A Stoic’s Guide to Navigating AI Hype Cycles

The post argues that AI hype follows familiar boom-and-bust patterns seen in the dot-com era, crypto, and the metaverse. It uses Stoicism to frame a builder’s response: focus on what is controllable, accept the cycle, and build for durable value rather than short-lived excitement.

Reading notes

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• The history of technology is presented as a sequence of surges and collapses, and the current AI wave is placed alongside dot-com, crypto, and the metaverse.
• The text uses Stoicism as an antidote to exaggeration, defending less fascination with the impulse of the moment and more attention to what remains.
• What is outside control includes the market mood, the pace of funding, and the noise of social networks; what remains under control is the discipline of building, clarity of purpose, engineering craft, and the choice of relevant problems.
• Acceptance of the cycle is part of the Stoic posture: hype rises, reaches its peak, falls into disillusionment, and, over time, only what has real value reaches productivity.
• The text cites mechanical watches, Japanese notebooks, and Unix philosophy as examples of things made to last, with utility, simplicity, and repairability.
• In contrast, it recalls overvalued technologies that lost strength, such as VR, forgotten “killer apps,” and empty crypto wallets.
• In the AI context, a Stoic founder asks whether the product solves a frequent problem, whether it remains valuable even when models and APIs change, and whether it was designed to survive the replacement of the base technology.
• The text also associates Stoic building with virtue, ethics, transparency, and service to the user, treating trust as the most durable asset.
• The companies with the greatest chance of lasting are described as those that build infrastructure, tools, or deeply integrated solutions, rather than flashy demos.
• The conclusion returns to Marcus Aurelius to say that, amid the noise, the obstacle can become the path itself for those who build with discipline.