Fried Egg Fridays: Slow Living, AI Agents, and Word Vomit

Image by Jasper AI

My daughter devours fried eggs. She loves them so much that we carved out a weekly day to enjoy them for breakfast. Upon waking, she will scurry out and loudly announce to everyone, "It's fried egg Friday!"

As an amateur cook, fried eggs take me a little longer to cook than most. It forces me to slow down and concentrate on what I am doing. The requirement to slow down and be present provides an unexpected benefit of parenthood. You don't get away with daydreaming or multi-tasking when you have a toddler looking to push the boundaries at any given second.

As a writer, slow-living and mindfulness are my most useful tools, along with mindful tech use. Modern life encourages fast-paced living. We are encouraged to multi-task ourselves into early graves to keep it all afloat. On the other side, studies show that slowing down offers better health benefits.

If you have your head in the tech world, you may have heard about AI Agents this week. If you haven't, a brief overview. They are AI (wow, really? I couldn't guess that from their names, Kaleene) that can perform complex tasks for humans without humans intervening. For example, they can research all the best dinner options for a romantic date and make a reservation for you without having you do it. However, most coverage has been around what they can do in the workplace.

Balance is Everything

Life pushes us toward living fast. Our world is geared for it. The constant push notifications combined with everyday or even emergency stressors put a damper on plans to curate our lives. This may be where mindful tech use comes to our aid.

I am currently writing a sci-fi novel. I don't like rushing the creative process. I find my best creative thoughts happen in stillness. Good art takes time. If you are a photographer you will most likely get a crappy shot if you rush the process compared to if you slowed down.

My first drafts of anything I write are word vomit. I like to take my time to write things out and go over and edit them myself. To allow myself time to do this, I need to automate my life in other areas, like parenting. Just Kidding! Parenting requires my mindfulness and attention more than my writing. There are other ways I can automate my workflows with the help of AI agents.

When I am creating blog posts, articles, or how-to guides, I have tech and AI tools to help me with outlining and grammar. If you are someone making an active choice in your life to not use the most common AI chatbots, places like GitHub Copilot (for more tech-oriented users), Jasper.ai, and ContentShake AI may be of interest to you. If you are in healthcare, retail, or even manufacturing, you may find that you have AI agents helping you automate tasks that would have taken too much time out of your work day.

Mindful tech use is of utmost importance. Just because we can use it doesn't mean it should take over. When used ethically, it can provide balance for humanity. We pull the reigns, we make the calls of how tech shows up in our lives.

Savoring Fried Egg Friday Routines

The tech world is an interesting place. There is apprehension about the future of AI, drama surrounding ways to use tech, and so on.

However, there is a lot of hope, too. I adore this story of how a new pair of glasses is helping a 10-year-old deaf girl. I equally love this one about mechanical crows and how they are helping the climate. I have optimism for how AI Agents and other tech will assist us in slow living. So I can continue to savor my word vomit drafts and fried egg Friday routines.