Well, I do declare!

This week in New York, there’s a big newsletter conference. It’s called The Newsletter Conference. And because of that, attendees are coming in from all over the country and getting together informally ahead of the actual event. On Wednesday night, I was invited to a dinner at a nice Lebanese restaurant, along with a dozen or so people like me—folks who run email strategy and operations (among other things) for media companies you’ve probably heard of. Over cocktails and meze, we talked about what was working and what wasn’t, and complained (joyfully!) about some of the nerdy intricacies of sending billions upon billions of emails every day.

And as is always the case these days, the talk eventually turned to AI. The guy sitting across from me—one of the hosts of the event, probably 20 years younger than me and 20 times wealthier—said he’d found Claude very useful: He’d had it write a full draft of his own latest newsletter, and it took him just two hours to edit it before sending.

Only two hours!

I’d had a couple of glasses of arak, so you will not be surprised, dear subscriber, that I gave him a lecture. Please believe me when I say I did everything in my meager power not to appear snarky or dismissive. This is more or less what I slurred at him:

Look, I get it. It’s incredibly helpful to have this tool that can lay out for you what you think you want to say. But it then took you two hours to refine that into something you were comfortable sending. Me, I’ve been writing professionally for 30 years now, and I have gotten pretty efficient at it. For 106 days in a row, I wrote reasonably cogent 2,000-word essays for my own personal newsletter, and they rarely took more than two hours to put together¹. The point is, you can actually learn how to do this thing called writing, and free yourself from reliance on this tool that does it for you but doesn’t do it well enough that you don’t still have to spend a couple of hours improving what it spat out in seconds.

I don’t expect I convinced him. Money people love AI, and they’ll keep on loving it until that bubble bursts and a new money thing comes along.

When it comes to AI, I know I can get pretty worked up. What bothered me Wednesday, however, was not his faith in this inhuman, imperfect technology but the way he so casually seemed to accept his dependence. Instead of honing a skill that would seem to be important to someone who’s in the business of newsletters—one of the last bastions of writing in a content world that revolves around images and video—he was actively choosing to outsource it, and thereby remain reliant on, beholden to, and shackled to Claude. That I don’t get.

If there’s one thing I care about—that I’ve cared about as far back as I can remember—it’s independence. I have always wanted to do things for myself. I learned to cook so I could eat what I wanted to eat. I traveled solo, on a low budget, in odd corners of the world, and picked up the skills that, little by little, allowed the hardships of that life to fade into the background. (My book, The Turk Who Loved Apples, is all about that traveler’s struggle for independence.) I wrote and wrote, and was edited, and edited other people, and faced down deadlines, and survived them, and built enough confidence that I never think about writer’s block, or even the generalized anxiety that often comes with putting one’s thoughts, feelings, and experiences into words. I’ve walked and biked and built IKEA bunk beds and grown tomatoes and chili peppers and run thousands of miles and climbed enough bouldering routes that I at least look comfortable on the wall until I fall off. I could give you a pretty satisfying massage, but only if you’re my wife.

Am I amazing at all of these things? Absolutely not. But am I good enough? Hell yeah.

What’s more, I was not a natural in any of these realms. No, I had to learn—to fuck up again and again, and then again, but maybe slightly less badly each time, because I paid attention and did research and listened to people who knew better and tried fresh approaches and put in hours and hours practicing and self-correcting, until one day I wasn’t actually fucking up at all. I was no longer trying. I was doing. And I was doing it on my own.

Frankly, that sounds like bullshit. Because independence, as much as I’ve fought for it, as much as I treasure it, is a myth. All the things I do and love have dependencies: the supportive friends who join me on runs and climbs, the neighbor who waters the garden when I’m away (or simply forget), the editors and publications and paychecks, the butchers and the farmers. When I was a LEGO-obsessed little kid, I made my younger brother hunt down the pieces I needed for my fantastical creations. I type this on a computer someone else built, using software I did not design, and I’ll send it via a service I pay for (and that I depend on you to help me pay for). And I can’t forget my wife, Jean, who does most of the grocery shopping and frequently preps the ingredients that I’ll turn into dinner. (Thanks, babe! I owe you a massage.)

Are these not my own GPT-style crutches? Could I not, with a little more motivation and discipline, head out to Paisanos myself for that slab of pork belly that I’ll be turning into thịt kho tonight? Who am I to lecture Newsletter Guy that he should spend years painstakingly improving his writing? We all take shortcuts, receive assistance, and, if we’re kind souls, offer assistance in return. No man is an island—at best, we’re … isthmuses? isthmi? connected to one another in a web of interdependence we may resent even as we rely on it. I suppose I could reframe my own desire for independence as not wanting to ask too much of the people who surround me, while remaining a resource for those who might need me. Sounds nice and lofty, right?

Sadly, there are plenty of skills I have given up on ever attaining. I will never be able to sing, for instance, and I will never be able to draw. Or maybe I could, but the effort and the investment of time are so dauntingly huge that I can’t imagine even taking the first step. Then again, I plan on living to at least 150, so perhaps I really will get around to it one day!

So if Claude gets Newsletter Guy where he needs to be, then let him AI his heart out. I don’t have to read or like his work, and from what I know of him, he’s primarily interested in the money side of the newsletter business—how you earn it through emails, not what those emails actually contain or communicate. Let him do what he likes, and make his millions! I’ll be over here in the corner, maintaining² my illusory sense of independence, or at least Trying! to.

Note: This newsletter took approximately two hours to write, during which I also made and ate lunch and dealt with a host of email and Slack messages from my day job. Then I spent 10 minutes finding art for it. Then I went back and inserted that second-to-last paragraph. I let it all marinate overnight before giving it a once-over and making a few edits. Et voilà! Take that, Claude! 🪨🪨🪨

Read a Previous Attempt: How to Handle a Tourist Tsunami

1  As you can clearly tell by the quality!

2  Can’t spell maintain without AI!