Charles Taylor

Foreword

By Edo Segal

The word I kept reaching for and could not find was "significance."

Not importance. Not relevance. Not value in the economic sense that the technology industry has trained me to calculate. Significance — the quality that makes a choice matter, that gives weight to one path over another, that turns building from mere production into something a person can organize a life around.

I had the feeling. I described it throughout You On AI — the moment when building with Claude shifted from exhilarating to compulsive, the hour on the transatlantic flight when the work continued but the meaning had drained out, the look in my son's eyes at dinner when he asked whether any of this still mattered. I could feel the difference between purposeful work and empty