirty seconds ago. Far better to waste another moment of your life than experience the fear of missing out when your favourite influencer announces their latest side hustle, new online course or luxury getaway, or promises that this year they’re going to be more ‘real’ with their followers, remain present and spend more time offline.

Yes, evidently. Sigh.

The irony is that influencers are among the clearest beneficiaries of your social media habit. They profit from your views, comments, and reactions. They produce content and build courses in direct response to their audience’s engagement and avowed interests. Who needs market research when your prospective buyers tell you what they want whenever you ask, eh?

The most successful influencers become wealthy and famous, living what appears to be the life of their dreams, while you risk wasting your own talents, skills, and efforts honouring your acclaimed leader like a good follower should.

I mean, even the word follower is quite distasteful when you consider it. It reeks of religious connotation, as though influencers have been anointed by holy powers above.

Of course, I understand that many of you aspire to build your own social media followings and eventually monetise them. You want to model yourselves on the influencers you readily follow. It makes sense. If they can do it, why can’t you? I thought the same.

The creator economy looks fun and lucrative. It is the modern-day supermodel: a highly visible aspiration that appears to bring status, love, and boundless attention. The problem is that one day your preferred social media platform may be considered obsolete or, dare I say it, dated.

Young people will eventually talk about Instagram, X and TikTok the way many people in their twenties and thirties now talk about Facebook. Your platform may struggle to attract new users, while existing users remain only out of habit.

If you have accumulated a decent following on one platform and it loses its appeal, what do you do next? If you haven’t successfully built an audience you can reach independently, outside a walled garden controlled by one of the world’s largest technology companies, you could lose your monetisation model, your community, and your popularity remarkably quickly.

This is not merely scaremongering. TikTok briefly went dark in the United States after the Supreme Court upheld legislation that threatened its continued distribution unless it underwent a qualified divestiture. In the UK, OnlyFans has faced substantial regulatory scrutiny, including a £1.05 million Ofcom fine for providing inaccurate information about its age-assurance measures.

Neither example means those platforms have disappeared. They do, however, demonstrate the same underlying vulnerability: when your livelihood and audience sit on infrastructure you neither own nor control, decisions made by governments, regulators, and platform owners can alter your prospects overnight. We’ve already watched once-dominant platforms such as Myspace and Vine fade or vanish.

If your content is built atop a platform that insulates its users from the outside world, you are at risk. If, by the time you realise this, it’s too late to do anything about it, what do you do?

And what about all the time you dedicated to building a following, watching content, leaving comments, and updating your profile? Was it all for nothing? Maybe.

Then comes the regret. That deep, stomach-churning regret that you missed out on connecting in the real world because you were fixated on the virtual one.

You remember all those moments when you ignored your friends at the dinner table while replying to a DM. Or when you ruined a day with your partner or family because you saw something online that derailed your emotional state and sent you into an anxious spiral.

Gym-goers lift their weights for the current set and then flex their biceps once more to pick up their phones during the rest period. At least they’re getting an extra curl between sets, right?

You are burning far too much candle wax from your short stick of life trying to impress people who don’t even know who you are. We love to believe we’re living in a soap opera, complete with a backing track playing beneath the story of our lives.

We sell ourselves constantly and hope the world notices and approves. We do it today. Then tomorrow. And the day after.

We participate in an endless cycle of validation-seeking behaviour, trying to prove, even to ourselves, that we are living a socially acceptable life. Except there is nothing socially acceptable about ruining your in-person relationships and experiences while seeking affirmation from the faceless masses.

Just Do It.

Carpe Diem.

Because You’re Worth It.

Think Different.

All highly recognisable phrases encouraging you to go forth and live your best life. But are you? Or does your screen-time report suggest you’ve spent longer than a workday cycling through your favourite apps?

Unless you consciously decide to change your behaviour, you may one day arrive at the painful realisation that too much of life passed you by while you consumed content that rarely made you happy. Content that made you feel terrible about yourself. Content that encouraged rumination and obsessive behaviour. Content that invited you to compare your entire existence with everyone else on the planet, and then feel surprised when someone, somewhere, appeared to have a better life in one or two narrow dimensions.

The full richness of your life is denigrated when you compare it with the carefully selected highlights of someone you’ve never met who happens to look great on a beach. The world we’ve built for ourselves is bonkers. And it’s broken.

Yes, there is obviously some utility offered by social media. Used as a tool, in the right way, it can, and often does, unlock real, tangible value. You can run a campaign, raise money for charity, notify friends and family about a funeral, or connect with business colleagues without requiring everyone to carry two hundred business cards wherever they go. These functions matter.

However, for many people, these purposeful use cases account for only a small proportion of the time they spend on the platforms. Far more of their attention disappears into the doomscroll. I mean, it literally has the word doom in it, yet it has become cute, casual parlance, as though this behaviour is entirely normal and simply something to be expected.

I turned thirty-two this year, and Facebook has been around since I started sixth-form college. Strangely, it is difficult to remember what we did with all our time before social media, and why we bothered to do anything at all.

Nowadays, it hardly seems worth doing something unless you can create a photo opportunity and share it with your network. We all do it. It has become second nature.

If we don’t capture a great photograph of our holiday, it was basically a wasted trip. It doesn’t matter whether you enjoyed yourself, so long as the world believes you did. We are the curators of our own personal galleries. We choose the artwork. We choose the branding. We design the experience. Then we encourage visitors.

And, like many galleries, we don’t even charge for the pleasure. Please, walk right in. Just don’t scroll too far back, because I wrote an unacceptable tweet in 2012 from which I am now completely dissociated. I was young then and, you know, YOLO. #naive.

I remember going on holiday and spending most of the day refreshing my Instagram feed to see whether I had received any more likes on my latest photo. If it performed well, it was a great day. If it didn’t, I became withdrawn and depressed, convinced that the world found me unattractive and that I would never find love.

Weirdly, almost everyone I speak to suggests that they felt something similar. So, at least we can bond over our shared dislike of ourselves. Parents must despair.

And it goes far beyond holiday photographs. The urgent need to impress our networks invades our decision-making at every level.

Choosing your university degree? Deciding where to get married? Which job should you take? Which car should you buy?

These have always been difficult questions, but now we’re so tangled up in public metrics that a muted response to an announcement can convince us we’ve made the wrong decision entirely. You assume everyone is talking about you, laughing and cackling about just how embarrassing your life is.

I wouldn’t worry. Nobody is laughing. They’re all too busy ruminating over the poor performance of their own posts.

It begs the question: is anybody truly happy on social media? Besides the influencers, perhaps, although they often seem to be just as unhappy.

It is difficult to feel satisfied when everything you do is immediately outperformed by someone else. You can work for months towards one important moment of success, finally announce it to the world and watch as your carefully curated post is quickly pushed aside as yesterday’s news, sinking towards the bottom of the feed.

There is always another announcement. Always someone doing better. Always somebody younger, richer, fitter, happier or more successful. At least, in the narrow frame they have chosen to show you.

I’ve been pondering recently just how different people’s lives might have been had social media never existed. Would they have remained in closer contact with their authentic desires and intrinsic motivation, and therefore followed career paths better suited to them? Would they have taken that holiday somewhere they didn’t really care about visiting, simply to show everyone they had gone?

Who would they have dated? Who might they still be dating? How many reckless or rash decisions have been made simply to impress followers?

It is very difficult to remain connected with your truest desires while you are being bombarded by signals about what everybody else appears to want.

Celebrities warned us long ago that fame brings perks but also scrutiny, pain, and the constant sensation of falling out of favour. You reach the top of the mountain for one brief window, then spend the rest of your career living in the shadow of your own success, never quite reaching that pinnacle again.

Social media has distributed a smaller version of this experience to almost everyone. It skews our behaviour. It skews the projects we choose to pursue. It makes us feel that we must identify the best possible career, lest we appear inferior to everyone else on the internet.

We humans also struggle to comprehend the numbers attached to our social networks. One hundred followers feels like very little. But if you stood on a stage and announced your views to one hundred people in a room, wouldn’t you feel a little daunted?

It would also be quite an honour if one hundred people voluntarily sat and listened to what you had to say. Through the lens of social media, the numbers become meaningless.

More is never enough. We chase constant growth. If the metrics don’t show an upward trend, something must be wrong. But we rarely stop to consider what the maximum audience for a genuine real-world following might look like. Eventually, you must reach the limit of the number of people in the world who sincerely care about your niche content.

Then there is the challenge of maintaining high levels of positive affirmation from your followers. Your views, your thoughts, and the quality of your content become distorted by your need to perform.

Once you start performing for likes, you are already on the path towards producing your own version of ‘slop’. Your followers were probably attracted to the quality and authenticity of your original work. But as your content shifts towards attention-grabbing one-liners, capitalised words, sensational remarks and increasingly radical points of view, your audience may grow weary of what you have to say.

Eventually, you lose your way. It becomes a downward spiral unless you steady the ship.

I get tired of seeing the same people peddling the same content repeatedly, purely to maintain ‘relevance’ on the platform, remain visible in timelines and stay ‘on brand’. It often feels as though a top influencer discovered one particular viewpoint that resonated with a large audience and then decided to repeat that same thing every day for the rest of time.

It’s boring. It’s uninspiring. And it’s fatiguing.

Yes, there are certainly benefits to social media. I’m sure you convincingly remind yourself of them each time you reopen your phone. That said, do the benefits outweigh the costs? And do you really need to check your phone again today?

The people who truly love you probably text or call. And your boss uses Outlook anyway.

I’m sure you could reduce your social media visits to once or twice a day. And no, not first thing in the morning, so you can dose yourself with anxiety before you’ve even pulled on your slippers. Nor last thing at night, so you’re tense, wide awake, and unable to sleep.

I’m not preaching from an ivory tower. I read Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport, and it resonated with me. Newport advocates deliberately stepping away from optional technologies before reintroducing only those that genuinely support the life you want to live.

I knew social media was making me unhappy, so I decided to remove the apps from my phone. I now use LinkedIn only on desktop. I stopped using Facebook and Instagram some years ago, and no, I don’t miss them.

The only social platform I keep on my device is Substack, and that is largely so I can see how my articles render on mobile. I’ve considered removing that app too.

Since making these changes, I’ve discovered that I’m calmer and less affected by other people. I feel less ‘behind’ when influencers post about their miraculous lives. I fill more of my time with richer content, such as books.

I also feel far less desire to perform for likes. As a result, I am more in tune with who I am and what I want.

And, to be honest, I’m not missing much. I still take photographs, and my phone curates them nicely in my photo library. Editing software is now built into the phone’s native photo app and, for my purposes, it is at least comparable with what Instagram once offered me.

The only time I notice the absence of the LinkedIn app is when someone asks to connect at an event and I can’t scan their QR code. Otherwise, I have literally zero use for the app itself.

If abandoning the apps feels too difficult right now, that’s fine. The next best step is to reduce the surface area available for potential negativity.

If opening your news feed or highlight reel fills you with dread and anxiety, I’d suggest that your digital environment is not especially healthy. You would do well to unfollow the sources of anxiety your feed repeatedly presents to you.

I did. It made a huge difference.

Less noise. More signal.

I kept only the people I genuinely admire and whose work improves my outlook. At the very least, that greatly reduced the likelihood of an idle scroll ruining my mood.

Removing the apps has not made my life smaller. It has given more of my life back to me. I’m calmer, less performative and less preoccupied with whether somebody else appears to be ahead. Most importantly, I can hear my own preferences more clearly.

Perhaps that is the real cost of social media: not merely the hours we surrender to it, but the distance it creates between who we are and who we might have become without an audience watching.

So, put the phone down for a while. Not because everything online is worthless, but because your attention is worth protecting.

Then ask yourself: without the feed, the metrics and the performance, what would you choose? And who might you be if social media had never existed?

Stay thoughtful.

James.

Whatever be the nature of business, fundamentally it has all been started in the interest of the wellbeing of human beings. The business of human wellbeing is the only real business. - Sadhguru

I sign off today for a much needed holiday. ⛱️

Using this week’s heatwave as acclimatisation. 🥵

I can't believe we're already at the end of June. The year's flying by, but there have already been many wonderful achievements, memories, and people who've entered my life for the better.

I've spent a great deal of time evaluating what I care about, what inspires me, and what drives me. I have come to appreciate just how much I value community, simple living, and a preference for the small where possible. I am not interested in technology for its own sake, but how it can be leveraged in thoughtful, beautiful, and humanist ways to make people smile.

Sustainability is often positioned with a focus on environment, and of course that matters. But it's also about sustainable living at a human level. Are we burning out? Are we frustrated? Are we hopeless? Are we anxious? If so, that's unsustainable.

Moments become memories. Our most visceral memories are typically about the people, and the places we experienced with them. Striving for better, delivering projects under tough conditions, supporting one another in challenging times, and giving your peers opportunities for recognition and growth are all people-centric activities and they're often the most memorable.

A lot is changing in the world today. We're all re-evaluating what work means, what the future holds, and our position in it. The foundations are moving everyday, and we find ourselves sprinting just to keep up. This all feels quite unsustainable and I can see people struggling with the pressure that the media and influencers are placing on them to go 'AI-first', to learn this new tool, to try this hot new model, etc. etc.

The truth is that despite this technological evolution and the noise we're hearing everywhere about it, we do have a choice. We can decide to live differently, to push back on rote advice that's ill-meaning, to focus on ourselves, on building lives we love, on opting for smaller as a lifestyle choice, and recognising that no achievement will ever feel enough, and work will never 'finish'. Allow yourself to be human. Give yourself some space. We're all in this together and we're rooting for one another.

Technology may be moving fast right now, but you don't have to keep up with every minor improvement. Software Engineers learned a long time ago that trying to keep up-to-date with every new framework, tool, and design pattern was a recipe for burnout. Instead, mature Software Engineers famously choose 'boring tech' because it works, it's stable, it gets the job done, and it doesn't fall over each week.

Yes, some people work at the frontier. Some people are defining 'a' future. But it needn't be everyone's future. In an abundant world, there's breathing space for us all to choose a path that actually resonates with us.

Playing big might feed your ego.
But playing small will feed your soul.

Be kind. Be happy. Be human.

And enjoy an ice-cream! 🍦

Stay thoughtful.

James.

Cast your mind back to when you first applied for your job. This may have been an exciting and nerve-wracking time. The role sounded interesting, the company was attractive, and the package was enticing. You invested your evenings and weekends to polish your CV, draft your cover letter, and sell your unique sk…

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Through design, psychology, technology, and systems thinking, we explore how the tools, environments, and decisions around us shape the way we think, work, and live. Our goal is to help engineers and professionals do their best work, with less friction and more intention.

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