The Red Shoes.

"And so dance, and dance and dance, she did. Over highest hills and through the valleys, in the rain and in the snow and in the sunlight, she danced...But it was not good dancing. It was terrible dancing, and there was no rest for her."

- The Red Shoes, from Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes

In the story of The Red Shoes, a young girl is bewitched by a pair of beautiful, shiny red shoes, which she discovers—too late—have the power to possess her in an endless frenzy of dancing.

A few weeks ago I found myself caught up in a frenzied dance, to the music of productivity and AI optimization.

I was running several Claude Code projects at once, bouncing back and forth, with 7 different browser windows with 30+ tabs open in each one, my mind a blur as I tried to hold so many ideas and tasks at one time. I brought my laptop to the kitchen so I could keep Claude running while I made dinner, pausing from chopping veggies every 30 seconds so I could check on my open projects.

It was a beautiful performance of productivity.

And I felt like I couldn't stop.

I've been entranced by enough cursed shoes in my life to recognize this feeling, and I didn't like it. There's something deeply unsettling about feeling like you're no longer in control of your choices, that you're being swept along by some external force.

As I was struggling to find words for the frantic rush I'm feeling around AI right now, this story of The Red Shoes from Women Who Run with the Wolves came to mind.

It's not only the staggering speed of advancements to wrap my mind around, but the consequent pressure to do something with these innovations. Online content now is just a bombardment of the latest AI hack, the 6 Claude prompts that will 10x your income, the must-use AI strategy to create viral content, the repo that will replace every consultant and employee...and every other human.

If we choose to live in this narrative where productivity and optimization are the most important values, then there is no limit to what we should be doing.

We're staring into an infinity of productivity. Why have only 5 Claude projects running? Why am I not running 10 agents? And why aren't these 10 agents supervising their own teams of agents? And why not add another computer and another host of AI platforms and models and environments? And why not optimize this workflow and add these skills and this connector and download this repo and...?

It never ends.

There's such a wild panic in the tech space right now. It feels like we're all in this mad race to get to the top. Top of what? The funeral pyre of our society? The cliff, like the fabled story of the lemmings who throw themselves down into the abyss? Will we dance ourselves to death wearing these beautiful shiny shoes?

I think one of the most powerful questions we can ask is "what if?" What if I decided not to participate in this frenzied race of productivity? What if I decided to turn my computer off and spend an hour enjoying this human experience of life?

What if I refused to let my worth be based on how productive I am? What if I'm more than just a cog in the economic machine of modern America?

"Among these ideologies [in today's world], I consider particularly insidious the one that suggests that every person must earn or justify his or her own worth, to the point of attributing greater value to those who are more efficient or effective. From this perspective, persons end up being reduced to a means of achieving results, a resource to be used and exploited, and are no longer recognized as a proper end in themselves who should never be instrumentalized. The value of persons, however, does not depend on what they achieve or produce. There are rights that apply to everyone simply by virtue of being human, and no human power can legitimately deny or arbitrarily limit them."

- Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV

This story of the red shoes also feels particularly relevant as a framework for AI because it gives us a few nuanced perspectives:

1: Though the shoes are human-made, they are not made by our protagonist herself. They are not a product of her own creativity and labor and passion. In fact, we're told at the beginning of the story that she had found some scraps of fabric and crafted her own pair of red shoes, but these were thrown away by her benefactress because they were too dingy and roughly made. After losing her homemade shoes, the little girl is taken to the cobbler where she is entranced by these bright, shiny red shoes that seem so much better than what she could make on her own. Until they become her undoing.

2: AI is just a pair of shoes. It's just an ordinary tool, an object. A thing of human creation, intended for a specific use. AI is just like the plow or the printing press or the steam engine. When the hype is getting out of control, it's helpful to remember: we're just talking about a pair of shoes.

3: And yet at the same time, it is true that these are magical shoes. Despite being simply a tool, there's something otherworldly about AI. In the same way that fire is a tool and yet also a force greater than what we can understand or control. There's magic in it. And magic requires initiation to be used properly, safely, and responsibly. An initiation framework that doesn't exist in our modern culture. We're an adolescent society wielding power we're unprepared for because we've never experienced initiation into the power of modernity.

"And then you have a complete lack of cultural container and context in which such powers could live in a holistic way. You have no true adept in the house. Who are the elders in this picture? The tech CEOs and venture capitalists who are saying, "Go for it, get this out there as fast as possible, use your powers, do it. And hey, if what you've discovered is really precarious, really potentially disruptive, all the better, let's throw half a billion dollars at it." Are they the elders? Congress, who views ethics as something that can be imposed from the outside, most of whom have no ethical ground to stand on, most of whom sold their principles down the river long ago for their next meal because, you know, Trickster's got to eat. Are they the elders?"

- So You Want to be a Sorcerer in the Age of Mythic Powers, The Emerald Podcast

If we think deeply about the destabilization of our culture, the incredible rate of change, and the long-term implications of choices being made today, it's easy to feel overwhelmed. Bearing all of this in mind, what do we actually do in our own small lives?

We each live in the stories we tell ourselves. It's a story or game or a construct, or whatever word you like to use. Right now we're being told a particular story: If you're not running your 78 agents 24/7 and utilizing every "must-have" repo and if your library doesn't have 5,493 perfectly-optimized prompts then you'll probably wake up in 6 months to find yourself living on the streets because someone else took over your entire market. (Conveniently, this story is being told by the people who will benefit from us believing them—and stand to lose billions if everyone else decides not to play this game anymore. But I'm sure that's just a coincidence?)

And yet, we can each choose to tell a different story for ourselves. This is the power of creativity. We can conjure up a different way of being, a different game that we want to play out in this world. Not a regurgitated imitation of a story, but our own personal and authentic narratives.

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?"

- The Summer Day, Mary Oliver

In the last few weeks I've been experimenting with the stories I tell myself. While I cook my dinner, I stopped trying to run 6 Claude projects at the same time. I leave my laptop closed. I'm making space for doing nothing. For sipping my coffee and watching the sunrise—with no to-do list in front of me. I'm taking time to be fully present in my conversations and savoring the experience of connecting with other human beings. To let my mind ramble and roam as I write pieces like this. For no particular reason, other than because I want to.

The purposeful life has no content, no point. It hurries on and on, and misses everything. Not hurrying, the purposeless life missing nothing, for it is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world.

- Alan Watts

And I've discovered that the world hasn't ended. Quite the opposite, the world has become deeper, more meaningful, and more real to me. Instead of feeling compelled to join this mad dance, I feel a sense of agency. There's space to choose exactly where I put my time, energy, and focus. It's a story I'm telling for myself, rather than inhabiting someone else's narrative. While the world is in upheaval and disruption right now, one thing I'm certain about is that this is the kind of future I want to build.

Note: I'm starting a weekly online meetup, the Human-Centered Technology Working Group. This is a space to discuss how we navigate this changing world of AI and technology from the perspective of equity, inclusion, and ethics. If you're curious or would like to join the conversation. check out this Google doc with details.