My son was seven months old when ChatGPT launched. I immediately started using it the way any self-respecting, sleep-deprived mother would: asking why on earth my baby wouldn't stop crying. One night, long past the witching hour, I asked whether we could start sleep training. It told me, "It depends." Now two of us were crying ourselves to sleep.
So I did what founders do: I declared war on "it depends" and built a company to kill it—an answer engine grounded in experts, so an anxious parent at 3 a.m. (aka, me) could get something specific and trusted instead of an average of the whole internet.
As it turns out, better answers matter, but they create their own problems. Whether ChatGPT hands you convincing mush by averaging 100 opinions into a hedge or a seasoned expert gives you something highly specific, both systems aim for the same goal: Deliver a conclusion.
The opposite instinct will therefore become a superpower: a refusal to resolve. We'll develop the discipline to stay in the not-knowing while every tool is rushing us toward conclusions. I recently learned that Keats had a name for it: negative capability, the capacity to remain "in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact." After years spent trying to kill "it depends," now I'm training to sit in that same ambiguity.
A fast answer was what I needed at 3 a.m. with a crying baby, but the decisions that shape a life aren't that simple. They are the ones where two things are true at once, and grabbing the polished, confident answer means skipping past the nuance and contradictions that our messy physical world runs on.
The people who thrive therefore won't be the ones with the fastest answer. They'll be the ones who can resist and stay in the gray long enough to find the one that fits.
