I'm 33 years old, a husband, and the father of two little girls. As of 2025, I find myself in that strange limbo of being technically employed but fundamentally dissatisfied with the work I'm doing. The paychecks arrive, but something essential is missing.
The AI Anxiety
Like almost everyone I know, I've spent the past year watching the AI revolution unfold with a peculiar mix of excitement and dread. The fear of missing out is constant and exhausting. Every morning brings news of another breakthrough, another tool that promises to change everything, another startup that seems to have figured out the future while I'm still fumbling with the present.
So I started doing what felt natural: having long conversations with AI systems about AI itself. Brainstorming sessions that stretched into hours, exploring possibilities, trying to identify the angle I was missing or the opportunity I should be chasing. I was convinced that somewhere in those conversations, I'd find the key to unlocking my place in this new world.
What I found instead was something I wasn't expecting.
Asking the Wrong Question
For months, I had been obsessing over "how do I exploit AI?" when the real question—the one I'd been avoiding—was much simpler: "what do I actually want to build?"
The uncomfortable realization came slowly: most of my professional work doesn't need artificial intelligence at all. I work with financial data, and financial data demands precision. Numbers need to be deterministic, reproducible, and auditable. You can't hand a client a report and say "the AI thinks your revenue was probably around this figure." That's not how trust works in my field. An AI that gives you a slightly different answer each time you ask isn't just unhelpful—it's actively dangerous.
My real tools have always been spreadsheets and scripts. They're not glamorous, they won't get me invited to conferences, but they work exactly the same way every single time I run them. There's a quiet satisfaction in that reliability.
The Problem Behind the Problem
Once I stopped chasing AI opportunities, I finally saw what was really bothering me. The FOMO wasn't about missing a technological revolution. It was about time—specifically, how I was spending mine.
I've been filling my days with work that compensates well but creates nothing lasting. Paper collection. Compliance checkboxes. Tasks that require no engineering mindset, no creative problem-solving, no actual building. Just processing inputs and producing outputs that look exactly like everyone else's.
Every hour I spend on that kind of work is an hour I'm not spending on what I genuinely want to do. And those hours add up into weeks, then months, then years of a career that looks successful on paper but feels hollow in practice.
What I'm Actually Looking For
When I strip away all the noise about AI and scalability and market opportunities, what remains is surprisingly simple: I want to build things.
Not "AI-powered" things designed to impress investors. Not "infinitely scalable" platforms meant to serve millions. Just useful tools that solve real problems for real people.
The people I understand best are small business owners who rely entirely on their accountants for regulatory compliance but have almost no visibility into what their numbers actually mean. They sign off on financial statements they don't fully understand and make decisions based on intuition because the data feels inaccessible. I know I can help them because I've done it before—turning financial chaos into something clear and actionable.
What would success look like? Maybe ten or fifteen clients who pay a monthly subscription for a web application I continuously improve. Recurring revenue that grows slowly but steadily. Work that compounds over time instead of evaporating the moment it's delivered.
It's not the kind of vision that attracts venture capital or generates headlines. But it might just be a life I'd actually enjoy living.
The Decision
I have existing commitments that will keep me busy through the spring, and I intend to honor them fully. But once those obligations are complete, I'm making a change. No more work that doesn't engage my brain as an engineer. No more paper collection disguised as professional services. No more trading my time for money in ways that leave nothing behind.
From this point forward, if the work doesn't involve building something, I'm not interested in doing it.
This Is Where It Starts
This blog exists to document whatever comes next. The experiments I'll try, the inevitable failures, the small victories that might not look like much to anyone else. Some of it will involve AI—these conversations have genuinely helped me think more clearly about what I want. But the goal was never to become an AI company or an AI expert. The goal is to build, and to do it in a way that fits the life I actually have.
I don't know exactly where this path leads. But for the first time in a while, I'm genuinely curious to find out.