I miss the climb
Steve Jobs once described the computer as a bicycle for the mind.
I have always loved that metaphor because it captures what computers used to feel like to me.
A bicycle makes you faster, but you are still riding it. You still pedal. You still steer. You still feel the hill in your legs. The machine extends you, but the movement is yours.
That is how computers felt for most of my life.
When I built a website, edited a photo, wrote some code, or made something on a screen, the computer helped me go further than I could alone. But I still felt connected to the work. I still felt proud of it because, in a very direct way, I had made it.
AI has complicated that feeling.
It is not that AI is useless. It is obviously useful. Sometimes it is amazing. It can help me move faster than ever.
But the feeling is different.
I am still in the race. I am just no longer on the bike.
I am in the team car now, following behind. I read the road. I call the strategy. I tell the rider when to push and when to hold back. My decisions still shape how the race ends — and sometimes they shape it for the better.
But I never turn a pedal. I never feel the climb in my legs.
I prompt, adjust, select, edit, approve. There is skill in that, of course. But it is a different kind of skill. The skill of the director, not the rider.
And maybe that is what I miss.
Not the slowness. Not the friction. Not the blank page.
I miss the feeling that the work passed through me. That the shape of the thing came from my own hands, my own taste, my own struggle.
Because the pedaling was never just how the work got done. It was where the pride and the attachment came from, both at once, from the same place. The thing was mine because I had made it, and it was good because I had made it.
In the team car, I can win more races.
But I am not always sure they feel like mine.
And the strangest part is that tomorrow, I will probably climb back into the car.