The Sickening Lust for Adequacy
Why I’m Hoarding My Own Rubbish
I was on the train the other day, crammed into a seat that felt specifically designed to give you instant, permanent diarrhoea of the posture, and I overheard a bloke explaining his holiday to a mate. He described the whole fortnight as “absolutely fine.”
That was it. “Absolutely fine.”
He wasn’t complaining. He wasn’t praising it. It wasn’t a disaster; it wasn’t a triumph. It was just... adequate. A perfectly acceptable, unblemished, structurally sound two weeks on a generic Mediterranean coast. A holiday that could’ve been assembled by an AI from a database of “Average Positive Human Experiences, Seaside Variant.”
It was as flavourless as a week-old slice of toast left out in the rain. And yet, he seemed quite content with it.
The Synthetic Sheen of Nothingness
Which brings me to the absolute horror of the AI revolution, and the mistakes I made back in the early days of this nonsense. That crushing blandness feeling of “absolutely fine”is the same ghastly, sinking sensation I got the first time I pressed the button and watched the machine cough up something that was technically correct but spiritually null.
I’d spent years in my twenties, back when I was still stupid and thought I could churn out a brilliant book between bouts of existential dread and bad coffee, struggling. Proper, sweaty, tear-your-hair-out, staring-at-a-blank-Word-document-and-praying-for-a-minor-ailment struggling. My finished stuff was always a bit chaotic, if I’m honest. It had the rhetorical equivalent of a limp.
But it was mine. It was the sound of my brain, struggling to express an original thought. My brain trying to birth a grand piano.
Then, years later, the tools came along. And I watched everyone, myself included, slowly start to ditch the piano birthing and instead opt for the perfectly clean, algorithmically balanced elevator pitch. We started feeding the beast our rough drafts, our honest, pathetic scraps of genius, and it would spit back a version that was clean. It was polished. It was structurally sound. It used all the right buzzwords and adhered perfectly to the style guide. It was, in short, perfectly adequate.
And that, my friends, is precisely why it was utterly worthless. It’s like being handed a beautiful, empty envelope. It looks professional, but there’s no actual letter inside.
The Crime of the Polished Turd
The central lie we’ve swallowed is that polished equals professional. We’re letting the algorithms sand away the things that actually make us sound like human beings who’ve had to struggle and think and feel things.
We are being sold a synthetic sheen of mediocrity. The machine can capture the style, sure, like looking at your own reflection in a funhouse mirror made of corporate glass. It uses words you might use. It makes points you could have made. But it’s not yours. It is a sterile, soulless imitation. It’s a perfectly rendered piece of hotel lobby artwork: technically competent, emotionally vacant.
Your human stuff, the writing that actually resonates, is always riddled with tiny flaws, and those flaws are the only thing worth saving.
Mine always has the weird rhythm. The halting cadence that shows I was genuinely struggling, thinking, or maybe just distracted by a couple of pigeons making jiggy-jiggy outside my window. It has the joke that misfires and lands with a sickening, audible thud. It has a sentence that goes on too long, meandering around the houses because I hadn’t actually figured out what the hell I meant until I got to the third subordinate clause.
That awkward stutter, that structural wobble, is the genuine sound of a human brain attempting to express an original, complex thought.
We’re being told to ditch that beautiful, messy chaos in favour of a synthetic cleanliness. To polish away the grit, the struggle, and the shame of the effort. We are being asked to trade our unique, pathetic fingerprint for a uniform sheen of mediocrity. And I went along with it for a while, stupidly believing that getting the words out quicker was the goal. It wasn’t. The goal was getting my words out.
The Anti-Self-Help Guide to Not Becoming a Robot
So, here’s the miserable truth I learned after spending far too much time watching genuinely smart people generate complete rubbish with terrifying efficiency. You can use the AI, but you have to keep your filthy, human hands all over the final product.
1. Use it as a Battering Ram, Not a Stylist: I now use it to generate the bare-bones, absolutely serviceable, entirely adequate version. The kind of thing that would get a C- grade. I then use that pristine, sterile draft as a template. It’s the brick wall I can now aggressively deface with my own stupid opinions, bizarre metaphors, and slightly inappropriate humour.
Don’t let it polish your work; let it give you a structure to violently tear down and rebuild in your own misshapen image.
2. Seek the Stutter: The most important thing is to actively search for the bits that don’t work. If a sentence flows perfectly, I change it. If the tone is uniform, I introduce a sudden, jarring shift. I’m deliberately looking to inject the sound of a human being genuinely thinking. I want the halting cadence, the phrase that seems to appear from nowhere, the joke that only I find funny. The mess is the message.
3. Measure Your Shame: Before I publish anything, I ask myself: “Do I feel slightly embarrassed by this?” If the answer is yes, if there’s a sentence that I suspect I’ll regret later, a comparison that might be a bit too grotesque, or a moment of genuine vulnerability, then I know it’s ready. That feeling of slight, low-level shame is the universal human alarm bell that indicates you’ve done something that is actually you, rather than a bloodless approximation.
Remember, that messy, crumpled note written on the back of a beer mat is your soul trying to get out, before the algorithm seals the lid shut, and we all settle for a life that is, tragically, “absolutely fine.” God help us all.