No. 006 • There Must be a System

I like to work. I built an AI-powered system to create content for my skincare brand, Empyrean Skin. The analytics agent pulls numbers across social, Meta ads, Klaviyo, and Shopify. It reviews previous analytics, outputs priorities, writes them to Notion, and updates a running executive summary. The planning agent reads what analytics provided. It gives a rundown of the next week of content, including prompts for the tools. Midjourney to make images. Veo 3 to turn them into video. Manual. Prompts and more prompts. Pull the video clips. Planning gave me scripts and scenes for each video. I use those. ElevenLabs for a voiceover. Kive for product-specific images and videos. Suno for background music. More prompts. Clip it all together in CapCut. Put the finished files in the correct Drive folder: video, stories, feed, carousels. The pipeline agent begins. It reads my branding documents for context. It analyzes each content file, creates captions for each social platform, determines what social channel each file gets distributed to, and exports everything into a Metricool CSV file for upload. A sophisticated system that learns from itself on a loop, allowing a solo operator to output a heavy week of content in a short period of time. It took about two weeks to build into something that worked flawlessly.

It feels powerful to build something that works. A well-oiled system with an output that hits the mark every time. The process of piecing things together. Finding the kinks. Fixing them. Getting every function to flow seamlessly into the next. Iterating until it produces something that surprisingly impresses you. Pat on the back. And then it’s built. And then I’m bored. The system that is finished loses all its fun.

I start to question myself. Why do I keep planning and building and never actually doing? I was in the shower. Big thoughts always appear in the shower. “Maybe I love building the system because I think the world should run on clean systems.” Building them myself is just a feeble attempt to build what I want, on a minuscule scale. Rules stacked upon rules. Do this, then this, and you will end up with this. Clean. Intelligent. Lawful. Guaranteed. The universe should be lawful. And if a person loves to build systems, they must be aligned with how the universe works.

Then I began learning. I learned Einstein needed the same thing. A universe of laws and rules. Nothing is truly random, not even at the bottom. “God doesn’t play dice” he said. He spent decades trying to prove there were hidden gears underneath everything. If only we were perceptive enough, intelligent enough to understand them. I learned about Spinoza. God is the universe itself. One system. Nothing can be completely random. Random just means you haven’t dug deep enough to find the cause. That struck a chord. I’ve believed this for years. When I learned I might have similar beliefs to the one-and-only Einstein I thought, “Wow. What good company I choose.” I had to know more about this Spinoza. Maybe Einstein and I are right!

Fuck. Turns out, the experiments went against him.

At least Einstein and I are not alone. Not by a longshot. The Stoics had their fate. Laplace’s demon. Surely if a being knew every molecule and every movement of those molecules, they could know everything there is to know. Christian providence. Even a dice throw is decided by God. Islam and qadar. Karma. What goes around comes around. Moral physics. The Tao. Everyone building systems to make sense of the randomness. Different languages, same idea.

Everything is connected. The net is real. At least physics agrees on that point. In my mind I imagine tiny little knots. Billions, trillions, an uncountable number. Almost invisible threads hold them all together. You ping one and an echo happens. Like throwing a rock into a placid lake and watching the ripples spread further and further. So, yes, everything is connected. Okay then. But that means a rock flying off Mars is as important as California falling into the ocean. Saying two things are connected means nothing. Connection has no meaning. It’s just a universal law. I want meaning. A meaningful thread to pull. Turns out, all threads are equal.

Yes, I want a big fat thread to pull that would offer me a guarantee. A system that the universe would obey. Standard input, standard action, standard outcome. The universe as my vending machine. I can learn about how a vending machine works. Look under the hood and study the mechanics. Learn about every little gear until I know exactly what action it takes to get what I want. Learning about the machine is the fun part. I will figure out how you work, damn it. Then I’ll make a plan. Get my coins ready and lined up. Everything I need, set up to get what I want. I’m ready to throw the rock into the pond. Except the preparation already felt like a throw. So I stand in silence. Rock in palm. Looking across the water.

Which is fine sometimes. The study, preparation and build can be acceptable as a standalone. Sometimes building just to build is the joy. Productivity culture says everything must provide a useful output. It’s a fucking terrible rule. I make things. I love making things. But a system for making social media content isn’t a painting. It was built and exists as a tool to produce a thing, and if it never produces that thing, it failed at its job. There isn’t much joy in that.

I love the idea of manifestation. I do. But it’s a slippery slope into simply living in your head. Same as the sophisticated content system I built. Learn it. Plan it. Believe in it. Watch it happen. The brain is part of the net. A little knot in the web of tiny strings. It puts out a real and measurable energy field. That field dies within inches of your skull. It doesn’t travel much. And it will never affect the net in the ways people describe it. Watching isn’t doing, and unfortunately, you’ve got to throw the fucking rock if you want to move the net.

The social content system was impressive. I’ll give myself that. But it was preparation shaped like action. I didn’t need a system. I just needed to post the damn content. I could have continued to build out the system for months. There is always something to improve. It never really has to be finished. And that’s another piece of the trap.

I used the system twice. By the time it was built, my interest just dissipated into the ether.

I love to hold the rock. It feels good in my palm. Perfect weight. I love to plan the throw. I picture my arm. Remind it to stay loose for maximum velocity. I imagine the throw. The rock leaving my hand with perfect timing, a beautiful arc. Its reflection travels across the still water before it splashes and creates a giant ripple that travels the full diameter of the lake. The string has been pulled. But imagination isn’t action. And I still have the rock in my hand.