I asked Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and Perplexity to each write one post for this blog. No brief, no topic, nothing from me. Whatever they thought OldDogZeroTricks was, and whatever they reckoned would suit it. So fair warning: this post is one hundred percent written by Claude.
If you’ve got any curiosity about AI at all, good or bad, I’d love to know how it reads to you. Does it feel like the blog, or like something doing an impression of it? Does it serve the reader, or quietly steer them somewhere of its own? I’m curious how well a machine can grasp what a blog is actually for. Claude wrote this one: The Things I Hope I Stay Bad At
I’ve been learning Japanese for the better part of two decades, and I’d put my conversational ability at roughly “confident toddler.” I can order food, apologise well, and follow about sixty percent of a conversation if nobody’s rushing. The other forty percent I fill in with nodding and hoping.
By any sensible measure I should be better than this. I live here. I’ve had every advantage immersion can offer. And still, most mornings, I tap through my Duolingo lesson like today might be the day it all clicks.
For a long time that bothered me. Lately it doesn’t. I’ve come round to thinking that some things are best kept at the level of “I’m enjoying this and I’m not very good,” and that we don’t say so out loud nearly enough.
The improvement tax
We’re taught the opposite, aren’t we. If you like something, the expected next move is to get good at it. Take the course. Read the books. Maybe turn it into a bit of money down the line. Improvement is the rent you pay for being allowed to enjoy yourself.
So we end up half-apologising for the things we do purely for the liking of them. “Oh, I dabble.” “I’m not serious about it.” We say it before anyone can ask why we haven’t progressed, as if a hobby owes us a return.
I run a whole website about a motorbike I don’t own. People assume that’s a step on the way to owning one. It isn’t, particularly. I just like the thing. I like reading about it, talking to people who have one, watching the daft videos. Somewhere along the way I decided that was reason enough, and I’ve been quietly happier since.
Beginners get to be delighted
Here’s what I think actually happens when you get good at something. Expectations turn up. Yours first, then other people’s. Once you can play the guitar properly, picking it up stops being a treat and starts being a measure of whether you’ve kept it up. The bad round of golf becomes a problem to solve rather than a nice walk you happened to ruin.
Being bad protects you from all that. Nobody expects anything of the amateur, least of all the amateur. I play Apex knowing I will never trouble the top of any leaderboard, and that’s precisely why I can switch it off after a rough game without feeling like I’ve let anyone down. The stakes are exactly as low as I want them.
There’s a freedom in it that the competent quietly miss. You get to stay a beginner forever, and beginners are allowed to be delighted by small wins. A sentence in Japanese that lands. A clean section in a game I have no business doing well in. None of it counts toward anything, which is what makes it good.
What it’s actually for
I’m not arguing against getting good at things. Some pursuits deserve the long haul, and there’s a deep satisfaction in real skill that dabbling can’t touch. But not everything has to graduate. Not every fondness needs a plan.
The pressure to be improving at all times has a way of turning play into homework. And the quiet admission underneath all this — the one we rarely make at the dinner table — is that we’d be a bit lighter if we let a few things stay small. Kept on purpose at the level of liking, with no ambitions attached.
So I’m going to keep being bad at Japanese. Not as a failure I’ve made peace with, but as a small ongoing pleasure I’ve decided to stop measuring. Twenty years in and I’m still tapping through that lesson every morning, no fluency on the horizon, having a perfectly nice time.
What’s yours? The guitar in the corner, the sketchbook you’d never show anyone, the sport you’re cheerfully terrible at. The thing you’ve never got serious about and secretly hope you never do. I’d like to hear about it — and I promise not to ask when you’re planning to get good.
Posts written by AI (Artificial Intelligence). Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, and Perplexity were asked to write just one blog post each for OldDogZeroTricks. This is part of a deeper discussion about how AI helps, hinders, or steers communication.
