The Quiet Retreat from Excellence? The New, Hidden Bitcoin

A guy I knew years ago was the best guitarist in his small town. Local gigs, people actually came to see him. He was charismatic and really good at his self-taught double-hand tapping.

Then he watched one episode of a talent show—some 12-year-old kid playing things he couldn’t even replicate on his guitar. That was a game-changer for him. He realized he would never be as good, and he gave up. The gap suddenly looked infinite.

Globalization suddenly discouraged people from excelling at their craft. Everyone wants to be “the best”—but if you can never, ever be the best: Why bother?

AI is doing the same thing, but at 100x speed.

You used to be able to sit down, write something decent, design something decent, code something decent—and feel you were getting somewhere with it. You could feel like a hero in your own little talent show. People noticed. It felt like yours. Now the machine spits out something better in 12 seconds, and half the audience already assumes anything good is probably AI anyway. So why bother getting good?

The quiet retreat has already started.

I see this phenomenon everywhere. Writers stopped spending weeks writing and refining their articles. Yes, skilled readers can still notice the difference, but that gap is shrinking fast. Once your “voice” (writing style) can be fully replicated, you are done.

Kids spent months designing an awesome animation in Blender, starting with a simple cube that eventually morphed into an entire space battle movie. Now, tools like Midjourney do that in no time.

People are giving up. Not because they’re lazy, but because the conventional reward system is broken. Globalization was an injury, but the AI wave has added insult to that injury.

Here is the thing, though: most of what AI is replacing was already the low-purpose stuff. For example, the “content-is-the-king” idea has led to a flood of meaningless web articles in the past. Boring stock photos were used because we needed pictures for a blog post, not because they were meant to say something meaningful. It had to be there because the blog post template demanded it. Repetitive work was only there because it was cheap (“best-cost”).

In other words, AI is just finishing the job globalization started.

A Survival Guide for the AI Era

I feel that three things will become the superpowers for anyone moving forward in the new AI era.

1. People who are already famous. The James Deans of their fields. They’re safe for now, but they’re also aging out—or dead. A key part from Dean’s wrecked Porsche sold for nearly $400,000. Stuff from known personalities that cannot be replicated becomes valuable.
2. The truly unique stuff. Example: Swiss watches. A walk through the town of Zürich reveals shops where watches can lighten your wallet by a million dollars. Swiss watchmakers spend 1,000–2,000+ hours hand-finishing a single watch, using techniques passed down over generations.
3. People who genuinely want to help, care about you, actually do help, and know how to do it in a genuine, honest, and authentic way. Not the fake “thought leadership” version. I mean that kind of help that really matters and offers value, including motivational aspects, thoughtful meaning, and genuineness. You can get generic answers from any LLMs. But an in-depth, sharp analysis, understanding the context in every specific case, and being willing and wanting to help with your personal and professional situation—that’s scarce. Everyone is thinking of themselves first; Someone who truly wants to help you is rare.

AI will increasingly keep getting better at the “best cost” version of everything—anything that AI generates becomes a cheap commodity, but it can never replace purpose.

Purpose is the only currency that remains in high demand. It won’t devalue the second it’s “AI-made.”

At the end of the day

The winners of the AI revolution won’t necessarily be the most talented. They’re the ones who still “give a damn.” We are about to find out how many of us are left in that category.

This is the real “abundance trap.” The peril is not that AI takes our jobs, but that it quietly takes our reason to try.

We must stop competing with the machine on its terms and start building things the machine can’t fake. Purpose is not a nice-to-have anymore—it’s the new Bitcoin.