Out of My Mind: Why a Little Delusion Is No Longer Optional

The short version

• Delusion is what we call a future before it shows up. Almost everything normal today was unreasonable once.
• The old deal is fading and people know it. More of them are taking chances than ever, but a bet on yourself and a lottery ticket are not the same thing.
• I never believed I could build something like this. AI made me delusional, and this studio is me sharing that delusion out loud.

What if the odds are the wrong thing to measure?

What we call the future before it arrives

Every few years, something that sounded unhinged becomes so ordinary nobody remembers it was ever up for debate.

Talking to a machine that talks back. Carrying the world’s libraries in your pocket. Earning a living from a bedroom with a laptop and a good idea. Each of those was, at some point, the kind of thing you’d say out loud and then quietly wish you hadn’t.

We have a word for belief that runs ahead of evidence. We call it delusion. And we use it right up until the evidence arrives, at which point we swap it for other words. Vision. Instinct. Obvious, really.

So when someone tells you you’re being delusional, listen to what they’re actually saying. They’re describing the present more than they’re describing you. They’re telling you that the world, as it stands today, has no room for what you’re picturing.

Of course it doesn’t. You’re picturing something that isn’t here yet.

Realistic, according to whom?

“Be realistic” sounds like advice. A lot of the time it’s a forecast somebody else made about your life, handed to you as if it were a fact.

Realism comes from averages: what happened to most people, most of the time, in a world that looked like yesterday’s. There’s wisdom in that, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. Averages kept a lot of people out of a lot of trouble. But an average describes a crowd. It has never described a single person in it.

The odds also carry a bias nobody mentions. They’re built mostly from people who stopped. Every “most people fail” includes everyone who quit in the first year, everyone who got talked out of it by someone who loved them, everyone who decided the dream was a phase. The statistic has no idea who you are. It only knows who gave up before you.

Use realism to measure the road. Just don’t let it pick the destination.

The deal is off

There used to be a deal. Most of us were raised on it. Be reasonable, work hard, don’t do anything crazy, and the future will take care of itself.

For a long time it mostly held. Of Americans born in 1940, about 90% grew up to earn more than their parents did at the same age. For people born in the 1980s, it’s about half (Opportunity Insights). The sensible path is still there. It’s just a coin flip now instead of a promise.

Then add this decade. The world is expected to pour more than a trillion dollars into AI this year alone (Goldman Sachs). Work is being redrawn in real time, and nobody, including the companies doing the redrawing, knows exactly where the lines will land. Ask people how they feel and you get a near-perfect split: about as many excited as nervous, and more and more, the same people feeling both.

When the ground is still, realism keeps you safe. When the ground is moving, realism can mean making very careful plans for a world that’s already on its way out. That’s the part that changed my mind. A little delusion used to be a personality trait. Right now it’s closer to a requirement.

Everyone is placing bets

People can feel the deal breaking, and they’re responding. Not by waiting.

Americans filed 5.62 million applications to start new businesses in 2025, far above the long-run average of about 3.5 million a year (Finder, citing U.S. Census data). At the same time, about a third of Gen Z now bets on sports or prediction markets, and roughly a third of Gen Z and millennials own crypto. Among people putting money into high-risk bets like these, 73% say they’re doing it because they feel financially behind, and among Gen Z it’s 80% (Northwestern Mutual, 2026). Some writers have started calling it “financial nihilism.”

I understand the impulse completely. When the slow road stops looking like it goes anywhere, a fast one starts to look reasonable.

But I want to be honest about what separates those bets, because this is where the whole idea lives or dies. A parlay is a bet where the odds are fixed and the house wrote them. Nothing you do after you place it changes anything. A bet on yourself is different. The odds move. They move every time you learn something, ship something, fix something, try again. Starting a business, learning a skill from scratch, putting your work in public: those are bets where effort gets a say.

So yes, I think more people should be taking real chances right now. Just the kind where you’re holding the dice.

What does that look like on an ordinary Tuesday? Usually it’s not dramatic. It’s an hour after work spent learning the thing everyone says you’re too late for. It’s publishing something small before it’s ready, with your name on it. It’s saying out loud what you believe will happen, so you can be proven wrong. It’s keeping the job that pays the bills while you build the thing that might replace it. Delusion, most days, looks a lot like homework.

Living in the gap

The hardest part of believing in something early is the gap.

There’s the version of your life you can see in your head, and the version everyone else can see right now, and for a long time the two don’t match. You live in the space between them. You make decisions based on a future no one else can confirm. You explain yourself at dinner and watch people nod politely. Some days, you’re the one nodding politely at yourself.

That gap is where most dreams die, and usually it isn’t a dramatic failure that kills them. It’s fatigue. Believing without proof, day after day, until it’s easier to let the picture go and rejoin the present.

The people who make it through still doubt themselves. They just stop letting the doubt make the final call. Certainty only ever shows up at the end, after the thing works. If you wait for it before you move, you won’t move.

Delusional, not blind

There’s a kind of delusion that wrecks people, and this essay isn’t an argument for it.

The dangerous kind lies about the present. It ignores the bank balance, the bad reviews, the broken code, the thing that plainly isn’t working. It confuses wanting something with having it.

The useful kind looks straight at every hard fact about today and still refuses to let those facts decide tomorrow.

The best illustration I know comes from James Stockdale, a U.S. Navy pilot who was shot down over North Vietnam in 1965 and held as a prisoner of war for more than seven years, much of it in brutal conditions. Decades later, the writer Jim Collins asked him who didn’t make it out. Stockdale’s answer surprised him: the optimists. The men who said they’d be home by Christmas, then by Easter, then by the next Christmas, and slowly lost heart as each date passed.

Stockdale survived by holding two things at once. Absolute faith that he would get out and that the experience would mean something. And complete honesty about how bad things were right now. Collins named that combination the Stockdale Paradox.

Impossible about the dream. Ruthless about the facts.

That’s the line I’m trying to walk. Out of my mind about where this goes. Completely sane about where it is today.

Why I’m out of mine

I never believed I could build something like this.

I’m not an engineer. I’m not a designer. I’ve never worked in a newsroom or a research firm. For most of my life, the kind of website you’re reading right now belonged in the category of things other people make: people with teams, with training, with years of practice I didn’t have.

Then AI changed what I thought was possible for someone like me.

It started small. I’d ask questions I would have been embarrassed to ask a person. What’s a stylesheet? Why did that break? How do you make a number count up when someone scrolls to it? The answers kept coming, patiently, at any hour, and slowly the list of things I couldn’t do got shorter. A doorway on the home page that opens like a gateway into another world. Charts that come alive as you read. A research page where every note becomes a neuron in a brain made of stars. A word on this very page that rewrites itself from “delusional” to “obvious.”

Newsrooms build pieces like this with teams of designers and engineers. I’m building mine with curiosity and an AI that never gets tired of my questions. The result, when it works, feels less like a website and more like a picture book assembling itself while you read.

It doesn’t always work. I’ve wiped out my own home page with one wrong upload. I tried to create a mascot for this studio and had to shelve him because I couldn’t draw him the way I saw him. I rewrote my first stock note from the ground up more than once before it read like a story instead of a report. Every one of those misses is still in the history of this site, and I’m fine with that.

What I’m risking isn’t dramatic, but it’s real. It’s my evenings. It’s my name on public calls that could look foolish later: I wrote that I believe SKHY can reach $780 a share by 2032, and I own the stock. If I’m wrong, the note stays up.

Here’s why I do it anyway. If AI could make someone like me believe I could build this, it can do the same for a lot of people who were told, or told themselves, that building wasn’t for them. The least I can do is share what I’m seeing. That’s what Figmira is: my delusion, out loud, pointed at the things I find most fascinating right now. AI, which made all of this possible for me. Robotics, where that intelligence is starting to move through the physical world. Crypto, where people are rebuilding how money and ownership work. And investing, where you find out whether you believed in the right things.

Every note labels its facts as facts and its beliefs as beliefs. I think that’s what delusion looks like once it grows up.

The world will tell you your odds. Be out of your mind anyway.

Iso, Founder of Figmira