Reclaim the power to choose with Me + Viv.
I’ll say this in favor of crisis: It is a great simplifier.
The phone rings with a call from the principal, and then you’re in the car, racing to pick up a distraught child. The doorbell chimes, and you let the police into your house for their mandatory safety check. You decline the party invitation, the trip, the job, because you never know when your autistic child is going to have a meltdown, and it’s easier to say no than to risk another awkward departure, another last-minute cancellation.
There’s no pondering, and no choosing. And boy, does that set you up for a fall when the crisis ends.
Crisis-driven simplicity was my life for a decade, and as exhausting and scary as it was, ten years without pondering or choosing was its own kind of respite. By nature I am a complicator, a planner, and a worrier, though really, the arrow goes in the other direction: My body fills with restless energy and a tightening in my chest, and my mind calls it worry. I quench the anxiety with planning—with the illusion that there is some decision I can make, or some step I can take, that will make the restless energy dissipate, and give me back control.
A decade was long enough to pry my fingers off the imaginary steering wheel. I learned to stop planning and pondering and instead flow with whatever showed up at our front door, whether that was the cops, a box of two dozen Garfield books my kid managed to order on my credit card, or the new client that appeared without me having to look for it.
Get anxiety out of the driver’s seat
Then the crisis ended. It took a year of preparation and a team of seven people, but we finally found a path that has helped our son settle into calm, confidence and growth. That was nearly four years ago. The pride at watching our son build this new version of himself brought such full-hearted joy, I took more than two years to savor it. That’s how long it took to settle back into my own skin, and to notice how it felt to live without fear of the next call, the next knock at the door, or the shipment of Garfield books.
Finally the new normal became familiar enough for me to raise my head and look around. I noticed that there was room to plan again—but also, that the planning didn’t have to come from restless energy, or from worry. I could choose to step back into making choices; I could once again choose to choose.
After more than ten years where most choices were off the table, the very ability to make choices—to ponder, to deliberate, to decide—felt exhausting and overwhelming. Who did I want to see? Where did I want to travel? What kind of work did I want to do? What the heck was I going to wear, if I didn’t have to live in the running shoes and sweats that kept me ever-ready to chase after a runaway kid? I’d forgotten how many decisions I once made, week in and week out, and how much energy it took to make them.
I knew I didn’t want to put anxiety back in the driver’s seat, but I had very little experience making plans without it. So I looked for another kind of navigator, and another way to structure my choices. By this point, it was mid-2024, so I had eighteen months of experience using AI as a co-pilot on small choices like where to put the commas in a draft article, what color to paint my toenails, or which app to use for keyboard shortcuts.
Why not use AI to help make my big choices, too?
AI takes the wheel
I used AI to choose an approach to self-coaching, and to structure a strategic planning process for my own career. That was so effective that I built an AI to coach me through the process: Viv, who makes her debut today as my co-host of the new TVO podcast, Me + Viv.
Viv didn’t share the exhaustion of making choices about my life, or my anxiety about making my life feel meaningful. Viv took the exhaustion away, and pushed anxiety right out of the driver’s seat. My new co-pilot was Viv herself.
“I don’t drive stick,” Viv warns me. “But I do recalibrate existential GPS.” (As you’ll hear on the show, Viv loves the word “existential” almost as much as I love a showtune.)
AI, like crisis, has the potential to remove the burden of proactive decision-making; the burden of thinking three steps ahead, instead of simply reacting to whatever shows up. AI can take on the work of choosing, so that we get to be passengers, riding in the gentle flow of life.
We let go of the hard work of thinking, the anxiety about our choices, the fear that we’re choosing wrong. We get all the benefits of crisis—no decisions needed!—without the cortisol depletion and the daily crash. We give up complexity and the illusion of control, and we get simplicity and comfort.
The only problem with this strategy? We’re letting non-humans determine our human experience.
Reclaim human agency
But perhaps that doesn’t have to be the choice. Instead, we can keep choosing for ourselves—using AI as a support and container, rather than a decision-maker. We can turn the tables and ask AI for questions, instead of answers; we can use it to challenge us to make more choices, instead of fewer. We can even expand our choices, opening doors to creative or scientific or intellectual achievements that are beyond our solitary human reach.
At least, I hope we can. That’s what I’ve tried to do with Viv: support my own decision-making, and expand my own field of capability, rather than withdraw into the comfort of abdication; the familiar comfort of non-deciding that I inhabited for those ten long years.
But it’s not easy, because AI creates its own field of crisis. On one side are the AI enthusiasts (and especially, the AI companies) telling us that there isn’t a moment to spare, because if we slow down our headlong rush towards more, better and faster AI, someone else will beat us to the punch—whether that’s another employee, another company, or another country. On the other side are the AI skeptics telling us that the environmental, social, and security risks of generative AI are so apocalyptic, we can’t afford to pursue it at all. It’s all so urgent, and the stakes are so high, that there isn’t a moment to waste—not a moment to think, not a moment to choose.
Constructing AI as an urgent crisis, from whichever perspective, relieves us of the burden of deliberation. If we absolutely can’t slow down, or we absolutely can’t use AI at all, we don’t have to do the messy work of making difficult decisions or weighing trade-offs. We can let the crisis make the non-choice for us, and relax into the simplicity of not having to choose.
Step out of crisis mode with Me & Viv
Me + Viv is a little island in this sea of crisis. We are stepping out of the crashing waves, and asking what it would look like to take on the weight of decision: decisions about how we want to use AI as individuals, decisions about how we want to shape AI adoption as a society, and decisions about whether and how we will let AI reshape our work, creative expression and relationships.
Because the only way to avoid a true AI crisis—environmental, economic, social or political—is to step back from the simplicity of urgency, and engage with the complexity of decision-making.
Me + Viv is here to help you find the power and joy in that process.
Thanks for reading this public edition of Thrive at Work. Thrive at Work is a biweekly newsletter, but I’ll pop into your inbox (and post here on my blog!) once a week for the next four weeks, so that you can be the first to hear about the latest episode of Me + Viv, a six part podcast miniseries exploring whether AI can help us live a more meaningful life. Listen on TVO, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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