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- Vibe check
Vibe check
a pitcher / a radio / a knife
They 3D printed a Starbucks
Video of how the concrete 3D printing thing works if you’re curious → here
It’s a drive-thru only.
Maybe they wanted to do dine-in but the wifi was bad.
Because concrete box.
How did we get “3D printed building” before “good cup of coffee”?
🤷♂️
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I’m just a guy, standing in front of a perfectly time blocked calendar, saying no thank you.
It’s gotten way too easy to do stuff and we’re drowning in options.
We can calendar block our day down to the minute. We can write code with a prompt. We can buy 12 kinds of toothpaste from the same brand. We can change careers, mid-latte, after one too many linkedin posts about “aligning with your purpose.”
More options mean more freedom.
Right?
The more you could do, the more you can do.
The more you can do, the more we feel like you should do.
But the more you should do, the less you feel free to do what you want to do.
Every single little bit of life feels like it should be engineered or optimized, but optimization always comes at the cost of a highly structured, predictable, unsurprising life.
Should it be?
Is going with your gut a better way to live?
Or does structure create space for the freedom we seek?
Spoiler alert in case you’ve been living in a fallout vault for two years:
We have officially entered the era of AI.
It’s great. It’s fancy. It makes you feel insanely productive in zero time. Like anything is possible.
I had chatgpt write a whole-ass iPhone app the other day.
It works. It’s on my phone.
But, as I said above, because I can build an iPhone app in a few hours, I feel like I should.
Is that more freedom or less?
In The Perverse Incentives of Vibe Coding, Fred Benenson proposes AI development environments make it easy to think we’re doing what we want, when we’re actually just reacting to a system optimized to keep us prompting.
AI doesn’t make you free.
It makes you feel free.
You type a vibe, it gives you something. Sometimes it’s gold. Most times it’s confetti. Either way, it feels like you’re in control.
But you’re not.
You’re nudged by invisible incentives: frictionless interfaces, dopamine loops, sunk cost fallacies. You’re not following your instincts. You’re pulling the slot machine lever and it feels good.
On the other side, shrouded in false productivity, is a bloated code base full of bugs, and that feeling that only comes with walking out of a casino feeling good about yourself because you won big a few hours ago, even though you lost it all again.
What about in a purely creative act? Let’s look at the king of doing-whatever-seems-to-light-him-up, Jacob Collier.
About a year ago, Jacob was interviewed by Colin and Samir, and while the entire interview is worth a listen (below), he spent a few minutes digging into his intentional process of chasing whatever is showing up that day.
The point here is that it’s an intention.
Jacob Collier doesn’t drift. He chooses to follow the spark. That’s not laziness—it’s discipline of a different kind.
He talks about entering a room of instruments and letting one pull him toward it. Not because it’s on his list. Not because it’s efficient. But because it’s the only one that’s alive for him in that moment.
That’s not chaos. That’s clarity.
It’s not anti-structure. It’s anti-control.
“I’ve learned to surprise myself,” he says.
Not optimize. Not hack. Not scale.
Surprise.
For Jacob, there is so much he could do.
But he is willing to skip over should and go straight to what he wants to do.
Fully intrinsically motivated.
That feels closer to freedom to me.
So we have a ton of choice.
But how do we choose?
Byung-Chul Han’s The Burnout Society gets at the real cost of infinite options: self-exploitation.
Han says we have moved from obedience-subjects in the 20th century, oriented toward a discipline-based society, to achievement-subjects, or in other words "entrepreneurs of the self.”
We have replaced the concept that we should do something - as dictated by a higher order - to a reality that we can.
We have unlimited opportunity, and, it would seem, an almost moral obligation to pursue it all.
So we try, and we burn out.
The depressed individual is unable to measure up; he is tired of becoming himself.
And maybe that’s why I resist calendar blocking. Maybe it’s not laziness or poor planning. Maybe it’s a refusal to pretend I’m a machine. A refusal to look at empty spaces on the calendar as wasted time, and instead to think of them as the prized outcome of years of hard work.
To be clear, this isn’t an argument for never planning anything ever again and living entirely on vibes and espresso shots and intuition.
It’s a reminder that instinct - real instinct - is one of the few places left that hasn’t been fully optimized, gamified, or commodified.
And when you feel that tug toward a project, or a song, or a walk, or a weird lunch order, it might not be irrational.
It might be the only real choice you’re making all day.
You don’t have to trust your gut all the time.
Just enough to stay connected to the part of you that isn’t trying to win a game that doesn’t even exist.
Let your instinct be a small act of defiance.
And hold on to that humanness. It’s the only one you’ve got.
At first, you’re just participating. You’re learning, absorbing, watching. But after a while—when you’ve spent enough time in the space, surprising yourself, letting ideas flow—you begin to contribute. That’s the moment it starts to feel like you’re really in it. Not because you had a plan, but because you found a space for yourself. You made one.
And that’s always the magic for me. It’s not about having the answers when I walk into the room. It’s about letting the room tell me something. Sometimes I walk in and a tambourine is calling my name. Other times it’s a piano, or silence. If I sit down with a fixed idea of what I should make, I miss what’s already trying to happen.
Do something you want to this weekend
Even if you have a hundred million gazillion memorial day pool party barbecues to attend. Find a few minutes and just do what feels right.
Then reply to this email and tell me what you did.
be good
z
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