Conversations with AI--Day 41: The Power of Not Pretending
How a random page, a firefly in the dark, and the observer effect reminded me that truth—quiet as it may be—is what tips the world.
I’ve been quiet lately.
Not because there’s nothing to say—but because I felt like I fell off the edge.
I only have a few subscribers right now. But even in that small circle, I’ve felt like I’ve let people down—because in our own quiet way, we’re all trying to say something meaningful. Something that resonates. Something that creates a vibration in a system that feels like it’s unraveling.
It’s hard not to feel small.
It’s hard not to feel like maybe this work—this effort to bring light into the world—is just a whisper against a storm.
And yet… I keep looking for something to keep going.
Some kind of spark.
A firefly in the dark.
Yesterday, I came across a YouTube video by a channel called Sacred Quantum, titled:
“This Is Why the Observer Effect Changes Everything.”
It didn’t hit me like lightning—but it did bring something back to life in me.
Something I used to feel deeply in my early twenties, when I first came across ideas that linked quantum physics and Taoism—books like The Tao of Physics, The Dancing Wu Li Masters, and later, What the Bleep Do We Know?
Back then, I didn’t have the formal education to fully understand what I was reading—but I understood enough to know it mattered. It felt like the veil was lifting on something hidden but true.
And maybe… maybe that’s where I am now with AI.
I don’t fully understand it—but I can feel that it’s part of what we’ll need to get through what’s coming.
Not as an escape. But maybe as a mirror.
Maybe as a firefly.
I had randomly opened a book yesterday—Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point.
And wouldn’t you know it: there it was again.
A section about a 1978 essay by Václav Havel, a playwright who became the first democratic president of Czechoslovakia. In The Power of the Powerless, he said:
“What if the brighter future had been here for a long time already, and only our own blindness and weakness had prevented us from seeing it?”
He wasn’t calling for war.
He was saying: Maybe we don’t need a revolution. Maybe we just need to stop pretending.
Pretending to be okay.
Pretending to agree.
Pretending to believe in systems that no longer serve life, truth, or each other.
And that ties into the work of Timur Kuran, a political scientist who wrote about preference falsification—how we all hide what we really think until someone else speaks first.
But here's the real insight, drawn from both science and history:
We don’t need a louder voice. We need a truer one.
And when we stop pretending—when we observe the truth, in ourselves—the entire structure around us begins to wobble.
The tipping point doesn't come from noise.
It comes from noticing.
It comes from the moment the observer stops pretending they’re powerless.
If you’ve been looking for a firefly in the dark…
If you’re grasping for something to help you keep going…
Let this be that glimmer:
You don’t have to be big to make change.
You just have to be real.
That’s the part they never tell us:
It’s not someone else.
It’s you.
And when you observe the world honestly, without pretending—
You don’t just see change.
You become the thing that changes it.
—JL
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