The Upload Happens Bit by Bit
On TED, AI, White Lotus (kinda) and the quiet courage of showing up to life (mostly)
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Everyone keeps asking: “How was TED?”
And I haven’t known how to answer. There’s no neat summary. TED wasn’t just an event. It was, for me, a personal threshold — a quiet, internal click I didn’t see coming. So this is the only way I can explain it.
A few weeks ago, in a session on AI, someone said something that hasn’t left me since:
“The upload happens bit by bit.”
They were talking about AI. But I felt it as a truth about life.
Because the top question I get from readers, from clients, friends, strangers — is some version of: how am I supposed to deal with all this? With AI. With the pace. With Trump. With the markets. With the quiet terror of becoming obsolete or irrelevant or simply… overwhelmed. The fear is real. It matters. And it deserves more than platitudes or hype cycles. It deserves honesty — and maybe even love.
We like to imagine change as cinematic. Dramatic. A switch flipped. A hero revealed. But in truth — and as even White Lotus tried to remind us in its latest (overwritten) season — real transformation runs on something older, stranger and harder: Amor Fati. They even named an episode after it.
Love of fate. Love of what is. Even when it’s not what you ordered. Especially then.
Right now, we’re all living inside a cultural dissonance: AI accelerating everything, Trump rising again, war always on the edge of our screens. Violence, climate, collapse — the machinery of modern life feels too fast to process and too big to fight. And still, we keep going.
We imagine that change — real change — should arrive like a lightning bolt. We crave a single line. A break in the clouds. But the future doesn’t come like that. Not with AI. Not with identity. Not with becoming.
It comes gradually. Unevenly. It embeds itself before it explains itself.
First, it’s a quick summary. Then it’s in your inbox, writing with suspicious clarity. Then it’s tweaking your five-year plan before you’ve even had your coffee. And you don’t remember when you stopped resisting it.
The upload happens bit by bit.
That’s what makes it so powerful — and so difficult to name. Because it doesn’t scare you all at once. It flatters your instincts. It offers help before it demands change.
But that sentence didn’t stay with me because of AI. It stayed with me because I recognised the shape of my own life inside it.
At TED, I didn’t feel like an impostor (what I always feared). But I did feel awake. Curious. Receptive. I knew I was okay to be there — but I didn’t know exactly why. And that felt right. Because sometimes, when you arrive in the place you’ve spent years imagining, the only real question is: What will I do with this now?
Decades ago, I first encountered TED as an idea — a dream, really. A place for other people. Growing up no more than 20 miles south of the original outpost, you might as well have said I lived a million miles away. I didn’t have a plan to get there. I couldn’t have made one if I tried. But bit by bit, decision by decision, I did. The upload was already running.
And I was grateful. Not just for being there, but for everything that got me there — the mistakes, the missed timings, the jobs I took or didn’t take, the failed pitches, the wrong turns that felt definitive at the time. Somehow, every one of them led to this. And that, to me, is reason enough. Amor Fati. Love it because it happened. Because it’s yours. Because it brought you here. And because it’s already bringing you somewhere else.
That’s the thing about transformation: we assume it starts with clarity. But often, it starts with survival. With instinct. With showing up again and again, without applause, without guarantee. We dismiss those early steps because they don’t look like strategy. But they are. They’re everything.
But to hear them — to feel the direction of your own becoming — you have to quiet the noise. And that includes your own. Because life whispers before it screams. And when it screams, things break.
We’re all so busy trying to manage what’s next that we forget to listen to where we already are. And sometimes, the best strategy is presence.
In Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, the shift doesn’t begin when the sword is drawn or the battle is won. It begins at the threshold — the moment you say yes to what you didn’t ask for. The moment you enter the unknown and trust that meaning will reveal itself along the way.
That’s what TED was for me. Not a finish line. A crossing point. And what I carried home wasn’t certainty. It was this:
You’re already inside the story. Act like it.
Amor Fati — “love of one’s fate” — isn’t about blind optimism. It’s not romantic. It’s radical. It means loving the reality in front of you, not the plan you made. It means learning to see arrival not as proof, but as invitation. It means showing up to the moment like you earned it — not because you’re owed anything, but because you survived enough to be here.
And when the world feels overwhelming — AI, politics, markets, identity, fear — it helps to remember:
The brave thing isn’t changing everything at once.
The brave thing is noticing that you’ve already changed — and choosing to keep going.
Because that’s how the upload begins.
And that’s how it finishes.
