Why You Feel Behind on AI (And why Nobody really Is)

There’s an urgency about life at the moment. Truth be told, I’m writing this blog entry mostly to reassure myself, but I’m hoping it resonates with you as well.

We are not behind.

I am not behind.

You are not behind.

AI has created a sense of urgency in our lives that feels so compelling right now that it’s hard not to give in to this narrative that if we aren’t producing at the level it’s capable of producing (24/7/365) we are somehow inferior – not just to the machine but to everyone using it in a more effective manner than us.

That feeling is not information. It’s a threat response. And it is being generated by a race in which almost nobody is actually where they claim to be and no one is actually winning.

The Race to the Bottom

In 1968, the Sunday Times announced a race: sail alone, nonstop, around the world. First prize, £5,000.

Donald Crowhurst was an electronics engineer in Somerset whose business was failing. He built marine navigation equipment and could not sell enough of it to get by. To him, the race looked like salvation — publicity, prize money, a story that he could use to reinforce his business. His backer agreed to fund the attempt, and Crowhurst signed terms that mortgaged his business and his house against it.

He had a forty-foot trimaran built in a hurry.

Crowhurst had never sailed a trimaran before.

When he left Teignmouth on October 31, 1968 — the last day entries were permitted — the boat was unfinished.

Hatches leaked.

Safety equipment he had designed was still in pieces in the hold.

(Anyone else see the immediate overlaps here to how we’re using and embarking on our journeys with AI?)

Within weeks Crowhurst knew that the boat was making less than half the speed he needed to be in the running. Winning aside, continuing into the Southern Ocean in that vessel would likely kill him. But the alternative was just as unappealing. Turning back meant bankruptcy and public humiliation.

So he devised a third option.

Crowhurst stopped sailing the race, stayed in the South Atlantic, and began radioing false positions. Starting December 6, he reported progress he had not made. He kept two logbooks: one recording where he actually was, one constructing where he claimed to be.

The world began to cheer him on, believing him to be in the positions he falsely reported. By early spring he was reported as the likely winner of the fastest circumnavigation.

Now, the part I cannot stop thinking about.

Another man on another vessel, Nigel Tetley, was actually out there. Really sailing, in a boat also coming apart, and he believed Crowhurst was closing in on him. So he pushed harder. Faster. On May 30, 1969, Tetley’s ship broke up under him and he was forced to abandon the vessel he’d made so much progress on. Tetley survived, but he lost the race that he had actually been sailing — to a competitor who had never left the Atlantic.

Crowhurst’s last radio contact was June 29. His final logbook entry is dated July 1. The boat was found drifting and empty on July 10. Three logbooks were aboard, more than 25,000 words, and they document a mind coming apart. He was never found.

A man died maintaining a position he was not in. Another man lost a boat chasing him there.

63% of us are keeping two logbooks

In a 2026 survey of 1,500 workers, 63% admitted to lying about or exaggerating their AI skills. Among Gen Z workers it was 80%. Fifty-seven percent said they feel pressure to appear AI-capable. Only 38% felt genuinely prepared to use the tools well.

And then the number that should stop you cold: 70% believed their peers were overstating it too.

Read that again. Most people are inflating their position. Most people also suspect everyone else is inflating theirs. And everyone keeps sailing anyway.

We are all radioing coordinates we have not reached to people we assume are doing the same, and then setting our own pace by the fiction that comes back.

The race is real. The positions are not.

Your body cannot tell “behind” from “in danger”

Here’s why this wrecks you rather than merely annoying you.

Your stress response does not run on facts. It runs on appraisal — a fast, preconscious read of whether the demands in front of you exceed the resources you’ve got. When that read comes back that demands exceed resources, your physiology commits. Blood flow shifts. Fuel mobilizes. Attention narrows hard onto the threat.

That system is superb at one thing: getting you through an acute, bounded emergency.

It has no category for permanently slightly behind an imaginary peer.

So it does the only thing it knows. It mobilizes and sails faster – even as the boat is breaking apart around you. You are running a system built for sprints as though it were a background process, all day, for months.

Urgency doesn’t just tire you out. It makes you worse at exactly the work that would have gotten you genuinely ahead.

The Red Queen, and what arms races actually cost

In 1973, Leigh Van Valen proposed what he called a new evolutionary law, and he named it after Lewis Carroll. In Through the Looking-Glass, the Red Queen tells Alice that in her country, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place.

That is what a coevolutionary arms race looks like. Predator gets faster, so prey gets faster, so predator gets faster. Enormous energetic investment, generation after generation, and the relative position barely moves. Everyone is running flat out to stay exactly where they started.

That running is not free. Every calorie an organism sinks into the arms race is a calorie not spent on something else — growth, immune function, reproduction, repair. Arms races don’t just fail to produce a winner. They quietly bill the rest of the system.

Look at what your AI arms race is billing. Attention that used to go to your actual craft. Evenings. The patience it takes to think one thing all the way through. The willingness to say I don’t know that yet in a room.

You are not falling behind in the race. You are being consumed by it. Those are different problems and they have opposite solutions.

How you get out

You don’t get out by running faster, and you don’t get out by opting out. Both of those are still moves in the same game.

You get out by refusing to set your pace from other people’s reported positions.

Stop navigating by radio. Assume most of what you hear about how far along everyone else is has been rounded generously. It has. Sixty-three percent, by their own admission. When somebody tells you what they’ve deployed, the honest question isn’t how did they get so far — it’s what does that actually look like on a Tuesday. Ask it. Watch how often the answer gets vague.

Pick your own finish line and write it down. The reason you feel permanently behind is that the finish line is defined by whoever is loudest this week, and it moves. A goal you chose — one problem, one tool, one real use case — and finish it. Make the goal cycle complete. An arms race can never be finished, structurally. That’s what makes it an arms race.

Say the true position out loud. This is the hardest one and it’s ultimately what will make you a true leader. Crowhurst had one exit available at every single moment, right up to the end: radio his real coordinates and take the consequences. The tax on an honest position is one uncomfortable conversation. The tax on a false one compounds forever, because now you have to keep sailing it.

Somebody in your organization has to say I don’t know this yet, and I’m learning it, and here’s actually where I am. It might as well be the person who can afford it most. If that’s you, that’s not a confession. That’s leadership, and it gives everyone else in the room permission to stop lying too.

None of this means the technology doesn’t matter or that the pace isn’t real. It’s real. But it’s prudent to remember that you’re allowed to sail your own boat, at your own speed, and report your true position.

Stay stressed friends, but let’s all learn to fear it a bit less.

Xoxo

Rebecca