I have just come back from Texas, and I want to write down why I did what I did there, because none of it was an accident and most of it was the opposite of how I spend a normal week.
I slowed down. I did no night work. None. I saw family. I ate barbecue in the middle of nowhere, at LJ's BBQ in Brenham, a drive-through, and not at any of the hot spots with the lines and the write-ups. I went to Barton Springs before eight in the morning, when it is free and the people in the water are the people who live there, and I read and I meditated and I did nothing else. I met colleagues in person whom I see on a screen every single day. I shopped vintage, or at stores I know by heart. My first Stetson was shaped at Maufrais on South Congress, and I still talk to the hatmaker. I came home with a deep breath, some good memories, and some good new boots.
The Choices Were the Point
Every one of those was a choice against a default, and the defaults are worth naming, because they are what I would have done on autopilot.
| The choice | The default it replaced |
|---|---|
| A barbecue drive-through in Brenham | The famous place, the line, the photo |
| Barton Springs before eight | The same water at noon, with a ticket and a crowd |
| A book and a meditation, and nothing else | A phone at the edge of the water |
| A hat shop where they know my head | A new place with better reviews |
| Colleagues across a table | The same faces in the same rectangles |
| No night work | The laptop after dinner, just to check |
The pattern is the same in every row. The default optimizes for coverage: the best-rated, the most famous, the most productive use of the hour. The choice optimizes for something that does not rate well and does not scale, which is being a particular person in a particular place with particular people. Nobody gives a spring five stars for being quiet at seven in the morning. That is what made it good.
About that barbecue, because they are local and they earned it. LJ's BBQ in Brenham is a drive-through that serves until it sells out. The highlight was the pork steak in white sauce, but it was all good. The sausage was great. The potato salad and the mac and cheese were amazing, and so were the fixings. No line, no photo, and no write-up until this one.
I wrote once that the United States is its own continent, with the kind of variety people cross oceans for. Texas, taken slowly, is the proof.
A Human Trip
I work in artificial intelligence (AI) for a living, in the specific sense that I spend my days building and running systems that do work so that I do not have to. So I noticed, somewhere in the cold water at Barton Springs, that I had planned a trip made almost entirely of things that cannot be delegated. You cannot send an agent to eat brisket. Nobody can meditate on your behalf. A hat shaped to your head is shaped to your head, and the conversation with the person who shaped it is the reason you go back. A colleague across a table is a different colleague from the one in the rectangle, and it takes a table to remember that.
The book I brought was Why Faith Matters, by Rabbi David Wolpe. It is a rabbi's case for faith. My own book traces morality to a time before religion, so we start from different places, and reading the other side slowly, next to a spring, is the kind of reading that does not happen at a desk. I wrote last week that the more I automate, the more the unautomatable matters. This was the same thought, as a trip.
If I had had one more day, I would have hiked. That is the only regret, and it is a good one to have.
They Did Not Leave Me Behind
Here is the part I was most curious about, because it is the part I have been worst at. I came back and got all of my AI tasks done. All of them. The queue was there. The newest model, Fable 5.1, was waiting. Nothing had moved on without me, nothing had been lost, and the work that felt urgent enough to check on after dinner in Texas turned out to be work that could wait until I was at my own desk with a clear head, which is where I do it better anyway.
I have written before that rest does not survive as a virtue, it survives as a rule. Formula 1 shuts its factories by regulation. Europe closes by custom. I do not have a rulebook, so I did the next best thing and went somewhere that made the laptop feel out of place. The tasks will be there. They did not leave me behind, and I came back better at them. That is the whole argument, and I intend to run it again.