The Day I Logged Off the AI Panic Machine and Walked at the Beach

I teach college writing, which means I’ve spent the last four years staring at the AI question the way a man stares at a fire he suspects might jump the fence. When ChatGPT arrived, it didn’t knock politely. It crashed into the room like a UFO and rearranged the furniture. Since then, I’ve read what feels like a small library’s worth of essays—predictions, warnings, elegies for the essay itself—and contributed a few of my own, because that’s what we do: we metabolize disruption by writing about it.

But there comes a point when the analysis stops clarifying and starts echoing.

I’ve reached that point. My brain has filed a quiet injunction: no more. Not just a break from AI, but a break from reading about how exhausted everyone else is by AI. The discourse has become a hall of mirrors—each reflection slightly more fatigued than the last.

I’ve been here before. In 2010, I had newborn twins, which is another way of saying I was living inside a low-grade emergency. The market offered guidance—books, podcasts, earnest experts—but I wanted none of it. I was already doing the job. Additional commentary felt like a second shift. Experience was loud enough; analysis was just noise layered on top.

Both episodes point to the same condition: Applied Reality Rejection—the refusal to consume secondary discourse when you’re already neck-deep in the primary experience. When you’re in it, more talk about it doesn’t help. It dilutes.

And here’s the part the essays rarely admit: reading about AI doesn’t soothe AI anxiety. It compounds it. Each think piece arrives like a fresh weather report announcing the same storm in slightly different prose.

So I’m choosing friction of a better kind. I play the piano until my attention steadies. I pick up kettlebells and let gravity argue with me for a while. I walk the beach and let the horizon do what no article can—put scale back into the day. The analog world doesn’t theorize; it recalibrates.

That was the remedy with the twins, too. Not another podcast on sleep training, but a walk, a dumb TV binge, a sweaty hour in the garage. Relief came from stepping out of the commentary loop, not diving deeper into it.

Which is why, when I see another AI essay queued up from The Atlantic or The New Yorker, I feel a familiar tightening—and then I close the tab. Not out of contempt, but out of preservation.

I’ve heard enough echoes. It’s time to drive two miles to Catalina Avenue and take a walk at the beach.