Ancient + AI
The oldest wisdom.
The newest tools.
I don’t think you cross a transition with ancient wisdom or with AI. You need both, and you need them woven. The old practices give you the images and the inner ground to turn information into wisdom. The new tools give you leverage. Neither one is enough on its own.
The enemy I keep coming back to is friction from the mundane— the tedious, transactional work that blocks your flow and keeps you from the one thing only you can do. So I use AI to clear the mundane, and I use the old wisdom to make sure I don’t automate my way past the inner work. This is where I share how.
01The operating principles
Three rules I try not to break.
- 01
Automate the mundane, never the meaning.
Hand the tedious, transactional friction to the machine. Keep the one thing only you can do — and the inner work no tool can do for you.
- 02
Tools are leverage, not a substitute for becoming.
AI multiplies who you already are. It can't make the crossing for you. Tend the body and being first; let the tools amplify what's actually there.
- 03
Prefer the 3-year review to the new-tool hype.
Anyone can review what's new. I write about what lasted — the practical, lived-in verdict after the novelty wore off. Durability over novelty, every time.
02The weave
Old principle, new practice.
Each of these is a thread I’m actively pulling — an ancient principle on one side, the modern practice or tool it maps onto on the other, and the line that connects them. My method, if you want the shape of it: see reality, understand the principle beneath the hype, then integrate the two into something bespoke and aligned to you.
Ancient
The fallow field
Old farmers left a field unplanted for a season so the soil could recover. The neutral zone is the same idea turned inward — a fallow stretch where nothing visible grows, and that emptiness is the point, not the failure.
Modern
Clear the mundane with AI
I use AI to take the tedious, transactional load off my plate — the inbox triage, the rote drafting, the small admin friction — so I actually have the open hours to sit in the not-knowing instead of busying my way past it.
The throughline
You can't go fallow if every hour is spoken for. Automating the mundane is how I protect the empty space the inner work needs.
Ancient
Descend to the root
The old teachers kept asking the same thing: go under the surface story, past the borrowed opinion, down to the cause beneath the cause. Stop arguing with branches; find the root.
Modern
First-principles prompting
Instead of asking AI for the popular take, I make it strip a problem back to its parts — what's actually true here, what's just assumed, what would I conclude if I'd never heard the hype. A thinking tool, not an answer vending machine.
The throughline
First principles is an ancient discipline. AI just makes it cheap to keep digging — if you have the patience to keep asking 'and what's underneath that?'
Ancient
Amor fati
The Stoics practiced loving their fate — not resignation, but a clear-eyed yes to what actually happened and what actually held. Less wishing it were otherwise, more reckoning with what is.
Modern
The 3-year review
I only write about tools I've lived with for the long haul. Three years in, the novelty is gone and the truth is in: what stayed in my life, what quietly got abandoned, what I'd choose again. A verdict, not a first impression.
The throughline
Both are about loving what's real over what's shiny. The 3-year review is amor fati applied to your toolkit — honoring what actually served, not what you hoped would.
Ancient
Tend the body first
Nearly every old tradition starts below the neck — breath, sleep, walking, the felt sense in the gut. Wisdom was never purely cognitive; it ran through the animal you actually are.
Modern
Don't automate past the inner work
The temptation with AI is to outsource everything, including the parts that are supposed to change you. So I draw a hard line: take care of the meat-and-flesh operating system first — body and being — and never let a tool stand in for becoming.
The throughline
AI is leverage on the outside. The transition happens on the inside, in a body. Tend the operating system you were born with before you optimize the one you bought.
Ancient
The clearness committee
An old Quaker practice: when you're stuck, people gather not to give advice but to ask honest, open questions — and trust that the answer is already forming in you, if the right questions can draw it out.
Modern
AI as a thinking partner
I've learned to ask AI to interrogate me, not answer for me. 'Ask me ten questions before you say anything.' The win isn't a faster answer — it's a better question I hadn't thought to ask myself.
The throughline
Good transition advice has always been a question, not a verdict. Used well, AI is a tireless clearness committee — there to draw the answer out of you, not hand it to you.
03The 3-Year Review
I write about what lasted, not what’s new.
Almost everyone reviews tools the week they launch, when the novelty does the talking. I wait. My filter is the 3-Year Review: I only write about practices and tools I’ve actually lived with for the long haul. Three years in, the hype has burned off and the truth is in — what stayed in my life, what I quietly abandoned, what I’d choose again without thinking.
It’s a bias toward practicality and durability over novelty. Anti-hype, on purpose. The deeper reviews and essays live in Field Notes — written from inside the practice, not from the press release.
The invitation
Get the tools as I prove them out.
When a pairing earns its place, or a tool finally passes the 3-year review, I send it around — first principles, honest verdicts, the bespoke setups I’m actually running. No hype, no affiliate churn. Just what’s held up.