The system that tied your identity to your job was designed that way. Now AI is arriving and the system has nothing to offer you except the ruins of a bargain you never agreed to.
"But a human without agency without the weight of personal effort is a ghost in their own life.”
When I wrote this passage, I felt quite uncomfortable. Because deep down I know tech today and in the future will have the capacity to take away our purpose, our agency, to convince us that we are nothing more than what we have created in a silicone chip. I’m writing a book and I include the distinction between Carbon and Silicone.
Carbon is about transformation and Silicone is about perpetual perfection, no change. And when I look at silicone valley I see this almost obsession of making everything perfect, that imperfection is a problem, and “they” the solution, and for that reason perhaps we are a problem for then, an impediment for perpetual perfection.
I see these big tech moguls obsessed with eternal life. In the book I’m currently writing I make a reference that we are living on borrowing time and all the elements that make you, You.
Have being in the center of our planet, around our galaxy, inside a star. And we should feel blessed in having this opportunity to occupy this form that allow us to understand our reality, the best we can. That perhaps a title is just as ephemeral has a blink of an eye, and we should not invest totally in this fragile persona, we are more than what the “market” is telling our worth is. The market needs this narrative so it can perpetuate.
Perhaps we need to change this, find new ways of leading our lives... outside performative templates.
Silicon Valley's obsession with perpetual perfection creates a feedback loop where human imperfection becomes a liability to be solved rather than the source of meaning. If we're problems to be optimized away, then yes we become ghosts, performing versions of ourselves designed by algorithms and market logic rather than living them.
But here's where I think your argument gets its real power: you're not arguing against technology or progress. You're arguing for remembering scale. That we're made of stardust, that we're temporary, that this form we inhabit is absurdly precious because it's fragile and finite. That's not weakness that's the whole point. Our imperfections, our struggles, our need to transform and fail and try again that's where agency actually lives.
Yes! And this is exactly where Diamantino's argument lands for me too.
The world, our communities, our organizations need us whole today : not the one we were told to be, or shaped into being by a boss, a group, an algorithm, or our own desperate need to belong.
The one that's been dormant, our Complete Self that has no choice but to live at the edge of the curve because that's where original and unique actually lives.
And here's what I know from my work: without deep self-knowledge, that Complete Self stays dormant. It emerges when you finally stop performing the version of yourself that was built for someone else's comfort and dare to be you. But "Who are you?" ♺
The changemakers have always lived in the margin.
They shift the mean slowly, from the edges. That's how consciousness evolves.
But only if they resist normalization... by AI, by the group, by the market logic that turns human imperfection into a problem to solve rather than the whole point.
Your stardust argument is exactly right. Fragile, finite, irreducibly human. That's the source and our greatest strength
You are right that they shift the mean from the edges. But the ones who changed things most did not usually know they were at the edge. They were just paying attention to something others had agreed to stop seeing. The margin is not a fixed location you choose. It is what happens when you refuse a particular convenience.
Your point about change makers living at the margins, resisting normalization, speaks to how real innovation requires the courage to be different, that fragility and imperfection you mention isn't a flaw to optimize away; it's what makes us human and creative.
“ The discomfort with stillness that I watch in leadership teams is not a personality trait. It is a residue. It is what three years of working inside a system that measures your value in throughput does to a person who was never given permission to value themselves outside of it. “
really appreciated the sentiment here. really great read all throughout honesty. thanks for this one. it was refreshing.
OMG Diamantino, thank you for this essay. It goes way beyond "who am I" — and that alone is the hardest question I know.
Three things in your article I want to respond to.
1 - AI is different from every technological disruption before it. The telephone replaced the switchboard operator. The internet replaced directory services. Each time, a vertical category disappeared and another emerged. AI is the first horizontal disruption — it crosses every category simultaneously. And nobody has a clean answer for what emerges on the other side.
2- You say we need to speak up, name the truth, say it out loud in the room. I agree completely. But speaking from that place requires courage. And courage requires something most people haven't built — a genuine confidence in who they are (not the performed kind), the confidence that doesn't need the room to agree.
Which brings me to the hardest question you leave us with. "Who am I" ?
I once stood in front of a room full of people, ready to pitch. I know how to pitch. I've done it a hundred times. And I froze from something deeper than fear. The words that were supposed to come out made no sense to me anymore. What I wanted wasn't to introduce my role. I wanted a soul-to-soul connection and no pitch format has a slot for that.
"Who are you?" is the hardest question I know, because we've spent decades building such convincing answers that aren't really answers. What I've found — and it took years, two burnouts, and a lot of silence — is that the answer isn't something you articulate. It's somewhere you return to: a place inside that feels like home. You know it when you're there because nothing needs to be proven, explained or performed - It just feels like home.
And here, finally, I know who I truly am, no words can describe it, just a deep, real sensation of being back within myself.
This is beautiful. You've named something I think most of us feel but can't articulate that moment when the performance breaks and you realise it was never the real answer anyway.
That frozen moment before the pitch wasn't a failure. It was your integrity saying "no, this doesn't fit." Most people push through it.
What you found in the silence that homecoming feeling, that place where nothing needs proving that's the real antidote to everything tech is selling us. Not better answers. Just coming back to yourself.
I think that's courage knowing who you are independent of whether anyone else agrees. And that's what the world actually needs to hear right now.
We must reconsider how our institutions and daily habits reinforce roles that could be redesigned. I'd be curious how we might envision practical first steps for individuals and communities to experiment with alternative structures without relying on large-scale policy changes.
"But a human without agency without the weight of personal effort is a ghost in their own life.”
When I wrote this passage, I felt quite uncomfortable. Because deep down I know tech today and in the future will have the capacity to take away our purpose, our agency, to convince us that we are nothing more than what we have created in a silicone chip. I’m writing a book and I include the distinction between Carbon and Silicone.
Carbon is about transformation and Silicone is about perpetual perfection, no change. And when I look at silicone valley I see this almost obsession of making everything perfect, that imperfection is a problem, and “they” the solution, and for that reason perhaps we are a problem for then, an impediment for perpetual perfection.
I see these big tech moguls obsessed with eternal life. In the book I’m currently writing I make a reference that we are living on borrowing time and all the elements that make you, You.
Have being in the center of our planet, around our galaxy, inside a star. And we should feel blessed in having this opportunity to occupy this form that allow us to understand our reality, the best we can. That perhaps a title is just as ephemeral has a blink of an eye, and we should not invest totally in this fragile persona, we are more than what the “market” is telling our worth is. The market needs this narrative so it can perpetuate.
Perhaps we need to change this, find new ways of leading our lives... outside performative templates.
Silicon Valley's obsession with perpetual perfection creates a feedback loop where human imperfection becomes a liability to be solved rather than the source of meaning. If we're problems to be optimized away, then yes we become ghosts, performing versions of ourselves designed by algorithms and market logic rather than living them.
But here's where I think your argument gets its real power: you're not arguing against technology or progress. You're arguing for remembering scale. That we're made of stardust, that we're temporary, that this form we inhabit is absurdly precious because it's fragile and finite. That's not weakness that's the whole point. Our imperfections, our struggles, our need to transform and fail and try again that's where agency actually lives.
Yes! And this is exactly where Diamantino's argument lands for me too.
The world, our communities, our organizations need us whole today : not the one we were told to be, or shaped into being by a boss, a group, an algorithm, or our own desperate need to belong.
The one that's been dormant, our Complete Self that has no choice but to live at the edge of the curve because that's where original and unique actually lives.
And here's what I know from my work: without deep self-knowledge, that Complete Self stays dormant. It emerges when you finally stop performing the version of yourself that was built for someone else's comfort and dare to be you. But "Who are you?" ♺
The changemakers have always lived in the margin.
They shift the mean slowly, from the edges. That's how consciousness evolves.
But only if they resist normalization... by AI, by the group, by the market logic that turns human imperfection into a problem to solve rather than the whole point.
Your stardust argument is exactly right. Fragile, finite, irreducibly human. That's the source and our greatest strength
You are right that they shift the mean from the edges. But the ones who changed things most did not usually know they were at the edge. They were just paying attention to something others had agreed to stop seeing. The margin is not a fixed location you choose. It is what happens when you refuse a particular convenience.
Your point about change makers living at the margins, resisting normalization, speaks to how real innovation requires the courage to be different, that fragility and imperfection you mention isn't a flaw to optimize away; it's what makes us human and creative.
Indeed, we has humans, in my opinion, are not perfect. But then again what is perfect?
Here is the question I want to sit with this week. Where does your sense of who you are actually live, outside of what you do for work?
“ The discomfort with stillness that I watch in leadership teams is not a personality trait. It is a residue. It is what three years of working inside a system that measures your value in throughput does to a person who was never given permission to value themselves outside of it. “
really appreciated the sentiment here. really great read all throughout honesty. thanks for this one. it was refreshing.
Thank you. I have seen a lot, and still do.
OMG Diamantino, thank you for this essay. It goes way beyond "who am I" — and that alone is the hardest question I know.
Three things in your article I want to respond to.
1 - AI is different from every technological disruption before it. The telephone replaced the switchboard operator. The internet replaced directory services. Each time, a vertical category disappeared and another emerged. AI is the first horizontal disruption — it crosses every category simultaneously. And nobody has a clean answer for what emerges on the other side.
2- You say we need to speak up, name the truth, say it out loud in the room. I agree completely. But speaking from that place requires courage. And courage requires something most people haven't built — a genuine confidence in who they are (not the performed kind), the confidence that doesn't need the room to agree.
Which brings me to the hardest question you leave us with. "Who am I" ?
I once stood in front of a room full of people, ready to pitch. I know how to pitch. I've done it a hundred times. And I froze from something deeper than fear. The words that were supposed to come out made no sense to me anymore. What I wanted wasn't to introduce my role. I wanted a soul-to-soul connection and no pitch format has a slot for that.
"Who are you?" is the hardest question I know, because we've spent decades building such convincing answers that aren't really answers. What I've found — and it took years, two burnouts, and a lot of silence — is that the answer isn't something you articulate. It's somewhere you return to: a place inside that feels like home. You know it when you're there because nothing needs to be proven, explained or performed - It just feels like home.
And here, finally, I know who I truly am, no words can describe it, just a deep, real sensation of being back within myself.
This is beautiful. You've named something I think most of us feel but can't articulate that moment when the performance breaks and you realise it was never the real answer anyway.
That frozen moment before the pitch wasn't a failure. It was your integrity saying "no, this doesn't fit." Most people push through it.
What you found in the silence that homecoming feeling, that place where nothing needs proving that's the real antidote to everything tech is selling us. Not better answers. Just coming back to yourself.
I think that's courage knowing who you are independent of whether anyone else agrees. And that's what the world actually needs to hear right now.
Thank you Valerie.
I'm publishing today the 3rd part of this series:
https://diamantinoalmeida.substack.com/p/a-delusional-ape-hallucinating-narratives
We must reconsider how our institutions and daily habits reinforce roles that could be redesigned. I'd be curious how we might envision practical first steps for individuals and communities to experiment with alternative structures without relying on large-scale policy changes.