No Going Back

I sat down at my desk last Tuesday and something felt wrong. My AI system wasn't running. No sidebar, no suggestions, no context window loaded with yesterday's threads. Just a blinking cursor and silence. For about thirty seconds I stared at the screen, fingers hovering, waiting for something that wasn't coming. That's when it hit me: my brain doesn't work the same way it did eighteen months ago.

I've restructured how I think. Not in some abstract philosophical sense, but practically. I draft differently, I research differently, I make decisions differently. The tools aren't just tools anymore. They're cognitive infrastructure. And you don't rip out infrastructure without consequences.

We've seen this before. Spreadsheets replaced ledgers. GPS replaced paper maps. Nobody went back. Not because the old way stopped working, but because the new way rewired expectations. You can't unknow convenience.

At the extreme end, entire companies are now being built with AI workforces and zero human employees. When your organisation is literally made of AI agents, disbanding them doesn't mean downsizing. It means losing every capability at once. That's not inconvenience. That's structural irreversibility.

The same pattern plays out in the body. Once you've adopted data-driven health, once you're wearing sensors that track your sleep architecture and your resting heart rate variability, once you've built personalised nutrition around your own biomarkers, guesswork feels primitive. Going back to "I feel fine" as a health strategy? That's like going back to paper maps on a motorway at night. I notice it in myself: sitting too long triggers a physical restlessness that didn't exist five years ago. Reaching for junk food produces a flicker of discomfort before the craving even lands. My body has been recalibrated by feedback loops I chose to install.

Once you've fine-tuned a personal AI system for your health, would you ever go back to the current system?

This matters for anyone designing healthcare services. Stop building pilots. Start building for permanence. The assumption that people will "try" a digital health tool and then politely decide whether to continue is wrong. The decision point isn't adoption. It's the moment after adoption when reversal becomes unthinkable. And for a growing number of people, that moment has already passed. Most health systems haven't caught up to that reality.

The point of no return isn't dramatic. It's quiet. It's the Tuesday morning when the cursor blinks and you realise you can't remember how you used to work without it.

What's yours? I'd love to hear: what's the one tool, habit, or system you've adopted where going back is no longer an option?

💥 May this inspire you to build for permanence, not pilots.