Part 1: Time Without Feeling

There’s something a little eerie about trusting decision-making to something that doesn’t feel the burden of time. Most large models, for all their intelligence, don’t experience it the way we do. There’s no sense of waiting. No pressure. No joy in a long-anticipated answer. Time is just another variable—stripped of emotion, consequence, or memory.

For people, time is never just a number.

It’s tied to our bodies, our families, our sense of what matters. A tariff announced isn’t just a blip in futures pricing—it might mean someone delays expanding their business. Someone else rethinks retiring. Another person tosses and turns all night because they don’t know what to do with what just changed. That’s the emotional weight of time. It’s very real. 

What concerns me most isn’t the presence of AI in our systems. It’s the absence of emotional consequence in the decisions those systems make.

An algorithm doesn’t care how long you’ve worked to build your nest egg. It doesn’t feel the stress of being wrong, because it can’t feel at all.

And yet, we still look to it. We feel more comfortable trusting something that feels more objective. More rational. There is a difference between not feeling fear and being immune to consequence.

That’s how we end up in the hall of mirrors—models reacting to other models, while people try to make sense of the reflections. It’s fast. It’s intricate. It (sometimes) forgets the humans who still have to live with the outcomes.

Here’s the thing: we don’t have to look away. We don’t have to fear the complexity or retreat from it. We can look right at this strange, reflective space we’ve created and start to ask better questions—not to escape uncertainty, but to move through it more thoughtfully. More humanly.

Later this week we can look at what this means for how we interpret what we’re seeing—and what kind of long-term posture we might need to stay grounded, even if and when the market starts chasing its own tail.

Lauren