A few years ago, I was on a working trip in Marrakech with a few friends. I recall Bunmi Ajilore using the term “attaining singularity” as we debated the future of technology and its role in human society. We were discussing the rapid convergence of artificial intelligence toward a superintelligence that would eventually surpass human capability.

At the time, we couldn’t have imagined the reality of the last two years. AI has become the defining concept of our era. Yet, along with the rapid development of these models comes a flood of resultant tools, each arriving with the same promise: increased productivity.

Today, however, the common challenge is sifting through this abundance. We face immense pressure to learn every new platform and sharpen on-demand skills for the marketplace. For a creative like me, someone with diverse interests who dabbles in various ideas, I find myself constantly testing, learning, and discovering new tools daily. Added to that, in my research work for a major tech company, there is a constant demand to not just use, but provide feedback on, these new capabilities.

It can be extremely overwhelming.

The Irony We Didn’t See Coming

We anticipated singularity: technology converging toward one superintelligence. What we got instead was fragmentation, dozens of AI models, hundreds of tools, thousands of tutorials, and an infinite scroll of social media posts promising that this is the tool that will finally transform your workflow.

The challenge wasn’t what we expected. It isn’t one AI overlord; it is the cognitive whiplash of trying to keep up with an ecosystem that spawns new “essential” tools faster than we can evaluate the last batch. The revolution didn’t arrive as a single, elegant solution but as an avalanche of options, each demanding our attention, our time, our resources, and our mental bandwidth.

The Human Cost of Abundance

This proliferation of tools isn’t just inconvenient; it is having real psychological and professional effects, such as:

• Decision Paralysis: Decision fatigue has morphed into paralysis. People spend more time researching which tool to use than actually doing the work. Worse, they often start a project in one tool, see a “better” one, and restart from scratch. The work never gets finished because the platform keeps changing.

• The Erosion of Self-Trust: There is an insidious erosion of confidence. When you see endless posts of people claiming mastery of fifteen different AI tools, you start doubting your own competence. “Am I falling behind? Am I doing this wrong?” The irony is that you likely already have the skills to execute great work. You just don’t trust them anymore because they aren’t tool-mediated.

• The Death of Deep Work: Constantly switching contexts between tools means you never drop into a flow state. You remain in learning mode, tutorial mode, or setup mode and never in creation mode. The tools that promised to enhance productivity have fractured our attention into unusable fragments.

• The Burnout Accelerator: For creatives, this is devastating. You entered this field because you loved writing, designing, strategizing, or building. Now, a disproportionate amount of mental energy goes toward tool management. The meta-work crowds out the actual work, yet the actual work is where the satisfaction lives.

Perhaps most seriously, when you are constantly tool-hopping, you lose sight of why you are doing the work in the first place. You begin optimizing for optimization’s sake.

A Different Way of Thinking

I recognize these effects in myself. I have felt the anxiety, the paralysis, and the nagging sense that I should be learning just one more tool. But over time, I have noticed shifts in how I approach technology that have helped me escape the overwhelm without opting out of innovation.

These aren’t prescriptions, they are observations. Take what is useful and leave the rest.

From Acquisition to Curation, I stopped asking, “What tools am I missing?” and started asking, “What tools can I eliminate?” The goal isn’t comprehensive coverage; it is intentional selection. I am not building a collection; I am curating a workflow. There is a profound freedom in recognizing that less can actually be more.

From Fear of Missing Out to Trust in Emergence. If a tool is truly revolutionary and relevant to my work, I will hear about it repeatedly from multiple trusted sources. I don’t need to be on the bleeding edge; I need to be effective. The tools that matter will find me. This realization alone has saved me countless hours of anxious exploration.

From Tool Optimization to Outcome Optimization. The question isn’t “Am I using the best tool?” but “Am I getting the outcome I need?” If I am producing good work with my current stack, the answer is yes. Switching tools should require proof that I cannot achieve something with what I have, not just proof that another tool exists.

From Capacity to Capability. More tools do not equal more capacity. They often equal less because of the overhead required to manage them. True capability comes from depth with a few tools, not breadth across many. I have found that mastery is more valuable than exposure. Going deep with one platform has yielded far more value than surface-level familiarity with a dozen.

From Reactive to Reflective When a new tool launches, my default response doesn’t have to be “Should I learn this?” It can be “Do I need this?” shifting from being reactive to every announcement to being reflective about my actual needs has been one of the most liberating changes I have made.

From Productivity Theatre to Productive Work. Sometimes our tool obsession is procrastination dressed up as professional development. Being “productive” – researching, optimizing, setting up – feels virtuous, but it is often a way to avoid the harder work of creating. I have had to become honest with myself about when I am engaging in productivity theatre versus when I am doing productive work.

The Practice of Convergence

For me, this journey led to something unexpected, which is convergence. Not the technological singularity we discussed in Marrakech, but a personal one. I found myself defaulting to Google’s Gemini as my primary platform for most of my AI-assisted work. Not because it is objectively the best (what would that even mean?), but because going deep with one tool proved more valuable than staying current with many.

This isn’t a recommendation that everyone should use the same tool I do. It is an observation about what happens when you stop optimizing your optimization and start actually working. You naturally converge on what serves you best, and the anxiety dissipates.

The Freedom in Constraints

There is a paradox here worth sitting with, and it is that we adopt these tools to be more productive, but the proliferation of tools itself becomes a productivity drain. The escape isn’t about rejecting AI tools entirely, it is about developing criteria for what makes the cut and having the confidence to ignore the rest.

We live in an age of abundance, abundant tools, abundant capabilities, and abundant promises of transformation. But abundance without discernment is just noise. And noise, no matter how sophisticated, drowns out the signal of meaningful work.

The singularity we anticipated may still come. But in the meantime, we each need to find our own convergence by the intentional narrowing of choices that paradoxically expands our creative capacity. Not because we are falling behind, but because we have chosen to move forward with clarity rather than chase after everything at once.

The tools are here to serve us. The question is whether we will let them, or whether we will exhaust ourselves in service to them.