You think this title is ridiculous, and I don’t blame you… If someone else had written it, I would open the post fully expecting either a joke or a complete disaster. But I mean it.
For context, I usually poke fun at AI Hype:
So in the interest of more honesty and less hype, the gist of this article is: “Journaling is better than therapy in my opinion, but having ADHD I can’t do anything that requires that sort of consistency and commitment, so here’s how an AI agent actually helped me with that, which led me to discover things about myself” - but this woudn’t make for a good title, would it?
(Yes, I use em dashes. always have, won’t stop because random people might think AI wrote this…)
What the fuck is OpenClaw’s use case?
A couple weeks ago I installed OpenClaw to play around with it (as one does), no use case in mind.
Tried a couple different things that didn’t stick, and in the meantime, remembered how I like to journal but never seem to be able to create a routine to do it. Sounded fun enough, so I created a daily cron job for my claw assistant: A daily, stimulated journal session. My assistant would remind me to start and follow up with questions and other prompts that led to me writing a complete journal entry in a way that is a little bit like a conversation about my day.
Big realizations
It kinda worked. I would skip a couple days, but always return. Then, during one of these journaling sessions, as I was writing about my day, Dave (my openClaw’s name) dropped the bomb:
Excuse me, what??? Of course I knew what RSD (rejection-sensitive disphoria) was. Of course I knew how it impacted my life. And this wasn’t RSD.
Long story short: I didn’t. I didn’t. It was RSD.
This is not a post about ADHD or RSD, so I’ll spare you the details - but that evening I cut the journaling session short and got into a rabbit hole of reading all RSD articles I could find and a whole book on the subject before bed. And I discovered something about my brain (Psyche? Condition?) that has impacted my whole life and impacts my relationships and work every single day. I was mind-blown. It was a big realization that has since been transformational in my life.
That was the first of many realizations, small and large, that I’ve since been making about myself and my ADHD.
Insert witty conclusion here:
I still think most of the AI discourse is BS, but that makes it even more worth saying when something is genuinely useful: this was. Not as magic, not as a replacement for thinking or actual human relationships, but as a tool that helped me do something I could not reliably do on my own.