The Thing I Can’t Put Down

On AI literacy, coherence, and the work that stays when the reasons disappear

🌸 ikigai 生き甲斐 is a reason for being, your purpose in life – from the Japanese iki 生き meaning life and gai 甲斐 meaning worth 🌸

I have a confession, a personal quirk to share.

It’s Saturday morning and I had to drag myself away from messing with yet another AI Literacy curriculum design to get this essay written. I’ve got SO many ideas for the most fabulous AI course ever ™, not just another guide to how to use Claude responsibly and well. No-one has asked me to do this, and I’m not really thinking about this being a chargeable side hustle. The courses I crafted for learnai.im have long since been delivered, that role ended. The professional reason to care so much about AI literacy... technically... has gone.

And yet here I am, again… rewriting the explanation of why AI isn’t Google... why you shouldn’t just ask it questions and expect factual answers, because the magic of it is generative, probabilistic, creative… and that’s exactly why it sometimes gets things wrong. Playing with different ways to explain context windows that don’t sound too technical (or boring)... why your conversations have memory within them but not between them, why starting fresh matters, why stuffing everything into one chat eventually makes the whole thing worse. These are things I keep trying to make simple. The things I lie awake thinking about how to teach. Nobody commissioned this.

I wrote about AI literacy yet again relatively recently, in essay 120 “Rethinking AI Literacy“ where I reframed it as learning to speak a language rather than passing a test. Fluency, not certification. Practice, not perfection. I meant every word of that essay and it perhaps should have been enough to scratch my itch.

It wasn’t.

I keep coming back. Like it’s a question linked to several of my twelve favourite problems I wrote about last week... the ones that keep choosing you. AI literacy is clearly one of mine as it won’t leave me alone.

But this morning, part way through yet another draft that nobody requested, I stopped and asked myself a different question. Not “how do I teach or express this better?” but “why can’t I put this down?”

What makes something stay with you?

I think everyone has a version of this. A project that outlasts the job it came from. A question that survives every attempt to answer it.

We usually call it passion. But that word has been a tad overused or possibly even flattened, so I worry it barely means anything anymore. “Follow your passion” has become the motivational equivalent of “live, laugh, love” It’s not wrong exactly... it’s just not enough.

What I’m describing is something more specific. I think I more mean the word ‘meaningful’, but then you can get a little meta thinking about what is the meaning of the word meaning *grin*... so yeah, when I sat with that thought this morning, really sat with it, it reminded me that I have had a scrappy essay planned for ages on “The components of meaning” and I spotted in my compulsion three things happening at once.

The first is coherence. This makes sense of who I am. AI literacy connects my helping and teaching instinct and my business innovation brain and my Isle of Man community care and my whole ikigai thesis into one legible story. Without it, some pieces of my life could feel scattered... with it, they form something I can narrate. It makes me make sense to myself.

The second is purpose. This work points beyond me. I’m not refining these guides purely for self improvement. I’m doing it because I genuinely believe people deserve access to this technology without being made to feel stupid or left behind. That’s the democracy argument from essay 120, but it goes deeper than I realised at the time. It’s not just about access, it’s also about agency and fairness, who gets to shape what comes next.

The third is significance. This work feels like it counts. I know because of what happens when someone suggests it doesn’t. If someone told me to stop... that AI literacy isn’t important, that I’m wasting my time, that the world doesn’t need another guide... something rises up in me. Not defensiveness exactly, more like clarity and a stubborn knowing that I have an important perspective on this. You wouldn’t fight to keep some of what’s on your to-do list. But this? This I’d argue for even though I exceedingly dislike arguing. Significance is something that makes you plant your feet. The work that, if threatened, you’d protect.

The place where the three things meet

So yeah, I’ve been wondering for a while ‘what are the components of meaning’? Or is it even meaning I mean (ahem)... is there a better word? Meaning and purpose often overlap but they’re not the same thing, and I haven’t fully untangled the definitions for myself yet.

What I do know is that coherence kept surfacing as the first component word I reached for instinctively. Before I’d read anyone else’s thinking on this or went looking for frameworks. Something in me just knew that having a legible sense of who you are, a story that holds together, was foundational to everything else.

Then I did go looking and found that Frank Martela and Michael Steger have been mapping this territory together... arriving at something close to what I’d been mind mapping in my bullet journal. Their joint paper, “The Three Meanings of Meaning in Life” distinguishes three components I’d been circling:

Coherence means a sense of comprehensibility and one’s life making sense.

Purpose means a sense of core goals, aims and direction in life.

Significance is about a sense of life’s inherent value and having a life worth living.

Their argument is that examining these three in detail, where they interlink and where they don’t, gives us a far more nuanced understanding of what makes life and work feel meaningful than any single definition can.

I’m not claiming I’ve arrived at anything original here, but I find it extraordinary that the thing I felt instinctively... coherence as bedrock... is backed by research. It also makes me look with new eyes at some of the things I’ve been circling across 130 essays. When something feels genuinely meaningful, not just enjoyable or productive, but meaningful in a way that organises your days off and won’t let you walk away... it’s because all three are present at once.

🌸 Coherence says this makes sense of who I am.

🌸 Purpose says this points somewhere that matters beyond me.

🌸 Significance says this counts.

Though I’ll be honest, I’m already wondering whether significance is doing too much work on its own. In lived experience, “my life feels worth living” is not quite the same as “I matter to other people” which is not quite the same as “what I do makes a positive difference beyond myself”. Those are three different feelings. I wonder if significance is actually nourished through two especially important channels: connection, the sense of belonging and being known and mattering to others; and contribution, using your life in ways that help or create or improve something beyond yourself. I haven’t finished thinking about this, but I wanted to share where the thinking is still going, not just where it’s landed. I also want to learn what the Manx translations for these words are to see how my place of birth may help me see these concepts through a new lens.

So yeah, the place where all these three overlap? It’s another fabulous contender to illustrate what hatarakigai, or even ikigai, feels like from the inside. Not a concept you study, but a lived experience you recognise in your bones because the work won’t let you go.

Maybe that is also why so much AI literacy work still feels incomplete to me. Most approaches treat it as a skill to acquire rather than a practice of meaning. Something that could be foundational to both your own, and societal wellbeing.

The i-risk of AI disruption

If meaning lives at the intersection of coherence, purpose, and significance... what happens when AI disrupts all three at once?

🌸 Efficiency without coherence - you’re getting more done but you can’t explain who you are anymore.
🌸 Productivity without purpose - you’re outputting constantly but none of it points anywhere.
🌸 Achievement without significance - the metrics look great but nothing feels like it counts.

That’s the i-risk. Not that AI takes your job, but that it fragments the conditions that make any work feel worth doing.

The antidote might be simpler than we think. Not a framework or a course or a five step plan. Just... noticing. What won’t let you go? What do you keep returning to when the external reasons disappear? What makes you make sense to yourself?

Build and create there.

What’s the work that stays for you? The thing you keep coming back to even when nobody’s watching, nobody’s paying, nobody’s asking? I’d genuinely love to know... tell me in the comments.

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS This week’s journal prompts, one for each component... grab a pen.

Coherence: What’s the thread connecting the work you keep choosing, even when nobody asks you to? Write down the things you keep returning to, what story do they tell about who you are?

Purpose: Who benefits when you do this work? Name one person, one community, one conversation that’s different because you showed up.

Significance: If the money, the title, and the audience all disappeared tomorrow... what would you still do? That’s your signal, write it down.

PPS Try this with Claude (with extended thinking on):

“I want to explore what gives my life meaning right now, but I’m not sure where to start. Interview me. Ask me one question at a time and wait for my answer before moving on. Start by asking me what I’ve been spending time on lately that nobody asked me to do. Then gently explore why it matters to me, who it’s for beyond me, and how it connects to the person I’m becoming. After five or six exchanges, reflect back what you’re hearing in terms of three things: coherence (does this work make sense of who I am?), purpose (does it point somewhere beyond me?), and significance (does it feel like it counts?). Be warm but honest. If something doesn’t hold up, say so. I want clarity, not comfort.”

PPPS This weeks soundtrack is “The Blower’s Daughter” by Damien Rice. Obsession, perhaps a love story, but definitely the absolute inability to look away from something ... not usually about the beauty of something, but because it won’t release you. That’s what this essay is about, really. The question you can’t stop asking. The thing your gaze keeps returning to when everything else says look away. I love that it just... stops. No resolution, no tidy ending. Which feels right for an essay about thinking that isn’t finished yet.