In my 20s I had a bunch of chances to move out to the bay area or New York, work at a big company, play the startup lottery. I never did, clearly. One company approached me with a creative director role and I said I’d love to accept, and then asked them to move the company to Chicago. They did not reply to my inquiry.

I have regretted nothing about this decision. Chicago is one of the best food cities in America, and it’s also the best large city for community in America. I like both of these things enough to orient my life around them. I was once wandering a different city with a local there, and they said something that stuck out to me: “this is going to sound like I’m dissing [CITY NAME], but the people are unambitious here.” I instantly got it. Chicagoans have ambitions to throw the best barbeques and go to every street festival during the summer. They do not have ambitions about their jobs, only to do good work and vibe.

In short, I log off at precisely 5:01p every single day, and then I cook, garden, go to shows, and hang out with my friends. Which is exactly what being a Chicagoan is supposed to be. My friends frequently tell me that they have to remind themselves that I’m a very different sort of person in my day-to-day job. Good. My colleagues sometimes get invited to my big parties, and they’re shocked at the vibes. Good.

Besides the obvious quality-of-life elements, there is a fringe benefit to my job about doing all of this. None of my friends are early adopters of anything except for bike lanes and locally native fruits. Their phones are five years old and their screens are cracked. Every single one of them is pausing new tech purchases because Apple is a fascist company now. Some of them are asking about screen repair.

Every time I talk to someone about technology or watch them use technology, I learn a lot about popular adoption in a way that being in a job-driven echo chamber simply can’t provide. I’ve been doing this for twenty years now, and I always keep learning from it. I could tell the iPhone was going to pop off because people wanted it to. I could tell Uber was going to displace taxis because people called them, because people hated taxis.

The opposite is true, too. When an app came out that would basically do your laundry for you, my friends scoffed and kept trundling down to the basement to feed their coin-op machines. I don’t know a single person in my personal life who uses a fake internet bank. None of them know what crypto is, precisely, because it doesn’t serve them. All of them have used the free version of ChatGPT as a surrogate search engine, but none of them know or are how it works, and none of them want to support the companies that make any of this. None of them have any “smart home” anything on purpose. None of them have Ring cameras.

The word grounding comes through when I think about the specific ways in which people are discerning about new technology. Everyone pays attention. They’ll tell their friends. Sometimes they’ll ask curly-haired weirdos non-leading questions at a barbeque.

So for the record, and because it seems like we’re in a bit of a moment where we all need to tap the clipboard, here’s what I’ve learned:

• People want technology to augment the rest of their existence. Technology for its own sake is never their highest priority.
• The moment you ask people to serve technology, you’ve lost the plot. Technology must serve them.
• People are too busy living their lives to want to deal with technology that’s unpredictable.
• End users have the cards in all technological conversations. Given infinite time, forcing technology on others will always backfire.
• Technology doesn’t use technology. People do.

There is no “us” and “normal people.” There are people. How much you understand about that relationship is up to you.

For the first time in over a year and a half, we have a consulting slot available to the general public. If “working with nickd” has been on your wish list for a while, you should reach out. If you have questions, you should also reach out. We’d love to hear from you.