Staying human in 2026

How we survive the AI wars, and the fire line between advertising and journalism

Thank you for following Updater up to here. I’ll have more to share soon on what I’ve been working on and what exactly happened, but mum’s the word for now. So far, I’ve been making small slice-of-life daily videos, highlighting the ready-to-bake croissants from Whole Foods, all pink Barbie ski clothes found on a quick run to SoHo, the latest of skirt-making days at Parsons. But I’ve also been sharing my life philosophy videos around steamed rice rolls, my Hadestown hot takes, and reflections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Up next, I’ll be heading to the Center for Fiction on a day pass, stopping by New York Fashion Week and the Toy Fair, and considering which museum to become a patron of.

This is all part of some grand scheme, a way to live life more intentionally, slowly, quietly, and in a way that subverts the common outcomes. Out with the busywork, meaningless stories, and networking parties where you forget everyone afterward anyway. In with the intentional goal-setting, curated gatherings, and deep, hours-long conversations with heartfelt humans. In 2026, if almost everything is false and you can only believe in yourself and your unshakeable faith, then you know exactly where the energy should be kept.

In 2017, I quit my job of being a marketer and copywriter of Korean skincare brands. I realized that being an advertiser means saying something complimentary about your product even if it verges on fallacy, while being a journalist is to be a truth-teller. Both careers involve storytelling, but one traffics in a desperate urge to sell, while another is centered around elevating the human experience. Now when the lines blur and either job is indistinguishable from the next, don’t we have a problem on our hands?

Ethics mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but for me, I just make sure the work I do never leaves a gross taste in the mouth. That’s why while I have shed the stricter guidelines of the most thoroughbred institutions I have been a part of, I still take note to only talk about the places, the experiences, the people I can really stand by. Sometimes I still think about the time I recommended a high-end treadmill, only for it to receive a massive recall months later for rolling over small children and pets. Awful stuff. As much as I vow to not make that sort of mistake again, I also can’t predict black swan events.

My newsletter is evolving, and soon, it will shed its current name. (More on that later.) Updater was a reference to The Washington Post’s Launcher, of a specific time and era. I’ve said this from the beginning: Instead of only focusing on gaming and technology, this is a newsletter that is about living. For as long as we’re on this earth, we have problems. We have stories. We vie every day, just to survive, but maybe also, to thrive. It’s about all of that. And more than that, it’s about culture. How we see each other.

I have been very fortunate to have been pigeon-holed into the gaming space early on in my journalism career. It was perhaps a beat that very few wanted to cover (for reasons that still remain unknown to me), but I jumped on the chance. Gaming is a microcosm of living. Each virtual world you enter is an approximation of someone’s dream. Just like a book shows you the thoughts of its writer, a real-life chance to neuro-link without the risks, a game is a little peek under the curtain of someone else’s brain. Or a massive corporation’s. It all just depends.
So all that is to say, it should be a natural transition for this newsletter originally about investigative gaming scoops to now be about culture and life at large. Or in Tim Denning’s words, I’m making this “a niche-less newsletter.” I will have more to share on this later, but I wanted to get the winds blowing this direction first and let you all know what was on my mind. My self-confidence is back, my unshakeable optimism is at hand. It’s taken me some amount of time to come to this conclusion, but I think my whole life has been leading up to this. It was just super hard to see coming because we didn’t have the words for it back then.