When the door clicked shut behind us, the world disappeared.

It was at the Setouchi Triennale, an art festival scattered across islands in Japan's Seto Inland Sea. My friend Kathy and I had queued up to see an installation by James Turrell, an American artist whose medium is light and space. The staff guided us down a long hallway and into a dimly lit room. We felt along the wall with our hands, reached a wooden bench at the back, and sat down.

And then, whatever faint twilight had lingered from the corridor vanished. The room became, quite literally, pitch-black.

Everyone settled, and the room went quiet. What remained was the small, unavoidable rustle of human beings failing to hold completely still: the brush of a sleeve, the shift of a sneaker against the floorboards.

Beside me, Kathy leaned in and whispered that it felt a little spooky.

She was right. We knew we were completely safe, but our bodies had no muscle memory for absolute zero light. When your eyes are given nothing to hold onto, your brain has no idea how to react.

We sat there in the void. And then, after a few minutes, something shifted.

My eyes began to adapt.

At first there had been nothing. But gradually, across the room, a faint outline began to emerge. I couldn't tell whether the staff had slowly dialed up an imperceptible dimmer, or whether my pupils were simply doing their quiet work. But suddenly, what had felt like a solid brick wall of black had depth. It had geography.

I sat on that bench, watching a shape that felt like it might vanish if I blinked, completely mesmerized.

We spend our entire lives under high-beam light. We walk out into the sun, flick on overhead switches, and take seeing for granted. It had never crossed my mind that in pitch darkness, you can still see things. But to see a shape in the dark, you have to strip away all the ambient glare first.

Years later, when I started trying to learn AI, that dark room was the first memory that surfaced. Maybe that's how I learn most things.

The Wrong Kind of Shortcut

For the longest time, I wanted nothing to do with AI.

I knew nothing about it, and to be honest, I was actively against it. Whenever I heard younger people talking about how they asked AI everything, or let chatbots feed them quick summaries of articles, I rolled my eyes.

I have always believed that sweat and repetition are how you earn things, so I had zero patience for people looking for an easy escape hatch.

I do joke about being lazy. In fact, I say it all the time. But my version of "lazy" isn't about avoiding the climb or refusing to sweat. When I hike Lion Rock, the ridge that looks down over Kowloon here in Hong Kong, I explore several different routes first, taking the wrong turns and breaking a sweat, just so I can find the trail that is easiest for beginners and has the best views. I put in the exploration upfront so I can find the path that actually makes sense. Literally, and in how I work.

The shortcut younger people were taking was an entirely different animal.

A few days a week, I teach design at university. When generative AI arrived, I started spotting it in student submissions almost immediately. Projects would arrive looking neat and polished on the surface, but the moment you actually read them, they hadn't answered the brief at all.

The students hadn't bothered to read the requirements. They had simply dumped the prompt into an AI, grabbed whatever it gave back, and designed from that. No checking, and certainly no wrestling with what the brief was actually asking. What arrived was an assignment full of errors that completely missed the point.

That isn't working smart. It's just doing the wrong thing faster.

Earning the Right to Be Lazy

When I say I'm lazy, it's a punchline, not a confession.

Back when I worked at corporate design firms, project finances were an endless headache. Every project moved through half a dozen stages, and each stage had its own budgets, billing milestones and fee splits. Every time a new project kicked off, someone would scramble to hack together an Excel sheet from scratch.

I watched that mess and thought: why are we putting ourselves through this every single time?

So I spent days doing the tedious, unglamorous legwork. I mapped out the financial logic of every stage, built a master spreadsheet that covered every stage and every situation I could think of, and handed it to the junior project managers.

From that day on, I really could be lazy. When a new project came in, all I had to do was type in the numbers. But I earned the right to be lazy, because I had crawled through the machinery and figured out how it worked first.

It was the exact same story at yoga teacher training in Thailand.

I shared a room with Lena, a Gen Z girl from Germany. For our final exam, we each had to design a complete sixty-minute yoga sequence. Lena opened her laptop and immediately had AI summarize articles and generate sequencing outlines, because she couldn't bear the thought of spending an hour watching a full video class.

On the other side of the room, I was doing things the stubborn, old-school way. Searching YouTube, watching videos from start to finish, pausing to sketch every transition by hand in my notebook, then getting up in the corner of the room to test the poses myself and make sure the transitions actually flowed.

Very Gen X.

When I eventually started teaching community yoga classes, I didn't rely on summaries either. Every morning, I rolled out my mat and practiced alongside an instructor on screen, moving through the sequence in my own body: feeling where a breath got caught, where an ankle felt awkward, whether a posture belonged in the class I was teaching or worked better joined to something else. Only after my own body understood the rhythm did that flow truly become mine.

Most people reach for the first kind of shortcut. They do the wrong thing a thousand times because it feels quicker in the moment. But if you take the time upfront to fumble, test, and solve the real problem at the root, the time you save down the road is genuinely yours.

That's when you've earned the right to be lazy.

Feeling for the Shape

So how does someone who sneered at AI end up using it every day?

Not through a sudden spiritual epiphany. I haven't turned into a tech person. But I am building this website right now, even though I cannot write a single line of code. (How that whole adventure started is a story for the next post.)

When I began, there were no courses, no textbooks, and no magic button to press. Most of the time, I had no idea what my next step should even be. It felt like stepping into an unlit room. Nobody had turned the light on for me, so I simply had to stand there, let my eyes adjust, and feel for the walls.

Then, slowly, I found I could see.

The longer you stay in the dark, the more your eyes adjust, and you really do begin to see the shape of things.

Just like that wooden bench at the back of the gallery.

It's no longer pitch-black.