🧠 How AI Kills Your WOW Moments

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Welcome back AI prodigies!

In today’s Sunday Special:

• 📜The Prelude

• 💨Serendipity Comes and Goes.

• 🔐How Can I Reclaim Serendipity?

• 🔮Choosing Mystery in a Predictive World

• 🔑Key Takeaway

Read Time: 7 minutes

🎓Key Terms

• Personal Agency: An individual’s capacity to act independently.

• Predictive AI: The ability to identify patterns, anticipate behaviors, and forecast future preferences.

🩺 PULSE CHECK

📜THE PRELUDE

You ask ChatGPT: “Draft an email asking my boss for time off.”

It generates a polite, polished, and professional ready-to-use template. Then, it instantly follows up with: “Do you want me to make it more formal, casual, or detailed?”

ChatGPT predicts your next move, suggesting adjustments to both tone and substance without you even asking. But in ChatGPT’s process of anticipating your every need, what do you lose? Perhaps a moment of friction that forces clarity?

Friction is more than just an inconvenience. It’s a critical moment where you consider, reframe, and refine your intentions. It’s where you experience serendipity: when you stumble upon something unexpectedly valuable.

Predictive AI thrives on eliminating friction. From autoplay to autocomplete, it’s designed to save you time and effort, foreseeing your needs before you even fully understand them yourself.

So, why is serendipity so valuable? How might Predictive AI be quietly taking it away by filtering out what’s unlikely and prioritizing what’s probable?

💨SERENDIPITY COMES AND GOES.

⦿ 1️⃣ The Value of Serendipity.

Imagine you’re wandering around New York City on a damp mid-summer morning, air still heavy from passing storms. As you weave through the foot traffic on William Street, you catch a familiar scent of freshly ground beans. You quickly scan the streetscape, but don’t notice a coffee shop within sight.

Soon, the aroma hits you once more. It isn’t coming from street level; it’s coming from below. You follow the scent down to a basement, where a faint glow spills out onto the gray corridor. Inside, sleek metallic counters curve like the hulls of spacecraft, and a yellow-lit shelf showcases whole-bean coffee.

It’s an intergalactic-themed coffee shop, inspired by American astronomer and planetary scientist Carl Sagan’s fascination with the cosmos. Through sheer serendipity, you’ve just discovered Voyager Espresso, one of NYC’s coolest coffee shops.

You didn’t hear about it on TikTok. No one told you it existed, let alone how to get there. Instead, you stumbled upon it, with the discovery unfolding in three surprises. First, you had no idea coffee was nearby. Second, you couldn’t trace where the aroma was coming from. Third, you didn’t expect an intergalactic vibe.

Delight came from not knowing it existed, where it was, and what it would be like. Each discovery in that small mystery built anticipation, which made the payoff richer. Not only did the suspense make your morning more fun, but it also made it more memorable.

⦿ 2️⃣ How We Lose It.

Just like curated suggestions from Yelp can thwart the magic of stumbling upon a hidden intergalactic coffee shop, Predictive AI removes the suspense of online discovery. Netflix auto-plays the next episode. YouTube queues up the next video. TikTok never lets us pick what to watch. The little puzzles of life are automated away. Yes, Predictive AI shows us things we would’ve never found on our own: useful products, great TV shows, and fun videos. But most good things come at some cost.

In psychology, Prediction Error (PE) refers to the gap between initial expectation and immediate reality. When reality contradicts our expectations, our brains pause, rewire, and pay attention. But Predictive AI rapidly serves us the next thing to consume, removing the opportunity to develop expectations. If we lack expectations, reality can’t disrupt them. When we accept an AI-powered recommendation, we accept reality as it’s served to us. Instead of experiencing “aha” moments, we subconsciously justify our selection as we click: “Oh, I would’ve wanted that.” So how do we preserve serendipity in this increasingly predictable AI-powered world?

🔐HOW CAN I RECLAIM SERENDIPITY?

⦿ 3️⃣ Adding Friction to Digital Experience.

First, we must make it harder to access apps that continually serve us AI-powered recommendations.

Many of us have likely tried to limit screen time. iOS devices offer App Limits, allowing you to cap an app at, say, 15 minutes per day. When the cap is reached, three options appear: “Add One More Minute,” “Remind Me in 15 Minutes,” or “Ignore Limit for Today” (i.e., with or without a passcode). The passcode option introduces the most friction. Similarly, Android devices offer App Timers through the Digital Wellbeing feature.

Still, no friction is perfect. Limits and nudges can always be bypassed, unless someone else sets the passcode for you. And none of these App Limits or App Timers address the deeper issue: the user experience itself, which strips away surprise, wonder, and the natural pauses where reflection and self-direction once thrived.

⦿ 4️⃣ Reshaping the User Experience.

Friction alone isn’t enough. Even if we add pauses and passcodes, the design of these apps still overwhelms us with endless AI-powered recommendations. To truly “de-addict” our digital habits, we have to go one step further: reshape the user experience itself within the app.

This means stripping away the very AI-based mechanics that make apps so sticky: autoplay, infinite feeds, algorithmic recommendations, and pushy notifications. Here’s how to “de-addict” your TikTok, Instagram, and Netflix experiences.

🔮CHOOSING MYSTERY IN A PREDICTIVE WORLD

We’re immersed in a world increasingly designed to predict and prescribe, where every moment is curated and every choice is forecasted. Why?! Because AI-powered algorithms are designed to optimize, serving us exactly what we want, when we want it.

Stripping away the AI-based mechanics that make apps like TikTok, Instagram, and Netflix so sticky can help us reclaim some of our Personal Agency. But the deeper challenge goes beyond timers and toggles. It’s about preserving the space for serendipity to thrive.

Think back to the hidden intergalactic coffee shop on William Street. The magic wasn’t in the coffee, location, or vibe. It was in the suspense and mystery of not knowing it was there. The thrill of wandering into the unknown. Compare that to the predictive AI-powered ecosystems of TikTok, Instagram, and Netflix, where mystery is engineered away before curiosity even forms.

That hidden intergalactic coffee shop is still out there. The real question is whether we’ll leave enough gaps in our lives to stumble upon it, or stay too busy following the next AI-powered recommendation to smell the coffee brewing right beneath our feet.

🔑KEY TAKEAWAY

Predictive AI offers efficiency but erodes the small moments that add meaning to our lives and build lasting memories. By adding friction, we can regain control over our time and create more opportunities for serendipity. Ultimately, life with more spontaneity is more exciting.

📒FINAL NOTE

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