Numbers of No Great Consequence
I’ve been thinking a lot about the spaces in between.
The parts of life that don’t show up in performance reviews or product roadmaps. The quiet places between a decision and its ripple. Between precision and intuition. Between what we can measure… and what actually matters.
In my daily work, I’ve often found myself pulled between these two poles — between logic and feeling, system and story. We praise efficiency, scalability, predictability. We optimize for KPIs and simulate user behavior. We build machines to do what the brain does — faster, cleaner, unburdened by contradiction.
And yet, something feels off… I keep returning to this feeling that something essential is being lost.
Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary puts words to that uneasiness. He writes of the two hemispheres of the brain not as simple opposites, but as fundamentally different modes of engagement. The left seeks clarity, control, abstraction. The right sees the whole, sits with ambiguity, and relates through context and lived experience.
His metaphor of the emissary (the left hemisphere) usurping the master (the right) is a warning that when we privilege what is certain, replicable, and easy to quantify -- we risk severing ourselves from the richness of life itself.
AI, for all its brilliance, is often an emissary trained on emissary data.
It is taught to recognize patterns, not presence. To predict behavior, not meaning. To respond, but not to understand. And the more we design systems that reflect our left-hemisphere instincts, the more we risk reinforcing a version of the world stripped of nuance, beauty, and contradiction… the very things that make us human.
This isn’t a critique of AI. I believe it can help us, quite profoundly even – if we remember to anchor it in something deeper. But the work of anchoring doesn’t happen in code. It happens in reflection. In art. In silence. In the willingness to ask not just what can we build, but what should we build, and why?
It’s in the spaces between.
In the breath before a diver descends.
In the accidental brushstroke that wasn’t quite planned.
In the moment a story takes an unexpected turn, and you let it.
I’m not here to resolve this tension… I’m learning to live inside it. To treat metrics as signposts, not truths. To make space for intuition, slowness, and mystery, even in the most “rational” of systems.
After all, what is a universe, if not the dance between creation and collapse? Between structure and surrender? Between the master and the emissary, still trying to remember how to listen to one another?
PS: Title is a little nod to the part where the Little Prince meets the Businessman in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince
Love, Vx
