When Everything Is Possible
On curiosity, speed, and the cost of following ideas
I read a Linked In post recently from someone describing how energized they feel using AI. How it lets them follow ideas just to see where they go. How the cost of exploration has dropped so low that curiosity finally feels unconstrained.
I recognized myself immediately.
Every day now, I follow threads I wouldn’t have followed before. I chase questions because I can now follow them through the data, far enough to see what’s actually there. I explore edges because the friction is gone. The work moves fast, and my thinking moves with it.
And my brain is full.
Not bored. Not burned out. Full. The kind of tired that comes from sustained intensity, from holding too many possibilities open at once, from operating at a speed your nervous system never trained for.
We are moving fast. Super fast.
The cost of trying an idea has dropped dramatically. What used to require planning, commitment, and time can now be explored in minutes. A question turns into a sketch. A sketch turns into a prototype. A prototype turns into three more questions, all asking to be followed.
Curiosity has become cheap.
But while the cost of exploration has gone down, the cost of attention hasn’t changed at all. My brain still pays full price for every context switch, every tangent, every promising path I decide to walk down just to see where it leads.
I feel this most acutely in the way my thinking has changed. My mind moves faster than it used to. It hops. It fans out. It holds more partial ideas in flight at once. That can feel exhilarating. It can also feel relentless.
There is always another thread. Another angle. Another version worth testing.
What’s striking to me is that nothing in this system tells you when you’ve done enough. There are no natural stopping points. No built‑in sense of completion. The tools remove friction, but they also remove the subtle cues that used to slow us down.
I don’t want to slow down. I love this moment. I love what’s possible. I love being able to follow ideas instead of shelving them because the cost was too high.
But I’m starting to notice that speed has a texture. That sustained acceleration feels different in the body than short bursts of intensity. That a brain can be stimulated and exhausted at the same time.
I don’t have a clean answer for this yet. I’m not interested in giving up the speed or the possibility. I don’t want to return to a slower, more constrained version of my work.
But I’m learning that when the cost of curiosity drops to zero, something else absorbs the bill.
Right now, I’m still figuring out what that something is.
Alison + Wiggins