My generosity always backfires. You would have thought I would have learned by now.
Daft as it sounds, I’m struggling with the passage of time.
This morning, I took our son to his sixth-form college open day, while my other half took our daughter to London to visit her preferred universities.
And here I am, wondering how this happened. How did I hit my late-40s so fast?
I can barely account for the passing years at all.
It used to be that ours was a quaint little market town on the end of the Metropolitan Line.
But Britain’s capital has become so expensive to live in that our once friendly town is rapidly importing all of London’s problems.
Knife crime, stabbings, gang violence, robbery, and muggings are becoming the new daily reality. Two nights ago, we even had a shooting.
What once felt like a safe place to raise our children, so close to beautiful open countryside, is quickly becoming just another ugly conurbation.
The cost of living crisis is changing everything. Few of us recognise ourselves anymore.
I am a very consistent person. Consistent in getting projects to 80% completion, only to then run out of steam.
It doesn’t matter what the project is. Decorating. Gardening. Writing. Development. That last 20% continually alludes me.
Sometimes it’s because I’m juggling multiple projects. All too often, it’s because my hyperactive mind proposes too many ideas, one after the other.
I’m a person who seems not to do anything in life. Actually, I do an awful lot. It’s just that I never finish any of that doing.
Everything I touch languishes in the same state, with 20% left. All it needs is that final push. But, sadly, that’s a push I can rarely give.
Maybe I will never finish anything at all.
Shock horror, the world is seeing what happens when you give billionaire narcissists unlimited power. Turns out they’re just human, like the rest of us, ego running wild.
Whenever I hear of companies planning to replace entry-level jobs with AI Chatbots, I think of China’s one child policy.
Ultimately, that restriction contributed to challenges in elderly care, with increased burden on the only child, themselves ageing.
It should be clear that if you cut entry-level jobs now, ten and twenty years down the line, you will find yourself with a skills shortage as you try to fill senior positions.
Whatever the self-aggrandising claims of big tech, a large language model is no match for a qualified professional trained in a specialism with all their learned discernment and insight.
If you want capable and knowledgeable staff in the future, you must invest in the next generation today. Replace them with a bot, and you’re stuffed. Only, it may take twenty years for that reality to hit home.
It’s undeniable. We live in an age of digital marvels.
Our phones can generate photorealistic images from a few words, games can transport us to breathtaking virtual worlds, and our apps promise to solve problems we didn’t even know we had.
The technology is indeed astounding, and we’re right to be impressed. To deny this would be unjust.
Even so, not all is well. Beneath the surface, many of these innovations are not just designed to amaze us but to trap us.
The psychology behind this trap isn’t accidental. It’s borrowed from decades of research into human behaviour, particularly studies on gambling and addiction.
At its core is the principle of variable rewards — the same mechanism that keeps people pulling slot machine levers for hours.
You don’t know what you’ll get when you swipe right on a dating app, open a chest in a mobile game, or craft another prompt for an AI image generator. That unpredictability creates a powerful compulsion to try just one more time.
I’ve seen this for myself when using generative AI tools. You start with a simple prompt, hoping for a reasonable result. Sometimes, the result is exactly what you were looking for, or even better than you imagined. And sometimes it’s complete nonsense.
That inconsistency is precisely what makes it so hard to stop. Each disappointing result feels like you’re getting closer to perfection, and each success convinces you that an even better one is just around the corner.
The developers behind these apps understand this psychology intimately. They’ve weaponised colour schemes that trigger urgency, endless scroll mechanisms that eliminate natural stopping points, and gamified feedback systems that make every interaction feel like progress toward some elusive goal.
The line between entertainment and manipulation has become so blurred that many apps feel less like tools and more like digital slot machines designed to extract our time, attention, and money.
This isn’t to say that all developers are acting in bad faith. Many genuinely believe they’re creating valuable products, and the underlying technology — especially in AI — represents legitimate breakthroughs that could benefit us all.
But we can hold two truths simultaneously: the technology is incredible, and its monetisation often relies on exploiting our psychological vulnerabilities.
The real tragedy is that we’re capable of so much more. These same powerful technologies could be designed to genuinely empower us to learn, create, and connect in meaningful ways.
Instead, too many are engineered to create dependency, to keep us scrolling, swiping, and spending in an endless cycle that benefits everyone except the user.
Recognising these patterns may be the first step toward reclaiming our sense of self. When we feel that familiar pull to “just try one more prompt” or “check the app one more time,” maybe we should pause.
Ask yourself: am I using this tool, or is it using me?
Understanding how these systems work doesn’t mean we have to avoid them entirely, but it does mean we can engage with them more intentionally.
We deserve better than digital tools that treat us like marks in a psychological con game. Indeed, we deserve technology that respects our time, attention, and autonomy.
The path forward isn’t to reject innovation but to demand that it serve us rather than exploit us. Only by naming these manipulative practices can we begin to imagine and build a digital world that empowers rather than entraps us.
But that demands an industry founded on ethics. A tall order, if ever there was one.
Remember, kids, AI is not a super intelligence. It’s just a complex algorithm that’s been trained on a shedload of data of varying quality.
In a world without AI hype, Builder.ai could have achieved success by boasting:
“All your apps will be built by real developers with advanced degrees in programming.”
But such is the hype about the promise of AI to replace human developers, the company instead had their staff pretending to be bots.
This is causing great amusement in the press, but really, it is just the tip of the iceberg. Many company marketing departments have slapped AI on non-AI products over the past two years.
What if the tide should turn, as more and more people see past the facade, to demand content created by actual professionals? That will happen, eventually. It’s the inevitable corrective path.
But it will probably only happen after a few more major cyber breaches, or when a few more Fortune 500 companies find they have undeployable code they have to secretly bring in previously laid-off consultants to fix.
There are those who believe they are doing us a favour but end up causing us great inconvenience.
I don’t deny that their intentions are good. Nevertheless, even these acts of kindness are a test for us.
How to respond to one who was only trying to help, or was merely being generous, however misguided?
Sometimes, it is hard to act in kind. But try, we must, regardless.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve wrestled with myself. Not with life’s external hardships — though they come and go — but with the quieter, deeper battle of how to remain present, purposeful, and disciplined when my mind seems to drift, loop, or spiral into distractions I never truly chose.
It has always felt like a moral issue, a failure of will, a spiritual shortcoming. And so, for years, I turned to religion, not out of guilt or pressure, but out of hope.
Hope that it might offer me reprieve. Out of yearning, or the deeply sincere belief that with enough intention, prayer, and tawbah, I could bend myself back into shape and silence the noise inside.
To be clear, faith has indeed helped. It gave structure, meaning, and a code of conduct when I lacked clarity. In a sense, I prescribed myself religion as a coping mechanism when I didn’t know what was wrong with me.
Yet now, later in life, I’ve come to see something I couldn’t name before: that my struggle may not just be spiritual weakness but also be neurological misalignment.
A form of impaired executive function. A brain wired for intense focus, but only when hijacked by novelty, emotion, or compulsion.
A pattern of behaviour that may look from the outside like laziness or distraction, but feels, on the inside, like being trapped in a cage, watching yourself self-sabotage, but unable to stop it.
This realisation doesn’t negate the faith I’ve held to all these years. If anything, it expands it.
It tells me that perhaps what I need now is not just more willpower, but a more holistic approach. One that includes structure alongside sermons, self-understanding alongside self-rebuke, compassion alongside accountability, and tools and tactics alongside dua and dhikr.
I still believe in ethical discipline, moral responsibility, and accountability. But I now see that expecting faith alone to carry what is also psychological and neurological may not be the most faithful approach. Sometimes, tawakkul means trusting that God created minds to be understood, not just judged.
This is where I find myself right now: not in defeat — although often it feels that way — but in deep reflection. Walking the long road home, with more realism, more humility, more self-understanding, and — in between each moment of dark despair — with just a little hope as well.
I wonder: had I gone to a normal state school, might I simply have been considered as of average intelligence?
It’s only now, as our kids go through exams, that it occurs to me that maybe I was misled about my own talents.
For whereas scoring 70% in an exam at my selective school was considered a poor result, marking me down as an idiot, at our kids’ schools, this seems to be considered moderately good.
Selective schools can create intense academic environments where being “average” suddenly feels like failing, especially when surrounded by high-achieving peers.
Yet, nowadays, even 60% would be considered a solid result, and in many cases, the equivalent of a strong pass, depending on the subject and year.
However, it just didn’t feel that way when the benchmark was skewed by a selective setting and a narrow definition of success. Hence, the distortion of self-image.
Sometimes, being average in a room full of exceptionally high performers might just mean I was normal in a very abnormal context.
It wasn’t necessarily that I lacked intelligence. Looking back, maybe I was doing just fine. Only the system didn’t acknowledge different strengths or learning styles.
Certainly, at my school, excellence was defined as being a rugby pro, a classical musician, or an academic success. I failed in all three. At least, I thought I did.
After thirty years considering myself a failure, maybe it’s time to change that narrative. Sure, I may not have been a genius. But was I really a dunce?
It seems I was just average. Fairly normal. Even typical. If only I had known!
How hard can it be for a righteous woman living in a Muslim country to find a religious spouse?
Very, apparently.
For religious men, she’s too educated. For educated men, she’s too religious.
And, of course, she has very demanding criteria.
No, not that he buys her a house and a BMW. Just two demands: he prays and doesn’t smoke.
You’d imagine the first would be easy in a Muslim country. But the latter: insurmountable.
Yet these two she will not compromise on. For she’s seen what happened to friends who compromised.
One of her closest ended up with a gambling addict, who ultimately left her with her children.
“I’d rather not marry at all,” the righteous woman now declares, “than go through what she went through.”
Life is hard out there. All of my advice is hopeless — pray, give charity, let go of inner conceit — for she’s better than all of us.
What’s left, other than a miracle? Well, don’t scoff — miracles happen. Just look at me! When it’s decreed for you, it will be.
The British government has plans to replace 10,000 junior civil service jobs with AI chatbots.
All I can say is, “Good luck with that!”
Those chatbots can be a great productivity aid. But they’re not really a replacement for people.
If anything, they’re about as competent as those junior roles they’re seeking to replace.
Here I am, using an AI chatbot to assist me in a project. Already this evening, I’ve picked up on a dozen mistakes it made.
It also suffers from being a bit too obedient. At one point, I asked it to explain why it had formulated a response the way it did.
Instead of it standing its ground, it immediately started rewriting it to conform to my approach, whereas all I was seeking was clarification.
When I later pointed out that what it said it was doing wasn’t the same as its actual output, it responded, “You’re absolutely right — I’m getting a bit muddled!”
In short, when I’m using this tool, I feel very much like I’m working with a junior colleague who’s trying their best to please.
Sometimes, its outputs are just astounding. But sometimes it’s just plain wrong. If I didn’t have my own expertise, I could easily be seriously mistaken.
So, to the Brutish (fitting typo) government seeking to entrust important work to these tools: I suggest obtaining some expert advice first. And no, that doesn’t mean asking your nearest chatbot.
Also — PS — how are you going to raise the next generation of senior civil servants if you cut all the entry-level jobs? Just asking.
