Surviving the Techno-Analog Barbell
Weights, YMCA contracts, Bricks, and Sweet Baby Ray's
[Author’s note: welcome to Future of Tuesday, a weekly post about various technologies, as well as psychology, careers, and other potpourri. If you hate reading, hit the play button above for the audio version.]
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I recently surveyed some Future of Tuesday readers and have very good news: none of them are living the Angela’s Ashes plot line in the year 2026.
While they aren’t getting physically pummeled on an assembly line and then hitting the bottle to cope alongside their fellow 12-year-olds, many readers are getting mentally pummeled. An onslaught of inbound noise and variable-reward messages persists until they’re fully burned out. To soothe after work, they finally take a break from the medium screens by playing on their little screen while ignoring the big screen on the wall.
It’s for this reason that my recent post about the Unpleasant Bell Curve and the Burnout Doom Loop resonated with many readers.
The conclusion was positive: the Good Barbell of the 2030s is within reach for any knowledge worker.
Change, of course, is gradual. There is no switch to flip to take us from the Bell Curve to the more humane Good Barbell. Instead, we have to construct the Barbell using three “weights”: the Techno (leveraging AI), the Analog (mental freedom and a better brain), and the IRL (restoring human meaning in real life).
The Techno: brain-maxing and income-maxxxing
While a key component of the Good Barbell—automating the Messy Middle and shallow tasks with AI agents—is still in its infancy, we can already use the Techno weight in other ways.
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Imagine you woke up one day and found out the local YMCA was offering you $3 million per year to play basketball. The guy at the front desk said if you were good enough, you might make $20 million starting next year. Initially, you almost told them, “Hey, you might have called the wrong person…???”
But on second thought, that’s a lot of money. So you lock in.1
You quit your job and start working out every day. You start shooting hoops, doing left-handed layup drills, and getting into shouting matches with broccoli-haired ninth graders during pickup games.
In short, you do everything you can to max out your basketball ability “ceiling,” since $20 million would be even cooler than $3 million.
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If you work for a living in the non-NBA, it follows that you should take the exact same approach to maximize your cognitive abilities. Everything you do impacts your brain, and, in turn, your income and quality of life.2
Sales careers are an extreme example of better pay from better performance (ignoring luck), but in any line of work, being, say, 2% sharper in an interview might get someone their coveted gig that has a 30% raise, better perks, etc.
Let that scenario compound, and this person might retire 5, 10, or 20 years earlier than they otherwise would have.3
The stakes of not maxing out one’s cognitive capacity are painfully high when you stop and really think about it, which is why I’m forever amazed that hordes of people don’t act this way after graduation.
Let’s apply this concept to the Techno, and then the Analog.
The Techno battering ram of “why?”
While it’s cool that LLMs can generate recipes or write a customized best-man speech in a few seconds, their greatest compounding impact is in education. Specifically, we can use chat bots to rapidly learn any topic’s fundamentals, from personal finance to climate change to simplifying a business to its two shoeboxes of revenue versus expenses.
When I joined the startup Codeium in early 2024, I spent a few dozen hours piecing together videos and podcasts to grasp what any of the product terminology meant. These days, I’d be able to repeatedly ram my head against ChatGPT—asking “why?” and “why?” and “ok but why?” and “ok got it, wait what??”—until I understand what’s really going on at the “concrete basement floor” (a term I invoked in my relentless GPT inquisition about peptides and biochemistry).
I suggest you pick any topic of interest that you don’t really understand deeply, and spend merely five minutes asking follow-ups to Gemini, Claude, or ChatGPT (even their free versions). It immediately becomes apparent that personalized AI tutoring will reshape education.
The future is mastery learning, and motivated people realize that it’s never too late to compensate for our own non-mastery-learning educations.
With such incredible brain-maxing tools at our disposal—and knowing that most people won’t even try—the path to financial freedom seems promising. Inconveniently, of course, we can get in our own way. My one-sentence summary of the 2020s is “sharper tools but blunter minds.”
Thus, it’s time to leave the Techno and move to the Analog weight.4
The Analog: being a weirdo, until you’re not
I’ll start with one of my favorite quotes of 2026 (from Tim Ferriss):
With all of the noise that is coming with AI—and it’s going to be 10, 100, 1,000 times worse within two years—if you can single-task on important things for, not even 4 hours a day, 2 hours a day, without interruption… you’ll be in the top 1% of performers.
Humans may have big brains, but it takes immense effort to tame the Athleisure Ape for more than a few minutes at a time. To assist me, I’ve introduced some Dumb Tech.
Dumb CD Player: When I search for background music on YouTube, I often re-enter consciousness after a rabbit hole of between two and... *calculates*… many more than two minutes. While record players have been en vogue for a while, I like the smallness of Dumb CD Player.
Brick: An actual Dumb phone would be hugely inconvenient these days. I love my iPhone and have so much stuff on it. Thus, the Brick device legitimately helps me (not a paid sponsor). To go on IG, X, or YouTube, I have to do so on my computer, which implies I actually want to do it. By contrast, opening apps on my phone is compulsively mindless and can erase hours.
Dumb Watch/Alarm: we all know the feeling of “I was just trying to turn off my alarm, I did not need to also read that undesired message that threw off my whole morning.” In addition to avoiding some bedtime doom-scrolling, my life has fully transformed because I now see undesired messages after I pee in the morning.
Dumb Calendar (image below): To quote Kawhi Leonard, “I’m just a fun guy who loves basketball.” Dumb Calendar is like Dumb Alarm: I don’t need to mainline the internet every time I check my schedule. Though corporate workers have online calendars, Dumb Calendar can help with realistic time-blocking in other parts of life.
While I’m admittedly a weirdo, I will deny accusations of performative hipsterdom. I earnestly believe (and have written for eight years) that behaviors that are currently “eccentrically abstemious” will one day seem… normal.
When it comes to maxing out one’s cognition to make life easier (and to make more money), Analog fruits hang much lower than Techno fruits do.
The IRL: flowers are like scrolling Reels with your nose
When I started my tech career in March 2020 (… cough), the veteran sellers emitted an understandable air of “selling from home is novel and very nice, despite the troubling times.” By 2026, however, my employer’s very different attitude (“return to the office and spare no expense to get in front of customers IRL”) was entirely normal in the industry.
On the left side of the Good Barbell—better work life—it’s true that in-person relationships are huge for both top-line revenue (i.e., visiting customers) and mental well-being (i.e., seeing coworkers in person).
On the Barbell’s right side—non-work life—change is also afoot. Look no further than the booming return of concerts, live sports, the well-executed Partiful app, my friend Nicole’s Austin nature newsletter, “run clubs as the new dating apps,” and doing 1990s-coded neighborly things (translated: normal neighbor things).5
Just as work-from-home was “novel” in 2020, so too was social media, once. In 2012, we still got a flood of dopamine when we refreshed the Facebook timeline to see what our friend-who-we-hadn’t-seen-since-2008 ate for dinner. Today, even when the TikTok-ified feed is amusing, it is definitely no longer novel.
While there is a time for more consumption, we’ve already reached its peak. The pendulum is swinging back in the direction of touching grass and kicking back in Zuck’s backyard—eating smoked meats with Sweet Baby Ray’s.
In conclusion, none of the Good Barbell’s three weights—the Techno, the Analog, or the IRL—requires future breakthroughs for us to get started today.
True story: I recently had a fever dream in which I was drafted into the NFL with like the 15th overall pick. In the dream, I suddenly became self-aware and realized I was already 28, which is far too old to be drafted in the first round. I then actually woke up and remembered I was 30, not 28. Please reply directly to this post if you have experience interpreting dreams and can help me. (Also, H/T to Lil Sasquatch who actually had this happen.)
Even in a job like teaching kids, which is not just about the money, being mentally better will help the kids and improve the teacher’s life omni-directionally.
Some AI Nuance
In 2026, I’ve critiqued the various camps of AI extremists:
The Dario Amodei-esque camp of “We are months away from AI solving all of our worldly problems” (Intelligence isn’t the Bottleneck)
Fear-stoking populists who say “AI is all a fraud” (Bubble-boys and Bubble Myths)
Nihilists (Copernicus Returns)
My belief is that AI definitely has its place on the Barbell (the “Techno”), but so too do the “Analog” and “IRL” weights.
I find all examples of “Bay Area people accidentally rediscover child-friendly neighborhoods via first-principles experimentation” to be hilarious.