I Asked AI a Question. Then I Climbed a Hill. The Hill Won.

Let me be clear from the start.

I like AI. Yes, there you go I said it.

I use it for tracking down research and organising files, etc. It saves me time. It helps me think through ideas, draft things, and organise my thoughts when my brain has already clocked off for the day. It is an amazing place to dump lots of ideas and thoughts, and then get it to spit back lots of bullet points. It is also great for sorting transcripts of my work, but also organising scripts from shows, recognising speakers and (nearly) perfectly getting all their dialogue. It is genuinely useful, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise just to seem edgy or contrarian. But this is just a fancier version of what we already have on our phones. Google has been doing something like this for years. AI has just made it quicker and a little more accurate. Hello, Google Translate and voice-to-text.

But I also climbed a hill recently.

And standing up there, looking out over the kind of view that makes your brain go quiet for the first time in weeks, I had a thought.

We are spending an awful lot of time watching other people experience the world.

The Terminator Is Not Coming. Relax.

Before we go any further, can we all agree to calm down about AI just a little?

Every week there's a new headline. AI is going to take all the jobs. AI is going to become sentient. AI is going to decide humans are inefficient and do something about it.

The Terminator is not coming.

We are, I would argue, a very long way from that being even a distant reality. What we actually have right now is an extremely sophisticated autocomplete that is genuinely good at a lot of things and genuinely terrible at others, and the sooner we make peace with that nuanced reality, the better.

AI has its place. Of course it does. The question isn't whether to use it. The question is whether we're using it well, or whether we've quietly handed it things that were actually quite good for us to do ourselves.

Like going outside.

Like looking at something that isn't a screen.

Like being somewhere that doesn't have a notification.

Helsby Hill

A little while ago, I drove to Helsby Hill in Cheshire.

If you haven't been, it's not Everest. It's not going to test your limits too much or require specialist equipment. It's a hill. A genuinely lovely, accessible, not-very-far-from-anywhere hill with a sandstone ridge at the top and a view that, on a clear day, will stop you mid-sentence.

You can see the Mersey. You can see Wales (maybe, geography isn’t my strongest point lol). You can see the kind of sky that reminds you the world is considerably larger than whatever you were worrying about on the drive over.

I stood at the top and I just... looked at it.

No filter. No caption. Well, I took a photo, I'm not a monk, but mostly I just stood there and let it be what it was.

Remarkable. Ordinary. Free.

It cost me a few quid of diesel and about forty minutes of walking.

Helsby Hill — It is a lovely view and walking trail with fresh air everywhere.

The Cloud — Macclesfield

Then there's The Cloud. This is a different kettle of fish. It’s still a hill, it’s just several times higher than Helsby.

If you're not familiar, The Cloud is a hill on the edge of the Peak District near Macclesfield, sitting on the border of Cheshire and Staffordshire. It rises to about 343 metres, around 1100 feet and on a clear day gives you views across the Cheshire Plain that make you feel like you've accidentally stumbled into a painting. It really is remarkable. If you’re not scared of heights like me.

The kind of painting where everything is green and wide and unhurried, and nobody is asking anything of you.

I walked up on a morning when the mist was still sitting in the lower parts, and the top was in full sun. The contrast was extraordinary. Grey and soft below, sharp and golden above, like the hill had its own weather and had decided today was going to be a good one.

There was nobody up there trying to sell me anything.

Nobody asking for my attention.

No algorithm deciding what I should look at next.

Just the view. Just the wind. Just the very simple and increasingly rare experience of being somewhere with no agenda.

Meanwhile, Back on the Internet

Here's the thing I keep thinking about.

There are people, talented, creative, genuinely adventurous people — who have made entire careers out of going to places like Helsby Hill and The Cloud and filming them on Insta 360 cameras and posting the results on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.

And millions of us watch them.

We sit on our sofas on a Saturday afternoon, with our phones in our hands while ignoring Netflix or a laptop open, ignoring work, watching someone else walk up a hill in real time, experiencing the view through a screen. We then comment on things like, “Wow,” this is stunning, and I need to go here and then close the tab and watch the next one.

The hill is thirty minutes away.

Not the specific hill necessarily. But a hill. A wood. A reservoir. A canal path. A stretch of coast. Something that is outside and real and three-dimensional and smells like actual air.

It's right there.

And we're watching someone else do it.

AI Didn't Make Us Do This. But It Isn't Helping.

I want to be fair here; this isn't AI's fault. We were doing this before AI arrived. The phone was already winning before the chatbots showed up.

But here's my mild concern, said lightly and without any particular doom attached to it:

The better AI gets at producing content, at answering questions, at simulating experience, the easier it becomes to stay inside. To consume rather than do. To watch rather than go. To ask a chatbot what Helsby Hill is like, rather than just driving there and finding out.

And something is lost in that substitution.

Not something dramatic. Not something that makes the headline AI DESTROYS HUMAN EXPERIENCE.

Just something quiet and important.

The specific quality of light on the Cheshire Plain at 9 am on a Tuesday.

The feeling of your legs working on a slope.

The way your brain goes quiet when there's nothing to respond to.

The conversation you have with the person next to you on the journey.

It’s an adventure.

The view that nobody can describe to you properly because it has to be stood in, not read about.

AI cannot give you that. An Insta 360 video cannot give you that. A very beautiful photograph cannot give you that.

Only actually going can give you that.

The World Is Still Out There. It Hasn't Gone Anywhere.

This is the thing that struck me most, standing on top of The Cloud with the mist in the valleys below.

The world is still as astonishing as it ever was.

The hills haven't moved. The views haven't been updated, deprecated or replaced by a newer version. The sky is still doing its thing with complete indifference to whether anyone is watching.

It's just that we've got very good at experiencing things second hand.

At watching the reel instead of living the moment.

At being consumers of other people's adventures rather than having our own small, unglamorous, genuinely wonderful ones.

Helsby Hill isn't going to get you a thousand likes. The Cloud isn't going to go viral. Your slightly out-of-breath selfie at the top with the wind doing something unfortunate to your hair is not Insta 360 content. Although as soon as I write that, I bet it is.

But it's yours. Whatever it is.

And it's real.

And your brain will thank you for it in ways that no algorithm, however sophisticated, has yet figured out how to replicate.

So.

It's almost the weekend.

AI will still be here on Monday. The internet will still be here. The headlines will still be predicting the end of everything. The content will still be there waiting to be consumed.

But so will the hill.

So what plans do you have this weekend?

Please note: This article reflects personal experience and professional opinion. It is not a substitute for professional mental health support. If you are struggling, please speak to your GP or a qualified professional. CBT is an evidence-based approach that works very well for many people — the point of this article is not to discourage anyone from trying it, but to encourage finding the right fit.