I’m not sure how others feel, or better said, how much they feel. I’m not sure what they feel, or when. So I can only talk about how I do, and I’m a person that feels insecurities about many things. Again, I’m not sure if more or less than you do, but I have some, and that’s something that is always on my mind. I’ve always had them and, for the majority of my life, I didn’t fully understand them. It was some years ago when I started realizing that these insecurities were probably my biggest strength, one of the things that mercilessly forced me into action, into actually changing things. It pushed me forward up to a point where inertia kept moving me, either through social inertia telling me who I was, or simply because sometimes what you’ve done in your past is what others assign to you, regardless of whether it is true or not.

It’s a bit tough to recognize this, but that inertia took me to where I am. And going back to those insecurities, as I have grown up, the pile of them has kept growing, all while this Sisyphus stayed at the skirt of the mountain, looking at the top growing in front of his eyes. And now AI arrives, and I’ve started seeing that mountain doing weird things, changing shape, to the point where it feels upside down. Do you know what that means? I don’t. But I know it is confusing, and that alone is reason enough to do something about it, or the anxiety about my big pile of insecurities might fall directly on my head.

Let me go back a bit, to where the mountain started growing, to the inertia. Only a few people know that during my early adulthood I suffered from a lot of impostor syndrome. In a way, people were putting me on a pedestal that I didn’t think I deserved. “You are the future of Spain!”, “I’m sure in some years you’ll be a great entrepreneur” or the good ol’ “Yeah, but not everybody is like you, Carlos!”. Lots of good things were said about me, all the while my head couldn’t fully believe them, so the only way not to disappoint those people was working really hard to make sure I didn’t. I’m proud of that Carlos, I wish I could tell him. But I reached a point where I stagnated, I stopped building, I stopped believing, I stopped having people by my side with whom I shared dreams of a world we wanted to build together.

But as I said, that inertia kept me going, people still saw me with some kind of admiration. Somehow, right at that point, I lost my impostor syndrome, I was someone important, who I always wanted to be. And while I was seeing myself there, something started to feel off, the gap between the dreamer, the builder, and that person that was excited about solving humanity’s problems started growing right in front of my eyes. I was losing the inertia, I could feel the clock ticking, not outside, but in me.

Then AI came, and suddenly I could do all those things again, I could dream, and tell it to build things for me while I guide it. It was fun, empowering, in a way a bit magical, and I think many of us have been there. But the more I’ve gone there, and the more convinced I’ve been not only of its potential, but of the reality of how much productivity can grow all around the world, the more something unknown has grown in me. I don’t have a name for it yet, it is some kind of unknown unknown.

I am starting to lose the capability of doing things I was able to do, because I surrender that to AI that, in most cases, if I guide it, will be able to do the job better than me. And if that’s the case, that feeling of being back to that special person (yes, very selfish, but it is what it is) is simply temporary. Anyone with some basic knowledge can do all the amazing things I’m doing right now, so what am I good for? Why would I want to be back, when that “being back” is so normalized that everyone will be like that?

I have to be honest with myself, I enjoyed the hell out of that impostor syndrome. Escaping it was fun, natural, fulfilling, but it was all those things because I craved external validation in one way or another. And now, as I’ve been realizing the commoditization of “being a genius” through AI, the initial rush of building things has transformed into something else, into a kind of despair. It feels like a continuation of me confronting the reality of life being hard, and me not being enough for the goals I set for myself. I look at my future with a mix of desperation and hope, hope that by keeping doing things and confronting myself, I’ll somehow come back to Sisyphus.