Never Enough

A short reflective post by Armin Ronacher, 21 July 2026, published on dark.ronacher.eu rather than his technical blog (lucumr-blog). It's a reaction to two newspaper stories, not an argument, and it doesn't propose anything.

The first, from the Washington Post, is about tech workers feeling less secure than ever while the industry has never been richer. The detail he pulls out is a couple earning $550,000 between them who still feel behind, because someone at Anthropic might buy the house they want first. The husband handed nearly all the parenting to his wife so he could spend days, nights and weekends becoming his company's top user of AI. She agreed.

The second, from the WSJ, covers recording apps and wearables. His example is a founder who records her first dates and afterwards has Claude tell her whether she was engaging and empathetic enough. Two people meet, and one of them then sits alone with a machine asking how she performed.

What he draws from them is that people who fear being replaced by machines are responding by giving those machines more of their judgment, attention and time, and that every hour saved gets fed straight back into a race with no finish line. The close is a wish rather than a prescription: for misfits who know when to stop, who leave a conversation unrecorded, who play with their children without agents running in the background, and who can watch someone else succeed without feeling smaller for it.

Worth keeping as the personal-cost end of the vault's AI-culture material. ceo-ai-psychosis and agentic-coding-fatigue describe mechanisms — sycophancy loops, decision fatigue, tokenmaxxing leaderboards. This one just describes what the resulting life looks like from outside, and is short enough to reread.