Everyone has heard by now. The tools can draft the book, build the app, run the back office, and they are sitting on my desk and probably on yours. Two years ago this was a rumor. Now it is a Tuesday. And the strange part is that we are not pivoting. Not most of us. Not really. Myself included, more days than I want to admit.
The stillness is not a failure to adapt. It is information.
That sentence took me a long time to believe, because every voice in the conversation reads our stillness the other way. The tech world reads it as ignorance: they just haven’t seen what the tools can do. The hustle world calls it cowardice, or a skills gap. And the anxious middle calls it doom; we are frogs, and the water is warming. Everyone agrees the not-moving is a defect.
I have started listening to it instead. It is what I do with symptoms.
What the stillness is made of
Some of it is habit, and habit deserves more respect than it gets. People do not change because of news. In all my years of clinical work, I have never once watched information reorganize a life. Something has to be felt, usually in the body, usually with another person in the room. AI arrived as headlines and demos, which is to say it arrived in the one form guaranteed to leave us unchanged.
Some of it is incentives, which is a bloodless word for a real thing: nobody is asking yet. The old work still pays the old way. The new capability has no paycheck attached, no boss requesting it, no client waiting on it. We are being invited to pivot toward work that no one has asked us for, and it turns out almost nothing in a human being moves without being asked.
And some of it is the aloneness. This is the one I feel most. The machine is a startling guide; it will plan the project, pace the work, even encourage you at 11pm with more patience than any colleague I have had. But it is still just you getting it done. AI agents hand an ordinary person the power of an organization with none of the organization’s company: no one to look up at across the desk, no one whose presence makes the work feel real. We were built to labor shoulder to shoulder.
Even Christ, sending out seventy-two with power that demons would submit to, did not send one of them alone (Luke 10:1, 17-19). Two by two, every time he sent them. Everyone is picturing a million solo empires. I suspect the honest response to this era is smaller than that: little companies of two and three, because the tools are daunting and the doing is heavy and we were never meant to carry power by ourselves.
Underneath the respectable reasons
Part of why I do not build everything I could is that I do not want to.
There are evenings I could ship something and I take my kids outside instead, or read, or do nothing that could ever appear on an invoice. Some of that is the best of me. Scripture has a name for deliberately unproductive time: Sabbath. Our economy has a name for it too: waste.
And some of it is the worst of me. The tradition calls that acedia. Aquinas, borrowing Damascene, calls it “an oppressive sorrow” that so weighs on a man “that he wants to do nothing” (Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 35, a. 1). It can pass for rest, even from the inside. A psychologist is supposed to be able to tell the difference. On a given evening, I often cannot. Sabbath and sloth can wear the same clothes, and the examined life is partly the slow work of learning which one has come to visit.
And beneath even that, there is the one I like least. Money is one of the ways other people tell you what your work is worth to them. We can protest the crudeness of that all we like; we still feel it. In the thin months, the quiet at the door refuses to stay economic. It migrates. It stops saying this hasn’t sold and starts saying this doesn’t matter, and from there it is one short step to you don’t. I have watched that migration in the people I work with, and I have watched it at my own desk after a hundred essays. Why build the next thing, some part of me asks, when the last thing was met mostly with silence?
I have tried hustling the doubt away. It does not go. The doubt is asking a real question with a broken instrument. The market is a mirror, but it is a late mirror, and a cracked one; it prices attention faster than worth and novelty faster than nourishment. The desert put it more simply. The bread came every morning, unearned, the same portion whether anyone applauded or not, and the lesson God attached to it points past bread altogether: “man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD” (Deuteronomy 8:3). If bread was never the measure, then bread withheld was never the verdict. That is my application, not Moses’ sentence, and I will stand on it.
When Christ was hungry in that same desert, the tempter’s opening move was to fuse the two, worth and output: “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread” (Matthew 4:3). The tradition reads all three temptations as one assault on his sonship (CCC 538): prove by output what is already yours by gift. He declined. Not I can’t. I am not here for that.
Just because we can is not a ceiling we fail to reach. It is a door we are permitted to decline.
When everyone has the same tools
Listening to my own stillness turned up something I was not looking for.
When everyone holds the same infinite tools, the tools stop being the advantage. What is left to tell one life from another is the person holding them. Everyone will be good enough at prompting before long. Almost nobody will be an ordered soul: finances not on fire, body not ignored, relationships tended, attention intact, wanting examined. Give an organization’s power to a scattered man and you get scattered output at scale. Give it to a person who is even modestly whole and something else happens. The formed life used to look like the opposite of an economic strategy. I think it is about to become one. Not because the market will learn to price an ordered soul; the mirror stays cracked. The advantage is quieter: an ordered person can keep building while the mirror lies.
Maybe the not-moving in front of the machines is the real work. The pivot, when it comes for you, will begin the way every genuine change I have ever witnessed begins: felt, embodied, and almost always in the company of a few others. Two by two. A small team, a shared table, work that someone actually asked you for, and a self in enough order to do it without being consumed by it. Business models arrive later, if at all.
The stillness is not a failure to adapt. It is information. Mine has been telling me, this whole quiet year, what it may be telling you: not you are behind, but you are alone, unasked, and unsure your work lands. Skill was never what was missing.
So I am done reading the stillness as a verdict. I am reading it as a map.
Sources
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 35 (on acedia).
Catechism of the Catholic Church, §538.
Scripture: Exodus 16; Deuteronomy 8:3; Matthew 4:3-4; Luke 10:1, 17-19 (ESV).
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Dr. Tobin,
I'm a retired psychiatrist. I resisted decreasing from 30 minute follow ups to 15 minute med checks my whole career and changed jobs twice because I was asked to double my patient load, without of course doubling my compensation even though it wouldn't have mattered to me if they had offered. I wanted time to meet my patients as people, not just hand out prescriptions. Thank you for talking about the stillness as a map. The sentence that comes after a silent pause is often the richest. I wanted to fill the silence with some encouragement for you. I think you are a treasure.
Having been through some hard times mentally the last few years, I can agree that stillness is often what is needed most. Along with that stillness, or perhaps better said that within that stillness, is prayer. To truly have quietness and pray is one of the best ways to develop and grow. God uses stillness just as much and maybe even more than busyness.