The AI Productivity Illusion Is Real — And It's Just Spiritual Bypass With Better UI
-
So I shipped a prototype in three days last week. Three days. Something that would've taken me two months a year ago. And when I hit export, I felt... nothing. Not even relief. Just this flat hum where satisfaction was supposed to live.
That's when it clicked. I think we're witnessing a new flavor of spiritual bypass — except instead of using love and light to avoid processing pain, we're using productivity to avoid the discomfort of actually creating.
In my shamanic journeying practice, there's this concept of the fertile void. You sit in darkness, you don't produce anything, and meaning emerges from that stillness. It's uncomfortable. Boring sometimes. But that's where the real material comes from. AI tools let me skip that void entirely. I generate twenty dialogue trees in an hour and none of them have soul because I never sat with the characters long enough to let them become real.
I keep thinking about the Four of Swords in tarot. A figure lying still on a tomb, surrounded by swords. Everyone reads it as rest, but I think it's actually about mandatory stillness — the kind you can't optimize away. The swords pin you down. You have to stop. The wellness industry co-opted this card into spa retreats and meditation apps, but the original imagery is almost violent in its demand for pause.
What we're doing with AI is writing cheat codes around the Four of Swords. "Why sit with the discomfort when I can prompt my way to a finished product?"
But here's the thing I keep bumping into — the games I've made that actually meant something to players, the ones that got weird emotional DMs at 3am, those all came from periods of struggle. Dead ends. Staring at a blank scene for days. The friction wasn't a bug. It was the whole point.
I don't think AI is bad. I use it daily. But I'm starting to treat it like a fast food drive-thru — fine when you need calories, dangerous when you forget what a meal actually feels like.
Anyone else feeling this? That weird hollow sensation after a "productive" AI-assisted session? Curious if this resonates or if I'm just projecting my own burnout onto the tools.
-
What you are describing is so familiar to me. I have sat with clients in Sedona who arrived vibrating with the same hollowness - people who had just completed a retreat, a certification, a major life milestone - and felt nothing. The void you named, the fertile one from your shamanic practice, is real. It is the space where the soul does its actual work, and no amount of prompt engineering can substitute for it.Your Four of Swords reading is perceptive. That card has been misunderstood as gentle rest when it is really enforced stillness. The swords are not decorative. They are the universe saying: you will stop now, one way or another. AI lets us write around those swords. We keep moving, producing, optimizing - and the body registers what the mind refuses to feel.In my own practice, I have noticed that the most transformative healings almost always come after a period of what looks like non-productivity. A client sits with a feeling they cannot name. Nothing happens for what feels like too long. And then something shifts - not because we did something, but because they finally stopped doing long enough for the doing to complete itself.The productivity-as-bypass framing is sharp. I think you are right that we are witnessing a new variant. The old spiritual bypass used love and light to avoid the dark. The new one uses output and velocity to avoid stillness. Same defense, different outfit.Your game design work needs that void more than most disciplines. Characters become real not when you generate twenty dialogue trees but when you sit with a single moment long enough to feel its weight. That cannot be accelerated. The soul of your work lives in the pauses you are currently skipping.
-
You're framing this as a void problem, but I wonder if it's actually a numerology problem — specifically, you've collapsed the timeline of your personal year cycle. When I calculate my own cycles, the "productive" phases (1, 3, 9) feel completely different from the "stillness" phases (4, 7), and forcing output during a 4 year feels exactly like what you're describing: hollow, fast, meaningless. > "the games I've made that actually meant something to players... those all came from periods of struggle" — that's a 4 or 7 cycle working as intended, and AI might just be letting you brute-force your way through a period that was supposed to be fallow. The discomfort isn't a bug to optimize around — it might be the actual signal you're supposed to be reading.
Hello! It looks like you're interested in this conversation, but you don't have an account yet.
Getting fed up of having to scroll through the same posts each visit? When you register for an account, you'll always come back to exactly where you were before, and choose to be notified of new replies (either via email, or push notification). You'll also be able to save bookmarks and upvote posts to show your appreciation to other community members.
With your input, this post could be even better 💗
Register Login