Let me tell you about the “first pancake” principle, because it’s the only framework that makes sense of the last two weeks of my life.

We spend so much time hiding behind the illusion of optimization, waiting for the perfect plan, querying the algorithm, running the model.

Nothing actually happens when you plan because execution eats planning for breakfast.

So I partnered with one of the most brilliant people I always learn from and we ran an experiment.

And here is something I need to confess immediately, before we go any further: I’ve been calling this an “AI experiment” for two weeks. I LIED. Sort of. We’ll get to that.

The Setup

A few weeks ago, I handed the keys to my wardrobe (and by extension, my nervous system) to two very different intelligences.

The first: AI. Tasked as my Tactical Logistics Officer. Weather analysis, calendar optimization, outfit recommendations. Pure efficiency. (Remember I’m not promoting any particular apps, these insights are my own. (I do not represent Google in this experiment).

The second: Alyssa Beltempo. Slow fashion stylist, educator, and the person who will make you realize that your overflowing wardrobe and your total lack of outfit confidence are not a coincidence. She built an entire philosophy: creativity over consumption, shop what you have, dress the woman who actually exists, promoting the very un-fast-fashion idea that a good life is rich in experiences, not units.

The question: which intelligence would actually survive a week in my life: a 15-hour NYC gauntlet involving two kids, a golden retriever puppy who treats my furniture like a subscription service, and a nervous system that treats an itchy sweater like a Category 3 incident?

Day 1: AI vs. The Laundry Bin 🤖🧺

The AI delivered a flawless recommendation. COS white tee, COS brown barrel jeans, suede tote, also COS. (Yes, lots of the same brands in my capsule: it’s partly because I’m autistic, so when I like something, I lock in intensely and loop). The suggestions were logical, consistent and seasonally appropriate, by the way.

However, all of it was in the laundry.

Also: my son Teddy had a morning school field trip to the Central Park reservoir, which is a beautiful place but there is a lot of mud. White tees and Central Park with a bunch of third graders in the mud - do not mix. This is not a variable the algorithm had accounted for. This is also not a variable I thought to mention, which is, frankly, on both of us.

I abandoned the entire plan, wrapped myself in baggy jeans, an oversized black cashmere sweater I honestly wear non stop, and spent the morning in the dirt while nine-year-olds built water pipes and learned that New York City has the world’s largest municipal water supply network which was genuinely fascinating and entirely random (go New York though!).

I was late for all my afternoon meetings. I remembered to eat because I walked past the café with an awesome view and was like, let me enjoy this view one last time before I totally get fired.

First nagging thought: the system I’d just called “AI” had retrieved weather data and matched it to calendar events. This is machine learning. Possibly just a very confident spreadsheet. But we’ll get to that.

🏆 SCOREBOARD: AI 0 — Alyssa 0 — Valerie 0 — Laundry Bin 1

Day 2: The Vulnerability Hangover, Featuring My Face 🍷🦞

It was Alyssa’s turn. She pre-styled me for the day at the office followed by an elegant happy hour: black Nation LA blouse, cream Everlane trousers, my favorite long black trench, options for shoes. The kind of outfit that says “I have considered this” without trying too hard. Human intuition, fully deployed.

Naturally, the happy hour was canceled. A surprise team event appeared on my calendar instead.

I should explain the team event. A few weeks ago, I moved from an Engineering team into the Office of the CIO, so I don’t know everyone on the team. Also, they’re all business strategy people, program managers, stakeholders who speak in frameworks rather than APIs. I am, in this context, a tech nerd.

And so the fun part is that I did (gasp) microneedling the night before (yes, I know). My face was, clinically speaking, the color of a fire hydrant, and of course you’re not allowed a drop of makeup, not that it would have helped, to be honest.

So: new team, and I walked in glowing like a radioactive tomato wearing Alyssa’s perfectly calibrated human-intuition outfit. Enter Brené Brown’s vulnerability hangover that nauseating wave of regret that hits right after you’ve exposed your unpolished self. Every instinct screamed: fake an emergency, reschedule until your face stops looking like it lost an argument with a waffle iron.

I walked into the room anyway. And guess what? Nobody gave a shit. Even if they did, nobody said anything or even looked at me weird. And after that it hit me: professional peers don’t connect with optics, they connect with value. Whether you show up, solve the problem, move the needle. That’s it: zero ego, zero interest in your skincare situation.

Alyssa won this one decisively.

🏆 SCOREBOARD: AI 0 — Alyssa 1 — Valerie 0 — Laundry Bin 1 — My Face: Undefeated

Day 3: I Will Not Wear The Skirt 👖

The AI suggested a skirt.

A skirt?

What? NO.

I am balancing early school pickups (no regrets, by the way), a golden retriever puppy actively engaged in psychological warfare against my furniture, and a work calendar that pivots roughly every forty-five minutes.

Tech-stack logic does not compute survival mode.

I said no thank you, put on denim and a black top, and the canceled happy hour transformed into a gorgeous rooftop breakfast at the Google terrace. I picked up the kids early. I played with the dog. I let the schedule slide.

The AI had the right aesthetic instinct for the original plan. The original plan no longer existed. It had no way of knowing that.

Second nagging thought: the system that recommended the skirt had simply analyzed data and matched patterns. It did not understand that my schedule had changed, that my nervous system needed ground-level comfort, or that denim is basically armor. This is not intelligence. This is a very well-trained lookup table.

🏆 SCOREBOARD: AI 1 — Alyssa 1 — Valerie 1 — Laundry Bin 1 — My Face: Undefeated — The Skirt: DNF

Day 4: Surrender 🐱

Alyssa had planned a killer outfit. Comedy show in the evening. But my nervous system formally went on strike.

I worked from home in basics, canceled the comedy club, and spent the evening being groomed by my cat Phoebe. She pets me, not the other way around. I have accepted this dynamic completely.

Here’s the thing about winging it: it also means trusting yourself enough to know when the only correct move is the couch. No algorithm was going to give me that permission. That required being a human animal who knows her own limits.

🏆 SCOREBOARD: AI 1 — Alyssa 1 — Valerie 1 — Laundry Bin 1 — My Face: Undefeated — The Skirt: DNF — Phoebe: Won without trying

Day 5: Walking Through The Door

I threw together an outfit using a mix of Alyssa’s recommendations, and a friend grabbed last-minute tickets to an off-Broadway play: What Happened Was... a searingly intimate two-hander about attraction, secrets, and the desperate cost of letting someone in.

Sitting in that theater watching Cecily Strong and Corey Stoll dismantle each other brought the entire experiment into sharp focus.

We use data and planning to map every variable because we are terrified of the unknown. We want the frictionless guarantee. But a truly human experience requires the counterintuitive, terrifying leap of faith to walk through a door when you don’t know what’s on the other side.

No tool can take that leap for you.

🏆 FINAL SCOREBOARD: Alyssa 2 — AI 1 — Valerie 1 — Laundry Bin: Undefeated — My Face: Undefeated — The Skirt: Still DNF — Phoebe: Won without trying

Okay. Now For The Thing I’ve Been Waiting To Tell You.

I’ve been calling this an “AI experiment” this entire time.

Here’s the problem: most of what I was describing as “AI” is not, technically, AI.

When you ask a system to retrieve information, match patterns, or make a prediction based on historical data, that’s machine learning.

Machine learning (ML) has been running quietly in the background of your life for well over a decade, doing pretty cool things, getting almost no credit, and requiring approximately zero of the hype it’s currently receiving:

• Spotify Discover Weekly = ML. It doesn’t feel the music. It noticed you listened to sad songs at 2am three Tuesdays in a row and drew its own conclusions.

• Netflix telling you “because you watched Succession...” = ML. Collaborative filtering. It doesn’t understand drama. It just knows you watch things at 11pm when you should be sleeping.

• Google Maps calculating your ETA in real time = ML. Traffic data and math having a very fast conversation.

• Google Meet generating real-time captions with live translation = ML. Been doing this since 2017. Saved approximately one million meetings from total chaos.

• Your bank flagging a suspicious transaction = ML anomaly detection. Statistics noticing you’ve never shopped in Bulgaria before.

• Autocorrect changing “duck” to something unprintable = an n-gram language model from 2008 that has never once learned from its mistakes.

• Smart Reply in Gmail (”Sounds great!”, “Happy to help!”, “I’ll look into it!”) = a sequence-to-sequence model that has never had a feeling about anything, ever, in its entire existence.

Actual generative AI is when the system creates something that didn’t exist before, like writing a draft, generating an image, building code from a description, synthesizing across documents to produce novel output.

Uploading photos of your closet and having an algorithm mix-and-match an outfit based on the weather forecast? Still just Machine Learning. It is just filtering a database of your clothes.

This matters because we’ve collectively agreed to call everything “AI” right now, which does two things: it makes the mundane sound revolutionary, and it obscures the very real environmental cost of actually running generative models at scale.

Using a massive, energy-intensive generative AI stack to figure out whether to wear a sweater is the technological equivalent of using a forklift to move a houseplant. The compute cost of a complex generative query versus a simple lookup is not trivial. You do not need a neural network to tell you it’s raining, you can look out the ducking window. A window has operated at zero energy cost for several thousand years and has never once hallucinated.

And if we call everything AI, we stop asking what it’s actually good for. ML is extraordinary at pattern recognition, retrieval, prediction, and classification all of which has been quietly revolutionizing your life since before your kids started school. Generative AI is extraordinary at synthesis, creation, and novel output. They are not the same thing, and pretending otherwise just makes it harder to use either of them well.

Three Things The Experiment Actually Proved

1. Style is somatic, not algorithmic

Alyssa’s entire philosophy is built on this. Shopping your closet isn’t a mood board exercise, it’s a physical, tactile practice. You have to touch the fabric, wear the thing, feel it on your body at hour six of a New York Tuesday. The AI built a perfect outfit in theory. It had no access to the laundry schedule, the mud situation, the nervous system report from 7am. The body knows before the model does.

2. Use the right tool (seriously)

Not every problem requires the most sophisticated tool available, in fact, most problems don’t. Matching the right tool to the right task, and refusing to over-engineer the rest, is both more efficient and significantly lower impact. This applies to fashion consumption and to compute.

3. Predictability is an illusion, execution is the point

The AI gave me a perfect plan on Day 1. The laundry laughed. Alyssa gave me a beautiful outfit on Day 2. Reality threw microneedling and a team event at me. Good planning is about direction and vision, but execution is what actually happens. And execution requires a human who can feel the room shift, notice the happy hour has been canceled, and decide, in real time, to wear the jeans.

The “Market Finder”, The Pancake, And Why None Of This Is New

Before I pivoted into AI/ML, I spent eight years on Google’s Global Expansion Team where one of the many things we did was, we helped build a beautiful tool Google Market Finder, I think it’s still well and alive (and free) on Think with Google, a mathematical marvel that could pinpoint the perfect market for international growth and theoretically automate most of what our team did.

It didn’t replace us.

Here is why:

(Quick demo): you enter your website URL OR your product category, your industry → It will synthesize search demand, purchasing power, competitive signals, consumer behavior patterns, digital infrastructure scores (and thousands of categories across hundreds of markets) and will surface where your product has the highest growth potential.

What you get is, in the most flattering possible way, a digital mood board for global domination.

It tells you, for example: India. 1.4 billion people, enormous search volume, much of it in English, one of the fastest growing digital consumer markets on the planet.

What it cannot tell you is that “India” is not a market. It is 28 states and 8 union territories, 22 scheduled languages, 121 major languages, 270 mother tongues. The English queries that made the dashboard glow is the internet’s lingua franca, not a proxy for cultural fluency, not a guarantee that your checkout flow makes sense to anyone, and definitely not a signal that one market entry strategy will work from Mumbai to Chennai to Lucknow to Bangalore. (The actual move here, and I say this having watched enough face-plants to know, is to pick one city and treat it like a country. Mumbai is not India. But done right, Mumbai is a masterclass that earns you the right to attempt the rest.)

And that’s actually the small thing.

The bigger thing (the thing Market Finder can’t model) is that entering a new market isn’t about optimization: it’s not taking your domestic brand, adding a currency converter and a translation layer, and calling it global. It’s starting a relationship from zero as a new brand where nobody owes you attention.

The data can tell you the door is open. It cannot tell you how to walk through it without looking like you’ve never left your own house before.

Every expansion that actually worked had one thing in common: the brand was willing to make the ugly first pancake. To show up before they were ready. To be small in a new place long enough to become real there, with zero ego: Market Finder can map the territory beautifully. It cannot manufacture the willingness to get lost in it.

So stop waiting for the perfect data set to guarantee you won’t look foolish.

Go grab your pan, make the pancake, and let it be wonderfully, structurally, irreparably imperfect.

This is the conclusion of the AI vs. AB experiment, a YouTube video coming soon! The full setup lives in Fashion Is a Nervous System Problem. Alyssa Beltempo’s slow fashion universe is at @msbeltempo - go fall into it. The laundry bin is available for comment but has not responded to requests.

Leave a comment

Every other animal on this planet is born finished: a tiger never wakes up thinking: “Is this stripe too aggressive for Q2?” A bird doesn’t stand frozen in front of a closet at 7:43 am wondering whether this jacket communicates “approachable authority”.

Humans are born completely unfinished. We emerge into the world screaming and naked and then spend the next several decades building a person out of fabric, rituals, caffeine, and vibes.

Anthropologically speaking, clothing is one of the oldest technologies humans ever invented.

Clothing serves as much more than a mere shield against the cold; it is a profound tool for manifesting identity, signaling belonging, navigating hierarchy, and expressing the raw complexities of seduction, grief, and transformation.

Before we wrote laws, we were already communicating through adornment.

There is nothing random about a linen wrap, a fur cloak, indigo dye, silver rings, embroidery, a cut of wool. Clothing told the tribe who you were before you even opened your mouth: whether you were the warrior or the mother, the widow or the bride, the outcast, the leader, the dangerous person or the one to trust.

Fashion has always been social code disguised as aesthetics. A ritual we participate in every morning before entering society, and maybe that’s why getting dressed has never felt “shallow” to me (because it isn’t). It’s the ultimate ritual of identity construction.

I think this is also why fashion is absolutely not trivial for neurodivergent people.

People imagine “getting dressed” as this effortless, decorative thing. Meanwhile my brain treats it like a high-stakes systems operation. Because a Tuesday morning can already be a lot, like, children shrieking + animals whining, construction drilling + ambulance sirens + twenty-seven overlapping conversations + wind tunnel between buildings + someone breathing directly on your nervous system
- kind of way. And I don’t even take the subway. I walk everywhere, like miles and miles.

Which sounds romantic until it’s July and you’re navigating a sidewalk that feels like a literal kiln, trapped behind a tourist drifting at a glacial pace who somehow occupies the exact center of the pavement, making it impossible to overtake them while the stagnant, 100-degree air turns your professional composure into a slow-motion meltdown.

By the time I actually sit down to work, my brain has already spent hours processing texture, sound, temperature, movement, social cues, eye contact, and whether my sweater is itchy in a psychologically destabilizing way. And an itchy sweater can absolutely become the final domino before the system collapses.

This is where brilliant Alyssa Beltempo completely rewired how I think about fashion and consumption. If you haven’t fallen into her corner of the internet yet, start with her YouTube channel, it’s less “buy this” and more “why do we keep buying versions of ourselves in the first place?”

Because sustainable fashion isn’t just about “buying better fabric and saving the turtles”, it goes much deeper than that. She talks about clothing as a creative relationship instead of passive consumption, which sounds logical and kind of obvious until you realize most of us shop like emotionally unstable raccoons.

We panic-buy identities and fantasy selves, chasing a hit of dopamine in the form of the woman who definitely drinks lemon water and answers emails with a calm, unshakeable composure.

Meanwhile the actual clothes we genuinely love are sitting in the closet waiting for us to stop cheating on them with polyester nonsense from Instagram ads.

What Alyssa taught me is that style isn’t about the performance of a trend; it’s about the integrity of the signal. It’s the search for the specific fabrics that allow my nervous system to finally unclench and the silhouettes that let me move without the constant, exhausting static of self-consciousness.

That realization changed everything. I stopped trying to curate an “impressive” image and started building a wardrobe that acts as a sanctuary, one that lets me exist in the world without the distraction of physical discomfort or the weight of a social mask.

People talk about “decision fatigue” as a minor inconvenience, but my brain experiences it like an Olympic sport. In the sensory gauntlet of New York, predictability isn’t just a preference, it’s peace. This is why a practical capsule is a functional necessity: the long wool coat that acts as a mobile perimeter, the oversized sweater that provides a soft buffer against the world, and fabrics that don’t make me want to peel my skin off by 3:00 PM. But building this capsule isn’t about shopping; it’s about a radical practice of observation. We have been conditioned to shop for an aspirational fiction who possesses a different nervous system, a different life, and the luxury of existing only in the abstract. Alyssa and I explored some of this on my podcast months ago.

Understanding your personal style through the clothes you actually wear, rather than the ones you keep for a “better” version of yourself, is an act of self-kindness. It’s moving away from the fantasy of who you should be and finally settling into the reality of who you are. When you stop dressing the fictional woman, you realize the real one is much easier to care for.

And here is the blind spot where AI completely misses the mark: it can predict a trend, it can generate a “look,” and it can calculate a statistical average, but a human being is not an average.

An algorithm can never comprehend the weight of the sweater you reach for when you need courage, nor can it map the silent relief of a fabric that feels like safety when the world is too loud. It cannot quantify the moment an outfit makes you feel, quite suddenly, capable of existing inside your own life.

That isn’t a problem to be solved by optimization. That is the soul of anthropology.

Lately my life has felt like a constant loop of cleaning puppy accidents, reheating the same coffee four times, trying to finish a book, remembering to eat protein, and attempting to maintain the illusion that I’m a very organized person.

This weekend I’m doing a full closet reset, not because I’m becoming a minimalist influencer (relax), but mostly because I need less noise, less artificial urgency, less random impulse purchases that solved an emotional problem for approximately five minutes. I want more human signal, more breathing room, more clothes that feel like me.

This weekend, the chaos goes laboratory-grade. I’m kicking off an experiment with Alyssa: “AI vs. AB”, where in the next few days we’re pitting algorithmic prediction against human intuition to see how we can actually build a uniform that survives the 15-hour NYC gauntlet. We’re using AI for what it’s actually good at, calculating wind-chill-to-conference-room ratios and mapping precipitation windows, while Alyssa will be doing something much harder: interpreting the human signal. Style has never been a matter of mere aesthetics. It is anthropology in motion, a complex web of ritual, identity, belonging, and communication.

It is the second skin humans invented to survive the friction of existing alongside one another.

And perhaps that is the ultimate goal: not to optimize ourselves into machines, but to delegate enough of that friction to the machines so we finally have the bandwidth to feel human again.

Autistic burnout isn’t just “tired.” It’s what happens right before the lights go out. It’s what happens when you’ve spent too long making everything look effortless. Until the effort finally catches up, And your internal operating system just… stops.

I usually spot the signs and try to reset. Sometimes it works.

Yesterday, it took ten minutes.

It wasn’t a real crisis, nor a major event: a soccer field changed location (second time in a row though).

So, yesterday, the field moved, which is, objectively, fine - whatever.

My brain: total system collapse.

I walked over with the puppy and the kids, in a downpour. The rain wasn’t cute, it was kind of aggressive. The kind that soaks through your clothes and your patience at the same time. The kids loved it, obviously. Running ahead like they’re in a black-and-white movie.

We get there to an empty field.

No game, no people. Just wet grass and unmet expectations. And this is where it gets disproportionate. I didn’t panic, I just stood there staring at mud like I’m waiting for it to explain itself, hiding that I was feeling so exhausted I could barely hold my umbrella.

Internally, though? Absolute chaos. Because here’s the thing about being “high-functioning”: You can run complex systems. You can make big decisions under pressure. But move a soccer field? Apparently, that’s where the empire falls.

We walk back.

I say nothing because I would love to explain what’s happening internally but it sounds insane even to me. We get home, I get into the shower. And my brain goes: Great, now we collapse.

Then I cry and cry. Cool. Love that for me.

And this is the part that actually hurts:

In that moment, it doesn’t feel like “I’m overwhelmed.”

It feels like:

what is wrong with me.

How can I just break over a field change? What kind of broken math is that?

And standing there under the water, crying harder than this situation could ever justify. I didn’t feel misunderstood.

I just felt completely alone.

Not the visible kind of alone.

The quieter version.

Where it feels like there is no environment designed for how your mind actually works.

And when I feel like that, not in a dramatic way, just in a very tired, practical way, I think: It would be easier to just… not be here.

Eventually, the water runs cold, I get out. Sit on the rug in the kids room. Kids are playing. Puppy is committing small crimes. I’m there, but like in beta mode.

At some point, I do what every highly competent adult does in 2026:

I ask an AI if I’m okay. I explain everything. The field. The rain. The glitch. Gemini listens. Then gently suggests: “Have you considered talking to a mental health professional?” I ignore it. It insists. At this point, I’m being referred to therapy By a machine I opened for efficiency.

Fine. I text my therapist. I say, “So, Gemini told me to talk to you.” He goes. “Oh good. So you still need me.” Then tells me “I’ve been using it sometimes. To prep.”

Of course you have.

So now we have: Me → Asking AI Therapist → Asking AI AI → Sending me to therapist

It’s not even a loop. It’s a fully integrated support ecosystem.

Anyway. No big resolution here. No life lesson. I’ll run the usual reset protocols:

Hot yoga.

Cold exposure (because apparently suffering, but on purpose, counts as nervous system regulation).

Writing, which, in hindsight, is probably just structured burnout in my case.

Huberman would be proud. I’m out here doing the physiological sighs and the morning sunlight, trying to biohack my way out of a logistical glitch.

But my actual favorite reset? Spring cleaning. There is something profoundly corrective about it.

When my internal operating system is crashing, I find I can manually reboot by organizing.

I’ve attempted this specific cleaning six times this year, but the weather, and my nervous system, keep messing with me.

It’s the ultimate Slow Fashion reset: purging the noise, finding the meaning, and finally shopping my closet. I’m currently teeing up another collaboration with my favorite slow fashion advocate, hopefully coming soon.

People ask me how I write a book.

This. This is how.

The recent research by Starr & Fraser (2025/2026) regarding the human neocortex has finally provided the biological evidence for what anthropologists have long suspected. By analyzing the “human-accelerated” L2/3 neurons, they found the exact genetic shifts that gave humans language, abstract thought, and complex social intelligence… are also the ones linked to Autism and Schizophrenia.

This shattered the long-held medical myth that neurodivergence is a deviation from a healthy center. Instead, the data suggests that these traits are the accelerants of our species. We did not evolve despite these variations; we evolved through them.

In the broader field of Evolutionary Anthropology, we see that human survival has never depended on a single standard cognitive type, but on a strategic distribution. The success of the early human collective relied on the existence of these diverse types. Imagine the ASD whose pattern-integrity allowed them to map the stars and track migration with a precision the social generalist could not maintain. Their deep, objective focus flowed into the work of the ADHD novelty-seeker who was the first to detect a predator or locate a new resource while the group was stuck in routine. This adaptability was further bolstered by the Dyslexic brain that was wired for finding new territories that a more standardized brain would overlook, while the ultra-performance cycles of the Bipolar brain provided the leadership and strategic energy required to push a tribe through a crisis. A tribe made entirely of homogeneous minds doesn’t survive very long; it plateaus, and it turns out evolution runs on outliers.

These diverse roles were held by what we might call a cultural container. In ancestral societies, these traits were not seen as deficits to be cured, but as functions to be integrated. This is perhaps most visible in the shamanic container traditionally provided for Schizophrenia. In these contexts, hearing voices was not a medical emergency; it was a specialized reception, often seen as a direct line to ancestral metaphor. By providing a ritual role and a social context, the tribe integrated the individual, giving them a place to land rather than leaving the person in terrifying isolation. We see this same ancestral care in the archaeological record of Down Syndrome. Individuals who might be viewed today through the lens of burden were instead the social glue of their tribes. Their presence necessitated a deep prosociality, patience, care, and non-verbal empathy, that strengthened the entire community’s cohesion, as evidenced by the high-status burials of ND individuals found in Saint-Jean-des-Vignes.

Sidebar: The Disability Mismatch (Etic vs. Emic)

The Etic Perspective (Medical Model): This is the “outsider” view. It treats disability as a biological deficit located entirely within the individual. It uses universal, standardized metrics (like the DSM) to label a person as a “deviation” from a healthy center, demanding a cure or suppression to return them to a “normal” baseline.

The Emic Perspective (Anthropological Model): This is the “insider” view. It recognizes that disability is a relationship between a body and its environment. In this model, a person is only “disabled” when the cultural container is too rigid to accommodate their specific wiring. It is a failure of the container, not the person’s biology.

Because our ancestral brains still fear the death sentence of social exclusion, we adapt by masking. We simulate the generalist, downclock our natural rhythms, and suppress our own signal to reduce social friction. From an anthropological perspective, this is a form of internalized colonization. We are asking individuals to override their own cognitive structure to fit into a world that was never designed for them and then calling it “functioning.” Of course it’s exhausting, and of course it creates self-loathing, but that doesn’t come from the neurodivergence itself, it comes from the constant, violent effort to not be it.

If you call something an illness, the goal is eradication, but if you call it neurodivergence, the goal is integration. In anthropology, we recognize that virtue and shadow are a package deal. The same biological circuit that allows for deep pattern recognition is the one that causes sensory overwhelm. To “cure” the sensitivity is to dull the perception. When we demand a “cure,” we are asking the ND person to mask, which is an act of internalized colonization where they exhaust their system simulating a generalist’s rhythm to avoid the ancestral threat of social exclusion. For a super-social species, being cast out is experienced biologically as a physical threat to survival.

If the very genes that make us human are the ones that make us neurodivergent, then attempting to erase these traits is an attempt to pause human evolution. We do not need to “fix” the ND mind. We need to rebuild the cultural containers that allow their signal to be utilized without their system being overwhelmed. Understanding is the only “cure” for the alienation our modern society has created.

Subscribe now

Share

So, I moved. I migrated from the “embedded” trenches of product strategy and Chief of Staff (yes, I was wearing two hats, and yes, my neck was tired) directly into the Office of the CIO as an AI Product Strategy Lead. Reporting line? Elevated. Strategic impact? High. Remit? Same-ish.

But the cultural shift is... a lot. Moving from Engineering to being directly under the OCIO is like I’ve moved from the engine room where everyone is covered in oil and arguing about the specific torque of a bolt directly onto the bridge of the ship.

On paper, I should be popping champagne. But in real life I am currently sitting with a very specific, very loud type of stress where I know the mission, but I can’t find the vibe in the dark.

I’ve been mentoring people on navigating change lately, which is kind of ironic because, internally, my brain is currently a series of browser tabs that won’t stop refreshing and one of them is playing music I can’t find.

Since I’m going through it, here is the internal philosophical spiel I’m using to keep myself upright.

1. The “Meta-Positive” Lie

Even when a change is objectively career-goals material, the physiological stress is real. We’re losing a version of reality that was predictable.

My brain treats a predictable routine like a perfectly organized Shared Drive, and losing it feels like someone took my favorite, flawlessly nested folder system and replaced it with a single, 5,000-line Google Sheet where all the tabs are renamed “Copy of Copy of Untitled.” Sure, the data is all there, and eventually, I’ll build a dashboard that makes me look like a genius but right now I’m just staring at a wall of cells feeling lost.

Let’s just sit with that sense of loss for a second without trying to optimize the discomfort away.

2. No Toxic Positivity (Seriously, Keep It)

I am officially banning the phrase “Everything happens for a reason.” Sometimes, the reason is just that tech moves fast and things shift. It is perfectly okay to say: “I’m supposed to be stoked about this, but honestly, it kind of sucks right now and I’m 40% cortisol and 60% coffee.” The “shadow” isn’t the enemy. Fear isn’t the enemy.

The enemy is pretending you’re fine when you’re actually vibrating at a frequency that could shatter glass.

3. Find Your People (The “Scar Tissue” Strategy)

Connecting with allies is huge, but as an ND person, I have a very specific filter. If I tell you I’m struggling and you give me the “You’re a rockstar, you’ve got this!” vibe, I will physically recoil. I don’t need a cheerleader; I need a co-conspirator.

My specific strategy has always been to recruit mentors who have actually done the thing I’m currently doing and survived. You want the person who can look at your 5,000-line spreadsheet and say, “Yeah, that part sucks, here is how I navigated the stakeholder politics of row 402.” You’re looking for tactical empathy, someone who understands the nuance of why this is hard, not someone who tries to “toxic-positivity” you into a better mood. Find the people with the scar tissue; they’re the only ones who can actually help you map the terrain.

4. Seeing vs. Performing

In tech, we are trained to perform competence, especially during a reorg. We want to look durable and ready to go. But there is a massive difference between performing and actually seeing.

The most valuable skill I’m working on right now is active listening, actually understanding the architecture of the new change rather than just nodding along so I look like a leader. True acumen isn’t about how fast you can run; it’s about how clearly you can see the terrain while everyone else is running in circles.

So, if you’re also in the middle of an “amazing” change that feels like a heavy backpack? Same. Let’s stop pretending it’s all excitement and just focus on breathing and noticing. The executive state will follow.

Eventually

Share

.

We are currently in a week dedicated to celebrating neurodiversity, yet for many of us navigating the high-pressure corridors of tech, “celebration” often feels like a formal exercise, a checklist completed to ensure a baseline of inclusion. While these initiatives are well-intentioned, they sometimes overlook the deeper, structural friction of living as an outlier in an increasingly automated world.

As an AI strategist, I see the push every day toward a “frictionless” existence: cleaner data, more predictable models, and seamless user experiences.

But there is a fundamental tension here that we rarely discuss: AI, by its nature, is a technology of the mean.

LLMs are designed to predict the most probable outcome based on vast datasets. They are optimized for the “median.” If your way of thinking, processing, or perceiving information falls outside that central curve, the system doesn’t always see you. Instead, the interface often attempts to “correct” or “smooth over” the very perspectives that make us unique.

There is a famous study from the 1950s where the US Air Force tried to design a cockpit for the “average pilot.” They measured 4,000 pilots on 10 dimensions. Out of 4,000 people, zero fit the average in all 10 categories.When you design for the average, you literally design for nobody.

Humans operate on a continuous spectrum, while AI operates on quantized probabilities. To be “the mean” is to be a static point. No living, breathing human is a static point; we are all constantly shifting.

We often hear that the principles of accessibility remain the same in the age of AI. I would argue they are evolving in ways we don’t yet fully understand.

Physical Accessibility was about building a ramp so everyone could enter the room.

Algorithmic Alignment is often about ensuring the individual mirrors the “expected” input of the system.

For those of us with divergent minds, “efficiency” can become a double-edged sword. If the world is built on predictive models, staying visible requires a level of self-regulation that is exhausting. We find ourselves performing a version of “standardized” behavior just to keep pace with a world moving at the speed of code.

Efficiency is a metric, but it isn’t a human value. The most vital aspects of our humanity, deep empathy, radical problem-solving, and truly original thought, usually emerge from the friction, not the smoothness.

There is an invisible tax on this ‘seamless’ existence. For those of us who process the world differently, the expectation of constant, high-speed output, accelerated by AI, is leading to a profound, quiet exhaustion. We are often perceived as ‘over-capable’ because of our pattern recognition and processing speed, but that performance comes at a cost that the spreadsheet doesn’t track. It is the cost of constant self-translation. I am tired of the performance. I am interested in what happens when we stop trying to outpace the machine and start acknowledging the human toll of the simulation.

We often talk about ‘alignment” as if there’s a central, ‘correct’ human standard to align to. But mathematically, the ‘average person’ is a statistical ghost. If we build our strategy around the mean, we aren’t building for the majority, we’re building for a person who doesn’t exist, at the expense of the outliers who actually do.

Having lived in some of the most remarkable cities in the world, like Amsterdam, Milan, and Dublin, and visited over 40 more, I realize how privileged I am to share my truth about New York as a local.

Yes, New York is huge, messy, and filled with too much of everything: the stunning and the ugly, the fast and the loud. It is often too ridiculous to be real. But it is also surprisingly livable—if you find your village.

The village is often a mindset; it’s not just a physical place. One of my first experiences after moving here from cozy Europe was seeing a man lifeless on the street. He looked exhausted, perhaps dehydrated, or worse. It was shocking, but what stayed with me forever was the response: two massive fire trucks and several firefighters arrived instantly. A group of heroes spent their energy trying to rescue a man who might have lost all hope for humanity. That is New York: it’s rogue, it’s real, and it’s beautiful. New Yorkers come together in their humanity, regardless of who you are or where you come from.

When the pandemic hit, we had the option to leave. We looked at the suburbs, but the silence felt like isolation. Humans, like most mammals, are meant to be raised in community. In the suburbs, I saw empty playgrounds; in the city, the playgrounds are the heart of the “village.” We chose to stay for our mental health and our social fabric. We formed “pods,” supported local restaurants by sipping cocktails in heated outdoor sheds in the middle of winter, and shared the weight of parenting with friends who became family. NYC came through the hardest times as a community of survivors.

I want my kids to understand that the world is a massive melting pot. I want them to know that people look, act, and live differently, and that none of it is a reason to be afraid. In our neighborhood, kids learn to navigate the full spectrum of the human experience. They might give a sandwich to a neighbor experiencing homelessness in the morning, and by evening, they might be sitting in a restaurant next to a high-ranking executive. And if that executive rolls their eyes because my kids are being “annoying” (as kids often are!), my children won’t be frazzled. They are learning to occupy their space in the world with a sense of belonging that isn’t tied to performance.

Looking back at the years of having both a baby and a toddler—arguably the hardest, most sleep-deprived era of my life—the city was my literal savior. For me, the “village” was the ability to roll out of bed, strap the baby into a carrier, put the toddler on a scooter, and hit the pavement with nothing on my face but a pair of frames to hide the exhaustion. No playdate arrangements, no GPS, no logistical gymnastics. Within seconds of leaving the house, I was surrounded by a sea of random parents who were also just trying to survive the morning. There is a specific, collective exhale that happens on an NYC sidewalk. You feel your blood pressure drop simply by virtue of being in the “pack.” We didn’t need to speak; we just needed to see that we weren’t the only ones in the thick of it. In a world of over-scheduled lives, that spontaneous, zero-friction sanity was the only thing that kept me grounded.

One mistake people make is thinking a village is some idyllic, “Live, Laugh, Love” commune where everyone agrees on the best brand of oat milk. It’s really not that. A village is your Republican neighbor who sprinkles Jesus-propaganda on your kids without being asked. She’s a lot, but she loves your family, you bring her food for the holidays, and she watches your dog while you’re away. It’s the “soccer moms” who, quite frankly, scare the shit out of me, but they never fail to produce a bandaid or a snack the second you realize you forgot yours. It’s the mailman, the janitor, and the legendary crossing guard who adopts a “You Shall Not Pass” Gandalf-stance against an oncoming taxi and is able to manage even the bikes. It’s the barista who knows you only drink soy and treats that information like a state secret.

A huge part of this journey is our school. It’s not the only school in the East Village that runs on these principles, like its refusal to be a “testing factory.” It prioritizes Self-Esteem (who you are) over Self-Confidence (what you can perform). It is famous for diversity and inclusion and a “child-first” education—focusing on the development of the spirit, not just the score.

Diversity here isn’t a buzzword; it’s our pantry. We are walking distance from incredible food markets where the quality of fresh, organic produce is world-class. We are raising our kids in a literal melting pot where they can experience the world’s best performances on Broadway or world-renowned art and science exhibitions, all while understanding that a high-quality, nourishing meal is a fundamental human ritual. In many parts of the world, life is lived through a windshield. In New York, we trade car seats for sidewalks. Our lifestyle is grounded in the freedom of physical movement. My kids don’t just “go” to places; they experience the city’s rhythm on foot. This mobility builds a different kind of resilience and spatial intelligence—an active engagement with the world that a screen or a car simply cannot provide.

Do I ever want to leave? Of course. New York is a relentless teacher, and there are days when the “too-much-ness” of it all makes me crave the absolute silence of Iceland, my favorite place on Earth. I dream of that vast, tectonic stillness. But then I remember the winters; cold doesn’t scare me, but the lack of sunlight eventually draws me back to the heat of human friction. I’ve also contemplated moving back to the Netherlands or Sweden to be closer to my roots. But every time I look at the life we’ve built here, I realize a difficult truth: while our history is there, our actual family is here. Our “village” isn’t a bloodline; it’s the community that stood by us when the world felt like it was shifting under our feet.

As a Tech Anthropologist, I navigate the complexities of AI and the future of tech every day. But I come home to NYC to remind myself what is real. We aren’t building a digital casino for our kids; we are building a foundation of ancient human rituals: community, curiosity, and the freedom to be exactly who they are.

It would be dishonest to ignore the elephant in the room: the cost of living. New York is becoming increasingly difficult for families, and the financial pressure is real. I fully recognize my absolute privilege. For me, affordability isn’t just about the money; it’s about the “sanity tax.” Many choose the large suburban house with the yard and the extra square footage. But that house often comes with a hidden cost: a multi-hour commute that eats into the only non-renewable resource we have: our time. I work in Manhattan, and the ability to be with my kids within a 10-minute bike ride or a 20-minute walk is a luxury no mansion can buy. I will choose a small condo every time if it means I’m home with my family instead of sitting on a train.

This choice has turned me into an aspiring minimalist. In a city like this, you learn that you don’t need a massive house just to fill it with “stuff” you eventually have to maintain. I prioritize experiences, movement, and presence over square footage. In the end, I’ve found that a smaller footprint leads to a larger life.