My Office Is a Shooting Gallery
The new sparkle icon is in every app, and from my desk, it looks less like a productivity tool and more like a quiet, company-wide epidemic of AI addiction; am I the only one who sees it?
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Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
From my desk, I have a clear view of three people. All of them are high.
Not on anything illegal, of course. They’re high on the sparkle. That little ✨ icon that’s suddenly in every text box, every search bar, every damn app on their screen. It’s the new company-wide pusher, and the product is potent.
The Morning Fix
There’s Jean, in marketing. He’s been “polishing” the same three-line email for twenty minutes. He types a clumsy sentence, frowns, and clicks the sparkle. Poof. The sentence is now smoother, more corporate, and utterly devoid of Jean’s actual personality. He stares at it with a placid satisfaction. “It just… finds the right words,” he told me once, his eyes a little glazed over.
To my left is a developer. She’s not typing. She’s just staring at her code editor, where the AI assistant is spewing out function after function. Her finger rests on the enter key, accepting the suggestions in a steady, hypnotic rhythm. It’s not coding; it’s a trance. Each accepted suggestion is a tiny dopamine hit, a micro-dose of effortless progress. No struggle, no problem-solving, just the warm blanket of generated logic.
It’s efficient, I guess. It’s certainly quiet. No one asks questions anymore. No one argues about the best way to phrase something. They just click the sparkle. I don’t know, maybe I’m the weird one for still wanting to do the work myself. The smart kids on Hacker News are probably debating the finer points of this new symbiosis.
But from where I’m sitting, it looks like everyone has found a dealer that sits right in their toolbar. A silent, ever-present source for a quick, clean hit.
Here’s a dose of methadone, if you need it: the next time you have a question, turn your chair and ask a human first. Count to five before you click the sparkle. It’s a small act of resistance, a way to remember what your own brain feels like. You can find more strategies for reclaiming your focus with groups like the Attention Activists.
I watch Jean finally send his perfect, soulless email. He leans back, sighs, and then immediately opens a new document to start the process all over again. The first hit is always free, but the subscription is forever.
Tell me I’m overreacting.