You’re Getting Time Back
Most of us have no idea what to do with it.
AI is giving you time back. And most of us have no idea what to do with that time.
Last night I watched WarGames. 1983 film, Cold War backdrop, a military supercomputer designed to simulate nuclear war ends up nearly launching the real thing because it couldn’t tell the difference between the game and the stakes. It runs every possible scenario. Concludes that no one wins. And then offers: How about a nice game of chess?
The line the film ends on: Strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
This morning I opened Claude and got to work (ironic?).
The people who made that film were afraid of what a machine that learns while being taught would do to us. I’m one of the people rooting for it, eyes open, and here’s why.
Think about what it used to cost to find good information. Hours in research. Days, sometimes. Entire teams combing through sources, verifying what you thought you knew, hunting for the right framework to build the right argument. The information existed. Getting to it was the tax.
Now, you can access that same quality of information in minutes. Minutes! Credible, layered, nuanced. You can question it, push back on it, redirect it the moment your thinking shifts. What used to consume your morning now takes only ten minutes.
What you got back is time.
Time is the only thing that doesn’t come back. Money you can rebuild. Energy you can restore. Time moves one direction and it doesn’t pause while you figure out what to do with it.
So the question worth asking is: what are you doing with the hours you’re getting back?
We don’t know. The machine returned something precious and most of us aren’t sure what to do when we’re holding it.
As a podcast host, I have the honor of interviewing highly accomplished people. And most of the people I know who look (from the outside) like they’ve figured it out, have a version of the same gap.
You can see it when you’re in conversation with them long enough. They built things. They led things. They sacrificed for decades and have the results to show for it. Their lives, if you wrote them down (and many do in the form of a book), read like success.
And somewhere underneath all of it, a third level still unfinished.
It’s not that they never asked the spiritual question (most people have touched it at some point), but touching it isn’t the same as sitting with it… and sitting with it isn’t the same as doing the work. Some people are scared of what they’ll find if they look too closely.
Spiritual work is, in fact, terrifying. So some go just deep enough to feel like they’ve handled it and move on. And some, like me, spend decades circling it before it’s finally revealed.
Spirituality isn’t a box you check. It requires you to take apart what you believe, examine it, and rebuild it. Then do it again. With everyone watching and judging.
Maybe this is you? Mind sharp, body capable, record full, and the third level still asking to be taken seriously.
You need all three levels: mind, body, spirit. And momentum is not the same thing as a foundation. When the business of life and entertainment stops, whatever is underneath it has been waiting there the whole time.
What Order are Your Levels?
The order people find the levels in varies. Some people arrive at the body last, after the mind has done everything it can do. Some people find the spirit question early and carry it into everything that follows. Some people save it for the final level, getting to the end of a full life and finding themselves asking the question they didn’t have room for earlier.
That’s not a failure. But it is information.
Mine didn’t follow a sequence I planned. The body level came first, and then I moved into the mind level, and something I didn’t see coming redirected me. I fell into a loophole in the game, and it moved me to the spirit level before I had finished the second. I wasn’t allowed to return to the mind level until the spiritual one was complete.
You see, it held my mind captive, and I wasn’t able to concentrate on, or even consider, anything else. There was no recreation: I was on a mission and every book, article, movie - any and every form of knowledge or entertainment I consumed revolved around the idea of spirituality in some way.
And then at one point (I’m not sure exactly when) I recognized that I had gained a sense of understanding and peace amongst chaos that I had never had before. It was like the world finally made sense.
I didn’t design my order of the levels. It was handed to me, and I’m grateful for it in ways I couldn’t have articulated while I was in it.
That’s my path. Yours may look nothing like it, or it may look exactly like it.
My dad is in his final years.
Last week my company hosted a wellness retreat. At the end, everyone in the room answered one question aloud: What question will you carry with you past today?
His answer: “What drives all of you to serve others with your lives?”
I’ve been replaying that question. A room full of accomplished people, all the directions a question could go, and that’s the one that surfaced for him. Asked openly, to people he’d known for less than a week.
His order might be body, mind, spirit. And he’s in the third level now. Asking the question the first two levels couldn’t answer.
I get to walk this alongside him on his spiritual journey.
I’ll make one more observation here. I interviewed a SEAL who said that he was jealous of people who have strong spiritual beliefs, and that he wished he had them himself. I’ve heard my dad say this exact same thing.
Pushing off the spiritual level doesn’t make it disappear.
The machine in WarGames ran every possible scenario and concluded that no one wins. So it offered the one thing left: a nice game of chess. Something human. Something that requires a person on the other side of the board.
The photo attached to this post is my dad and my son playing chess.
I don’t think that’s a coincidence; I think it’s the answer the machine already knew. What the simulation couldn’t account for was the kid who walked away from the military terminal with the people who mattered to him. That decision didn’t fit in the model.
You’re getting time back, and the machine is good at the things that used to consume your hours. Let it do that work.
When you get the hours back, who is sitting across from you… and what does their spirit say to yours?
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Each of your posts feel like they have been pulled from the recesses of my mind and heart - not entirely, no, but bits and pieces . It moves me every time I read or listen. I am humbled because the feelings they evoke are hard to make space for.
I feel heard and recognized with this work you do ( and the collective that is involved). ♥️