If you want to get rich, don’t do what I did in 2016 and say “TikTok will never be a viable way to make money.” Hindsight is 20/20, I was 18 making beats in my dorm room and ten years later part of me is still kicking myself for not jumping on TikTok or YouTube sooner.

I didn’t get rich, otherwise I wouldn’t be blogging right now, but I gained some wisdom watching people rise and fall in the music production world through the streaming era. It was a gold rush, until major labels cut massive deals and consolidated the market to keep their investments healthy. Now it’s just as saturated as before with the same household names like Drake, never to lose their place at the top…

…tbh he’s totally fine and everyone has completely forgotten the battle (unless you live on the west coast and still bump “Not Like Us” like me). But in any field, is maximum visibility and total dominance over the market in your niche really the point?

I have a rebuke: you and I do not need to constantly search for gold rushes to find maximum value in our lives. Especially with AI.

The anxiety-inducing Twitter feed might disagree with my retro blogging refute, but let me cook real quick.

Look at the following dashboard and tell me what you see:

At the time I checked Cloudflare Radar on September 22nd, 2026 bots accounted for roughly 60% of worldwide requests to HTML content, compared to about 40% human traffic.

If you weren’t aware, a lot of what we publish and interact with online is now visited, indexed, analyzed, or scraped by automated systems (probably to sell you dish soap on Amazon). Shocking? Think about the angry comment you saw on Twitter and ask yourself if that was even a real human being. That’s just where the conversation begins.

The dark forest theory has been circling the internet recently and gives us a way to think about how to navigate this eerie jungle. Say I post this blog in the jungle and make everyone aware of my cool opinions and be very “loud.” The metaphor suggests that broadcasting yourself can become less sexy in a chaotic environment where everything I share can be scraped, repurposed, and fed into AI. So is it better to just leave the internet altogether?

Everyone sees the problem, but not everyone agrees on the approach.

I found three broad camps:

• Burn it down
• Wait and see
• Build Through It

Burn it down says go touch grass. Fair. Wait and see says wait for it to stabilize. Build Through It sees beauty in bots and AI as tools for the new internet.

I’m not interested in joining any of the camps yet. I just know this: the internet should not become a machine for value-maxing every new thing.

I still think there’s a renaissance available for the internet, but I’m not convinced squeezing more value out of the systems we already have is how we get there.

It’s so exhausting.

We did it with the dot com bubble, social media, now it’s happening with AI. We want to take and take the good from something and extract its maximum value but all that’s left is a wobbly corpse.

Social media to most young crowds feels like slop, looks like slop, and acts like slop more than it has ever been valuable or connecting. So we go find meaning in other areas like our work where AI is just becoming the latest excuse to make us do… MORE WORK.

Is there truly any rest for our souls?

Your life has more value than KPIs, quarterly earnings, follower counts, or AI prompting tokens. They will rise and fall just like generations before and you’re truly just like me, a speck of dust in a large universe that is like grass being mowed over every week in the summer.

The hope of the time you have in this life is to look away from the screens and get off the internet and stop reading this blog. Making physical contact with the grass is great. Then use the internet as the tool it was meant for: Networking, Storage, Entertainment, Surfing. Don’t throw it away, but don’t use it unwisely, let the bots all go “No Country For Old Men” on each other and duke it out. Let’s enhance the dignity of our privacy in the process and reshape the internet in the new age with wisdom.

So yes, jump on the new TikTok, AI tool, platform, or digital gold rush and ask whether it can be profitable for your life.

Just don’t let it prevent your life from becoming profitable.

Build things, meet people, make art, learn something but then go live your life.

Don’t let your life become the internet.