There's a low hum of anxiety that comes with living right now.

AI is reshaping industries overnight. The pace of everything, technology, business, the world, feels like it's accelerating past the point where keeping up is even possible. You scroll the news for ten minutes and walk away feeling like you've already missed something. Like the ground is moving and you're the only one who hasn't found their footing yet.

I know that feeling. I've been sitting with it too.

And then I did the actual accounting of the last fifteen years, and something shifted.

I moved to the Gold Coast the day after I finished high school.

Eighteen years old. Knew nobody. One suit, three shirts, rotating them Monday to Wednesday. Lunch every day was two-minute noodles because that's what $400 a week allows when you're figuring out rent for the first time.

First business at 20. First million at 21. Lost everything at 22. Bad partnership, drained accounts, 200 thousand dollars in debt overnight with no income and a 1-year-old daughter. I remember searching couch cushions for coins to buy bread and milk.

Rebuilt from scratch. Sold real estate to clear the hole. Started Yakk, my marketing agency from the spare bedroom with $50 to my name. Grew it into a full agency. Visited 35 countries somewhere in along the way. Failed more times than I can count or care to remember. Wrote a book. Started writing more.

Ten-year wedding anniversary this year. Met Elise somewhere in the middle of all of that chaos, both of us only kids ourselves, both completely unprepared, both just getting on with it. We've grown up together, which is a different thing to just growing old together. She's been there through every version of it. Every rise, every hole, every rebuild.

And next year, London, my eldest daughter starts high school.

Then there's a man named Charlie White. I read about him in a book called The Book of Charlie. Charlie lived to 109. Born before radio. Died with a smartphone in the house. One foot in the age of horse-drawn carriages and diphtheria, the other in the age of space stations and robotic surgery. The world he was born into and the world he died in were completely unrecognisable from each other.

He didn't resist it. He just kept adapting. Kept showing up as whoever the next version of him needed to be.

Heraclitus said you can't step into the same river twice.

Not because the river is dramatic or violent. Just because it's always moving. The water you stepped in yesterday is already downstream. The river you're standing in right now will be gone by morning.

This isn't something that started happening because of AI. It's not new. It's just the nature of things. The current has always been this strong. We notice it more when the water feels unfamiliar.

Here's the strange part, though.

Day to day, life feels monotonous. You wake up, work, handle the things that need handling, pick up the kids, go to bed, do it again. Nothing seems to change between Tuesday and Wednesday. The pace that feels overwhelming in the abstract feels completely invisible in the daily grind.

And then you look up fifteen years later and the person who arrived on the Gold Coast with three shirts is completely unrecognisable to the one sitting here now. Different life, different work, different perspective, different version of yourself entirely. Thirty-five countries. A decade of marriage. Two daughters. A business built from nothing. More failures than you'd care to admit to.

The river was moving the whole time.

You just couldn't feel it from inside it.

AI will change things. It already is. The world will keep accelerating. There will be more versions of you that are unrecognisable to this one, more chapters that don't look anything like the current one.

That's not a threat.

That's just the river.

The only question worth asking isn't whether things will change.

It's whether you'll keep swimming.

If this gave you something to think about, feel free to forward it to someone who might appreciate it.

Until next time,

Broden Johnson