That line from About Time has been sitting in my head.

In the film, Tim’s father can travel back in time, and one of the quiet joys of his impossible life is reading. Not saving the world. Not becoming powerful. Not chasing some dramatic second chance.

Books.

He has the one luxury every reader secretly wants: more time.

I looked at my own reading list today and felt the opposite.

Even after cutting it down to the books I truly want to read, there are still 175 of them.

One hundred and seventy-five books sounds beautiful when it is sitting on my bookshelves. It feels like potential. It feels like the future version of myself I keep trying to build: wiser, clearer, calmer, more articulate.

But it also exposes the problem.

I cannot travel back in time.

I cannot read every book slowly and deeply. I cannot treat every interesting idea as if it deserves the same weight. I cannot keep collecting books as if saving them is the same as becoming changed by them.

That is the strange pressure of living now.

Information is everywhere. Summaries are instant. Explanations are endless. AI can give me ten perspectives before my brain has finished buffering.

Access is no longer the problem.

Judgement is.

What deserves my full attention?

What should become part of my thinking?

What am I saving because it matters, and what am I saving because it makes me feel like I am becoming someone?

I do not want AI to help me become a faster skimmer of life. I do not want to “process” books the way people process emails. Reading should still have slowness in it. It should have silence. It should have the small discomfort of sitting with a sentence longer than my attention span wants to.

But I also do not want to pretend the old way is enough.

Not for the life I am trying to build.

So I am changing the question.

Instead of asking,

“How can I finish all these books?”

I want to ask,

“Which ideas are worth building a relationship with?”

That is how I want to use AI.

Not as a shortcut around reading, but as a way to enter reading with better questions.

I want to use it to map the core ideas of a book or topic before I go deeper. I want to use it to bring together related sources, competing arguments, and different interpretations. I want AI to widen the room before I choose where to sit down.

Because there is a difference between summarising and understanding.

A summary can make me feel efficient.

A good question can make me think.

That distinction matters.

If I only use AI to consume more, I will probably become shallow faster. But if I use it to compare, challenge, connect, and prepare, it might help me read more seriously.

My goal is simple:

Study one book each week.

Not just read it.

Study it.

Turn it into a clearer thought, a sharper question, a piece of writing, maybe eventually a product, a story, or a service.

For me, If It All Ends can become the place where reading turns into thinking in public.

Not a graveyard of saved notes.

Not a performance of being well-read.

A workshop.

Because the real test is not how many books I collect. It is not how many highlights I store. It is not how quickly I can summarise someone else’s thinking.

The test is whether a book improves the quality of my judgement.

Tim’s father had time travel.

I have AI.

Maybe that is enough.

But the question still remains:

In the AI age, are we using these tools to consume more, or to think better?