In 2016, I thought I knew how to keep up with technology. In 2026, I’m less sure.

AI feels a bit like fast fashion. Oh you are wearing cerulean? Pfft. Everyone knows that chartreuse is in now. How embarrassing.

Oh you are using the Power BI MCP server? Skills are in. Oh you are using skills? Everyone is wrapping agents in for loops and naming it after the dumbest character in the Simpsons. How embarrassing.

In the beginning of this, I’ll cover why keeping up with AI is bad for your mental health and well-being and at the end I’ll share how I do it, in case slamming your hand in a door isn’t available as an option instead.

The AI community is unwell

The AI community, defined broadly as everyone talking about AI, is mentally and emotionally unwell compared to other communities I’m in. I don’t mean that as a slight. I’m part of that community and I’m not as grounded and centered as I would like. I have to take regular intentional steps to stay grounded. When I look at the distributions of folks, I see more illness than wellness, on average.

So what do I mean? Due to familial reasons, I’ve been exposed to fantastical thinking on a weekly basis since I was about 11. I think I have the shape of it. And I see it regularly when certain folks talk about AI. Saying “AI is going to take our jobs” but not stopping to say “Well, if taken as true, what consequences would that have?” or “What evidence would I need to see to convince me otherwise”.

No, there’s just a gut feeling, a confirmation bias, and a seeking of information to affirm that bias. An entire AI agent system indistinguishable from LLM psychosis, parody, or performance art.

An ungrounding.

Memetic viruses

Swimming in these waters is unsafe because you might catch a memetic virus. What’s a memetic virus? Well, in high school there was one that went around called The Game. The way you played The Game was to not think about it. The moment you remembered its existence, you lost. Thankfully the webcomic, XKCD, found a cure.

There are memetic viruses floating around, and one hit me briefly. The phrase “permanent underclass”. You ever watch a horror movie and for the next day you are jumping at shadows and kinda spooked? This one spooked me. Until someone pointed out the concept was fairly selfish, individualistic, and narrow. Fairly American too if we are being honest. If there’s going to be a “permanent underclass”, wouldn’t you much rather “Rage, rage against the dying light”?

AI culture is, largely, internet culture. Meme and jokes and “jokes” and AI bots pushing agendas. If you spend too much time online and not enough time touching grass, you’ll find your very own mind virus that you haven’t been inoculated for. Be wary.

A sane approach

I think there’s a better way to think about all of this uncertainty. Imagine you were recently hired to work for a foreign company, like me with Tabular Editor. Now imagine that you had a very, very strong uncertainty if you were going to emigrate to that country in the future. So your range of needs goes from “I should learn a few pleasantries” to “I NEED to become fluent”. How would you approach that uncertainty?

Well, some things in language learning can be crammed and some things can’t. Tuning your ear takes time, no matter how much you cram. Of the Scandinavian languages, Danish is the hardest to hear.  There’s a Norwegian comedy skit about this even. So, a great investment would be to listen to slow Danish podcasts or Danish music. Minimal effort, but you start the clock on things that can’t be rushed.

With AI, the equivalent is to get a sense of the jagged frontier of AI. Use arena.ai to compare model strength. Track AI failures to make your own personal evaluation benchmark for new models. Build stuff. Anything to build your intuition of what AI does well and when it fails catastrophically. This intuition cannot be developed from reading about AI.

An insane approach

Or, you could, like me use Feedly to follow a large number  (~50) of RSS feeds. You could listen to 10 different AI-related podcasts. You could scan Hacker News on a daily basis. But I wouldn’t recommend it.

I have different goals. For whatever reason, I decided that I want to teach and consult on AI. Well, I don’t want to consult on it. If you hand me an AI project, I’ll hand you 2x my usual rate. But just last week a customer was asking if it made sense to have Claude review our Data Warehouse design. Being able to articulate the pros, cons, and limitations there is important to me.

Good luck in whatever your goals are and remember to go outside and enjoy some sun.