You've heard of gaslighting—when someone makes you feel like you’re the crazy one—by pretending that something clearly wrong is actually normal.

The term comes from the film Gaslight, and it's become a well-known psychological phenomenon.

It’s the same concept behind “The Emperor’s New Clothes”: If everyone around you acts like the emperor's wearing clothes, but we know he's naked, we start to question ourselves.

When we post content online, we hope people will like it, share it, maybe even subscribe. We don’t love being criticized—especially for how we look or who we are.

But historically, even if a rando said something cruel, at least you knew it was a real person—a 12-year-old troll in his mother’s basement perhaps, but still human. It was part of the “town square” dynamic that platforms like Twitter (now X) were built on.

Now, that’s changing.

Soon, the majority of online discourse will come from AI bots.

And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but on X—leaning more and more to one side of the political spectrum (thanks to its almighty CEO)—you’ll see something disturbing:

Anytime someone from “the other side” posts something, it’s met with a flood of nasty, hateful, vitriolic replies. This creates the illusion that the entire world hates that viewpoint.

I used to scroll through YouTube or Reddit comments to gauge public sentiment on hot topics. But increasingly, many of those replies—especially on X—aren’t written by real people.

And that has a real effect. We start to question ourselves. We wonder if we’re wrong, or if everyone else sees something we don’t.

If everyone else seems to think one thing and we think another, our brains starts to say: “Maybe I’m wrong,” or “Maybe I’m just dumb.”

In a good faith system, questioning our values is a wonderful thing that can lead towards tremendous personal growth. But when our values are questioned/manipulated en masse by an algorithm, that’s gaslighting—by the system, at scale.

It chips away at our confidence, our logic, and our reasoning.

And that’s what makes AI so dangerous. It makes intelligent, thoughtful people question their own sanity.

So here’s my advice: don’t take any of it at face value.
Don’t doubt your mental capacity—trust it. Assume that if someone disagrees with you online, they might not be real. In fact, that’s increasingly likely.

Turn off comments if you need to. Turn off likes.

But don’t turn off your own brain.

Don’t let an algorithm convince you that you have nothing of value to say.

My daughter had me search high and low for the second book in a series.

We had to scour multiple public libraries until we found an available copy.

“Do you want another book?”

“No, I want that one!”

In a sea of children’s books across multiple large libraries, only that one would do. I’d say that’s a pretty specific need!

But the first book? The first book was a random library find she picked up, skimming through hundreds of titles.

So many things are like this.

Our spouse just happened to be at the same college we attended. Our favorite taco truck just happened to be next door…

And now? We can’t imagine being happy without our spouse or without that damn taco truck, no matter how many thousands of miles away we may live.

Nothing is worse than handing over a pitch deck you worked hard on, or concept drawings, and being ghosted by the other party.

This is a hard lesson I’ve had to learn over the years. Prospects are quick to ask for a pitch deck, because it's easy and takes all the burden off of them.

Whether prospects read these decks or not, service providers are asked to waste a ton of time on something that may never be glanced at—or worse, something that’s used as an A/B comparison to justify going with a lower-priced competitor.

Tip: Don’t send decks or PDFs or concept pitches via email any more. If a prospect wants your pitch, they should schedule a call. Go over the deck together. That way you'll know they at least heard your ideas the way they were meant to be heard.

Buyer’s remorse sets in almost immediately after we buy something new.

When the initial joy wears off, we realize our bank account has shrunk and our responsibilities have grown (along with our carbon footprint).

To truly get the sense of the burden of stuff, watch the documentary The Queen of Versailles. It’s one of the clearest examples of the trappings of wealth.

But deleting an item from our lives has the opposite effect. We feel good donating to someone in need. Our space grows—and so does our peace of mind.

Getting rid of something old can give us more lasting happiness than buying something new.

The news makes it so easy to hate our fellow humans. To see them as “other”, “not like us”, “idiots”, or less than.

But the vast majority of people are good in their own way.

Often it’s not that we even disagree, but that we just choose to focus on different parts of the same river.

The person in the rapids wants the river to slow down.

And the person at the delta sees all the accumulated trash.

Fundamentally people aren’t that different. They’re just responding to a different angle of reality.