What’s the Point of Me?

Or: why vacuuming my lounge room felt like freedom

I woke up grumpy this morning. Out of sorts, in a way I couldn’t immediately name.

It’s not one thing. I’m building a business. I’m learning how to use AI — seriously, deeply, in ways that change how I think and work every week. And I’m writing a book about uncertainty. All three are happening at the same time, and all three are quietly reshaping who I am.

That’s the part nobody warns you about.

The grumpiness wouldn’t shift, I did what I’ve learned to do: I went for a walk. There’s a mind-body connection I’ve come to trust — change your physical state and your emotional state follows. So I stepped out the front door, and within three steps — literally, before I’d reached the footpath — I was already in it. Who am I? What am I actually trying to achieve? What’s the point of me?

I couldn’t even plan what I was going to do with my morning before the bigger questions arrived. They didn’t wait for me to start walking. They met me at the door.

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Three days earlier, a completely different experience.

I was vacuuming the lounge room while AI was helping to draft the outline of the second chapter of my book.

I want to sit with that sentence, because six months ago it would have sounded like nonsense. Or hype. Or the kind of thing someone says at a conference to make a point they haven’t actually lived.

But it happened. On a Monday afternoon. And the house genuinely needed vacuuming — the kind of clean that’s overdue when you’ve been building a business from your spare room for twelve months and housework keeps losing the priority contest.

Let me back up to how the day started.

As I’ve been preparing to write the book, I’ve generated more source material than I know what to do with — over a hundred journal entries, more LinkedIn posts than I can count, newsletters, research and frameworks I’ve been building and iterating for over a year. All of it potentially useful. None of it catalogued in a way that tells me: this belongs in chapter two, and this belongs in chapter five.

Consider the journal entries alone. Dozens of entries covering similar terrain from slightly different angles, depending on how I was feeling that morning. Which ones carry the strongest version of the argument? Which ones are earlier thinking that’s since been superseded? That’s not a writing task. It’s an intellectual sorting problem — and it’s exactly the kind of work that would take me days but which AI can do effortlessly.

So I handed it all over. No predetermined structure. No solution attached to the problem.

Just: here’s everything, this is what I need. Index it. Catalogue it. Help me see what I’ve got and where it fits.

And it did. Which meant I could skip straight to the part that writing a book should be about — sitting with the material and thinking about how the ideas connect.

By the afternoon, I’d set up something more complex: take several streams of research, newsletter content and raw thinking, and weave them into a chapter outline. AI was doing the knitting. And I realised I didn’t need to watch.

So I got up, found the vacuum cleaner, and did something useful with my body while the machine did something useful with my thoughts.

I vacuumed for twenty minutes. I paused mid-room to come back and check on it — still guiding, still orchestrating, still directing. This wasn’t set and forget. But it was twenty minutes away from my screen, while my work continued.

It felt like freedom. Real, specific and unglamorous — a type of freedom I had never experienced before. Not freedom from work, but freedom from the screen. Freedom to use my hands instead of my head for a few minutes while the cat watched me from the couch.

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After vacuuming, I sat down at my desk and looked at what had been produced while I’d been out of the room. It was good. Not perfect — maybe seventy percent right. But the structure was sound, the right content had been mapped and I knew exactly how to draft the chapter from here. I felt genuinely good. Lighter than I’d felt in weeks.

Three days later, I couldn’t get to the footpath without the questions arriving.

Those two moments happened in the same week. And that’s why I’m writing this.

In one, AI had given me something extraordinary: twenty minutes where the work kept going without me. In the other, it had given me something much harder: a question about my own identity that followed me out the front door.

These aren’t different phases. They’re not “early struggle” and “later reward.” The world we’re living in is not linear. They’re the same week, sometimes the same day. The technology that frees you is the same technology that unsettles — and in some ways displaces — you.

And the freedom doesn’t give you all the answers. If anything, it makes the questions louder. Because when you’re standing in your lounge room while your “work” continues without you in the next room, the question isn’t can AI do my job? anymore. It’s something else entirely: what is the point of me?

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I think the reason this tension is so persistent is partly proximity.

Most disruption happens at a distance. A policy changes. The market shifts. An organisational change program is rolled out. You read about it, assess it, respond. It’s out there.

AI is twenty centimetres from your face.

It’s on your screen, in your study, on the couch when you’re scrolling at night. It doesn’t ask questions about your value and your relevance from a stage or a strategy paper. It asks them whenever you’re using or exploring the latest tool or capability. In the gap between what you just asked it to do and what it just did — often better, and faster, than you expected.

There’s nowhere to put that. No meeting to unpack it. No framework that makes sense of it. It’s just there, literally staring back at you, in the space between what it just produced and what you thought you knew about your own value.

And here’s the part that’s harder to sit with. The deeper you go with AI — the more capable you become, the more you build it into how you think and work — the bigger the questions get. If you’re just starting out, you’re still working out what the tools can do. But the more you use it, the harder the identity questions become. The more present. The more personal.

Capability deepens the reckoning.

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The conversations around AI are often full of practical advice. How to use the tools. How to write better context. How to integrate it into your workflow. None of that is wrong. But it skips over the thing that makes this so hard.

You cannot work deeply with AI without confronting your own identity.

Not eventually. Not after some threshold of fluency. The moment you start building systems that extend your thinking, you collide with a question that has nothing to do with technology: what do I actually want to keep doing — not because I have to, but because it matters to me?

AI opens a space between what you can do and who you are. Not by taking your work away — that’s the crude version. But by making it possible to hand over more and more of what you used to do, leaving you sitting with the question about what you want to hold onto. And who you want to become. In twenty minutes, all I did was vacuum the lounge room. But what happens when twenty minutes becomes twenty hours, or more?

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I’m getting clearer about some of it. Slowly. Through doing, not waiting.

I know that my value isn’t in the doing anymore — not the way it used to be. It’s in the discernment. The sensemaking. The judgement about what matters and what doesn’t. The ability to hold complexity and ask the right questions and know when AI has it right and when it doesn’t. Those are mine. For now. And I hold them knowing that even those will be renegotiated as the technology keeps moving.

But other questions haven’t resolved. I don’t think they will, at least not in the short term.

This isn’t a phase of AI adoption that you work through and come out the other side of. It’s a companion. It arrives on some mornings before you’ve barely walked out the front door. At other times, it sits quietly in the background when you’re vacuuming the lounge room.

I’ll confess I had slightly grander plans for what I’d do with the time AI gave me back. The carpet was not the dream. But maybe that’s the honest version of what freedom actually looks like at this stage — less dramatic than you imagined, more domestic and strangely good for your mental health.

The questions AI asks of you change shape. Some days they’re heavy. Other days they’re almost light — curious rather than anxious, open rather than afraid.

I used to think the goal was to answer them. Now I think the goal is to get better at living with them. To keep showing up — grumpy some mornings, free some afternoons — and asking them again tomorrow.

— Sue