Katie Parrott · Essays since 2024
The Curiosity Gap is where I write about mental health, faith, and how AI keeps reshaping work — often in the same essay. Here's the whole run so far, oldest to newest and color-coded by theme. Start with the diagnosis at the top, or just follow whichever color you came for.
September 2024
The most personal piece here: a cross-country move falls apart in the desert and ends in a bipolar diagnosis. If you read one thing first, read this — everything else grows out of it.
January 2025
Media criticism on the rise of the video essay, and what gets lost when every argument turns into a two-hour YouTube performance.
April 2025
On building something with AI and falling all the way in — the flow states, the creative obsession, and the forgetting to eat dinner.
April 2025
The bottom falling out of content marketing as search traffic dries up — and the career panic of watching your whole industry change under you.
May 2025
A Windows 95 childhood — Kid Pix, AIM, dial-up — read as the training that shaped how I work now. Ends somewhere I didn't expect: whose hand is really on the mouse.
June 2025
The case for treating a messy career as a feature, not a bug — every rejection as a redirection. The one to send a friend who's sure they've fallen behind.
July 2025
A Friday-night habit of reading scripture with ChatGPT as a study partner. Where the faith thread starts — curious, irreverent, and genuinely searching.
August 2025
When a bipolar brain and a superintelligence both promise you can do anything, how do you tell mania from momentum? Funny and a little frightening.
August 2025
The sci-fi dystopias I grew up on, and how they shaped — in advance — what I expected the AI age to feel like. Ends with me closing the laptop and walking outside barefoot.
December 2025
My pen-and-paper Bible practice meets an MIT study on the "cognitive debt" of leaning on AI. On what we might be trading away when we let the bot do the thinking.
February 2026
The dependency question head-on: if the tools vanished tomorrow, what's left of me and the way I work? On the line between a useful habit and a crutch.
April 2026
What if using AI well is less like engineering and more like ritual? A religious-studies lens on prompting-as-petition, with my assistant Margot as a kind of familiar.
May 2026
The newest one, and the one that pulls the threads together: an argument for rest, limits, and logging off — for being a creature instead of a machine.
It's my personal Substack — longer, weirder, and more confessional than anything I publish anywhere else, usually written before I know how it ends.
One question runs under all of it: what am I worth apart from my output? I don't have a clean answer. I keep writing toward one anyway.