The Small Things I Keep for Myself

My days are full of AI. I write about it, invest in it, and even this website came together through a conversation with an AI agent instead of a text editor. Somewhere in the middle of all that, I started noticing the short list of things in my life that stay entirely mine to do, slowly, by hand. Not because I'm resisting anything. Just because doing them that way is the whole point.

the coffee I still brew myself

Coffee happens the same unhurried way every morning: pour over one week, french press the next, whatever the aeropress feels like that day. My spouse and I built an entire little station for it. There's something I love about standing there deciding what to brew, ten quiet minutes before the day gets a say in anything. It's not an efficient ten minutes. It's just mine.

the plant that grows on its own time

There's a football lily in my garden that blooms once a year, for a few days. I can't speed that up, and I never want to. Finding it in the first place took some looking. Watering it, noticing when something looks different, waiting for May, all of that is mine to do, and I like that it is. Every May, I photograph it and send the pictures to my parents, who grew the very same plant, and they send theirs back to me.

The garden is quiet for now, while our house is mid-construction. That's fine. It'll be there when the work is done.

the art I found in person

Every piece of art I own came from actually standing somewhere: cheap Picasso prints from a solo trip through Malaga, a stone carving from near the Hatshepsut Temple in Luxor, a print of Mount Fuji that quietly makes up for the one view I chased for three days in Japan and never quite got. None of it is valuable in any market sense. All of it is a small, physical proof that I was there.

noticing, on purpose

I still shoot and post my own travel photos and videos, at @frame.passport. The gear barely matters. What matters is what looking for a shot does to how I move through a place. A photograph only happens after I've already stopped, looked twice, and decided something in front of me is worth keeping. That noticing is the actual reward, long before anything gets posted.

the food I cook by instinct

I move between Italian, South Indian, and Maharashtrian food depending on the week, and I cook most of it by feel: tasting as I go, adjusting salt and spice by instinct instead of a measurement. I don't reach for a recipe app, and I don't miss it. The dish at the end is almost beside the point. The hour or so of standing at the stove figuring it out is the part I actually look forward to.

the music I go looking for

I'd rather stumble onto a song through a friend, a film, or an old playlist I forgot I'd made, than have one handed to me because it matches what I played last week. Half the pleasure is in the finding, not just the listening. It's one of the few parts of my day that still genuinely surprises me.

why I keep any of it

None of this is a stance against AI. I use it for most of my day, happily. This is just for me: a cup of coffee I made myself, a flower that takes a year to bloom, art I traveled for, a photo I noticed before I took it, a meal I cooked by instinct, a song I actually went looking for. None of it needs to be efficient. It just needs to be mine. That's the whole reason I keep it this way, and it feeds something in me nothing else quite does.