The Flake 99 Theory of Being Human

What we lost when we gained everything

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Friends,

Late seventies. Early eighties. North London. Everything was beige. Carpets. Walls. Sofas. Television. The future, from where I stood, looked beige too. Small. Finite. Knowable.

But the street was alive. Kids everywhere. On bikes, on walls, in front gardens that weren’t theirs. Someone had drawn a hopscotch grid in chalk on the road. Further down, a game of cricket with a tennis ball and a black dustbin for stumps. Front doors open in summer because nobody locked them during the day. Parents on doorsteps, watching, half-talking to each other. You’d hear someone’s mum shouting a name from three houses down and you’d know it was teatime. Neighbours knocked on the door without calling first. You said good morning to everyone, even the people you didn’t like, because that’s just what you did. You didn’t choose your community. It chose you. And it was smaller than anything we’d recognise as a community now, but everyone in it was real, and you saw their face when they spoke to you.

And then the van would come.

Greensleeves drifting down the street, the tune every ice cream van in Britain played, a sixteenth-century melody repurposed to sell ice cream to children. A little boy hears it. A girl across the road hears it. “Please.” A coin. A run. A Flake 99.

Or plain ice cream. Or nothing.

That was the menu.

A Flake 99 was an ice cream cone with a stick of crumbly Cadbury chocolate pushed into the top. I chose it every single time. Obviously. I’m not a psychopath. So did the girl across the road. Nobody asked why it was called a 99. There was no search bar waiting to answer it. It didn’t matter. The van came. The sun did its job.

You bit into the Flake carefully, trying not to lose the crumbs, knowing that if you bit too hard, the whole thing would shatter and you’d spend the next thirty seconds trying to catch falling chocolate with a tongue already going numb from the cold. You’d watch someone pull their Flake out and eat it separately, like a barbarian, while you were still savouring yours in situ, as God intended. You tried to enjoy the last inch of cone even though you knew it was going to taste like sweet cardboard. But you ate it anyway. Because finishing things was part of it.

Decades later I stand in a supermarket aisle paralysed by forty-seven types of milk.

And I realise something uncomfortable.

I was happier then.

Not because it was the past. Not because things were better. I had a teacher who threw chalk at children. Casual racism was so normal it hadn’t been named yet. I got bullied by a boy who stole the carrot my mum gave me for a snack, every single day, until I stopped bringing one in. The past was full of damage we’ve rightly left behind. But inside a single moment, a bounded one, the ice cream and the sun and the crumbling chocolate, I was more fully there than I have been since. Because the van would leave. You might not get another one.

You paid attention.

Psychologists have a word for that. They call it savouring. Being fully inside an experience while it’s happening. Savouring requires a boundary. A limit. It requires the real possibility that the thing you love might not be there tomorrow.

We lived inside one choice.

Now we live inside the infinite.

Fast food meant McDonald’s. That was it. That was the whole category. Yes, Wimpy existed, a sit-down burger chain that somehow predated McDonald’s in the UK. But Wimpy wasn’t fast, Wimpy wasn’t cool, and Wimpy had a name that sounded like it was trying to lose. Kentucky Fried Chicken was around. One mysterious recipe, eleven secret herbs, and the vague feeling that you were doing something slightly illicit by eating it. But the choice was never which fast food. The choice was fast food or your mum’s cooking. Two doors. Pick one.

Now I open Deliveroo and there are dozens of chicken shops within a mile of my house. I stand there scrolling through options the way I used to stand in front of the ice cream van, except the scrolling takes longer than the eating, and by the time I’ve chosen, the joy has evaporated somewhere between page four and a £4.99 delivery fee.

The Flake 99 and the Big Mac had something in common. They didn’t need to be the best. They needed to be the only. And in being the only, they became unforgettable.

You can’t savour something you chose from a menu of hundreds. You can only savour something that was, for that moment, the whole world.

Age five felt like this.

You were running. Always running. Walking was for adults. Your foot caught a paving slab and you went down hard. Palms first. Knees next. That specific 1980s London concrete, the kind that seemed to be made of ground glass and moral lessons, took the skin clean off.

For four seconds the world was nothing but sting.

Then you looked at your hands. Gravel embedded in pink skin. You were certain you now had permanent holes in your palms and that life as you knew it was probably over.

But the knees were worse. The knees were the emergency. And even at five, your brain performed a ruthless triage: ignore the hands, focus on the knees, and start thinking about the real catastrophe. Which wasn’t now. The real catastrophe was tonight. Bath time. When the hot water would find the raw skin, and the Dettol antiseptic would come out, and the screaming would be entirely justified but completely ignored. That smell. Sharp, clinical, faintly orange. The smell of the whole era. Clean floors and kitchen surfaces and a house that looked beige but smelled like it meant business.

Your mum appeared. A plaster that didn’t quite stick. “You’re alright,” delivered in that miraculous tone that was somehow both a dismissal and the most comforting sound in the known universe.

And then you got up.

Not because you were brave. Because it didn’t occur to you that there was another option. Nobody was coming to ask how you felt about it. The dinner lady glanced over and went back to her tea. A passing dad might say “walk it off, son” to someone else’s child, and that was considered a kindness. The world was not set up to protect you from itself. It just expected you to cope, and mostly you did, and sometimes you didn’t, and either way the afternoon carried on.

If you grew up in the seventies or eighties, your knees remembered that before your mind did. That’s not nostalgia. That’s your body reminding you: you used to have a raw, direct relationship with the world. And from it, you learned something no app will ever teach you. You are more durable than you think.

This was the curriculum.

Constraint.

It didn’t feel like teaching. It felt like Tuesday.

In the playground we played What’s the Time, Mr Wolf. We played British Bulldog, which sounds barbaric because sometimes it was. You never wanted to be the last one picked. Someone always got properly flattened. The big kid who was supposed to be on your team would charge through you like you weren’t there, and you’d hit the tarmac and nobody would stop the game. A teacher might watch from the staffroom window. Might not. You learned to get up fast or stay down and get trampled. But when it worked, when you broke through, when the whole team roared, it was the best feeling in the world. We threw a ball against a wall and invented rules no one else in the world knew. You caught it one-handed because that was the rule. Because you’d decided it was the rule. Because nobody had made the rules for you. And half the time the game was really just arguing about the rules, and the arguing was better than the game, and the whole thing was invented from nothing, in real time, by children whose only technology was imagination and a vague sense of injustice.

There were no downloads. No updates. Just a long afternoon and whatever you could make of it.

Some night you couldn’t sleep and so you counted sheep. Built a field in your head. Fence. Grass. Sky. No app. No audio. Just the strange, old technology of your own mind. A small child, alone, using nothing but the inside of their own head to solve the problem of consciousness refusing to switch off. Every kid did it. It wasn’t special. It was just a Tuesday night and you couldn’t sleep.

I wonder sometimes whether we’re raising a generation that doesn’t know their own minds are habitable.

7:30 on a Thursday meant one thing.

Knight Rider.

That synth. That red scanner sweeping across the bonnet. A car so impossibly cool that every child in Britain was briefly prepared to become a crime fighter if it meant they could drive a talking Trans Am.

7:30 on Thursday. The only option. That was it. If you missed it, you missed it. There was no catch-up. No on-demand. No “I’ll watch it later.” You either arranged your entire life around that thirty minutes of television or you spent Friday at school in a state of social exile while everyone else discussed what KITT said to Michael.

What I remember about that time is this: you arranged your life around it. Happily. It was an anchor. Thursday had a shape because Knight Rider was in it. Saturday morning meant going to the shops. Sunday evening meant the dread of school. Wednesday afternoon meant swimming. The week had a rhythm because things happened at fixed times and you built your life around them, and that structure, externally imposed, non-negotiable, shared by everyone you knew, gave time a texture it no longer has.

And the spaces in between those anchors? Those were yours. Not scheduled. Not optimised. Just empty time, stretching out, daring you to fill it.

Now you can watch Knight Rider, right now, on your phone, in bed. But you and I both know it wouldn’t be the same. Not because the show has changed. Because the scarcity has gone. And the scarcity was where the magic lived.

It wasn’t just inconvenience we lost.

It was the feeling that everyone was in it together.

That same feeling was there in a lift in 1995, at my first proper office job. My colleague and I were talking about The X-Files, and a stranger just jumped in. ‘That scared the bejesus out of me,’ he said. No one had checked each other’s profiles. No algorithm had matched our interests. We’d just all watched the same thing the night before, on one of the five channels available, and that was enough to turn three strangers in a lift into people with something real to talk about.

Now we each live inside a personalised information tunnel that nobody else can see. My feed is not your feed. My algorithm is not your algorithm. We can sit in the same room and inhabit different planets.

But I want to be honest about something: that shared world wasn’t kind to everyone. If you were the kid who didn’t like football, or the kid who liked the wrong music, or the kid who was different in any of the ways that kids can be different, three channels and one playground meant there was nowhere to hide. The mainstream wasn’t optional. It was the only stream. And if you didn’t fit, you just didn’t fit, and that was that, and nobody was building you a community online where you could find your people. The shared world could be warm. It could also be a cage.

I don’t think we’ve noticed how much we lost when the assumption of a shared world died. But I don’t want to pretend we didn’t also gain something when it did.

There used to be a game show in the UK called Mastermind, where the host with the most amazing name, Magnus Magnusson, used to quiz self-made experts on their expertise. Magnusson had a catchphrase: “I’ve started, so I’ll finish.” If the buzzer went, he didn’t stop. He completed the question. The contestant completed the answer. That was how everything worked back then.

I took four books out of the library. Two weeks. Date stamped inside. I rationed them like provisions. Because there were only four, I read every word. I earned the ending.

We used to finish things. Now we just start the next one.

But the memory that still tightens my chest is this.

Our Price. The one on Wembley High Road.

The record shop that got the US imports in on Thursdays. You’d call to reserve one. On Saturday, you’d stand there with headphones on, listening to thirty seconds to answer the only question that mattered:

Is this the track?

Back home, you’d copy it onto cassette, then duplicate it again high-speed dubbing, Dolby B noise reduction on, trying to kill the hiss that crept into every recording, for anyone who wanted one.

In my head, my car tapes were the best. In fact they were legendary. RCT 17. Rahim’s Car Tape, number seventeen in a series that eventually ran to forty three, until someone broke into my car and stole the Technics tape deck. I replaced it with a CD player. Nobody steals car stereos anymore. The tapes became redundant overnight.

Half past midnight. Steve Jervier on the radio, the only DJ in London playing the underground R&B chart, and only at this hour. Finger hovering over play and record.

Press both at exactly the same time.

If you were early, you caught the DJ’s voice. If you were late, you missed the first bar. Either way, you kept it. The imperfection was proof you were there.

Then it happened.

The remix.

Heavy D on the remix.

We knew the single was going to be number one. But nobody told us Heavy D would be on the remix. We hadn’t heard it yet. Nobody had.

You pressed those buttons like a surgeon. You held your breath. You felt something surge through you that can only be described as alive.

Think about what went into that single moment. The street knowledge to know the chart existed. The dedication to stay up past midnight on a school night. The taste to know which songs mattered. The physical craft of the two-button press. The weeks of listening and learning and caring. And underneath all of it: love. An actual love for the music that made you sit in the dark, with only your desk lamp on, building something with your hands.

That wasn’t consumption. That was craft. Everything you had, all at once, for one song.

And then the song finishes. And you pick up the phone. The landline. The one in the hallway. The one where the whole house can hear it ring. You pull the wire under your bedroom door and close it so nobody can hear you.

And you call your mate.

You’re seventeen years old. It’s one in the morning. You are calling someone’s house. Not their pocket. Their house. Their mum and dad, sister and maybe their grandad are sleeping, and the phone is going to ring like a fire alarm through every room, and there is a very real chance that a very angry parent is going to answer, and there will be consequences, real consequences.

And you do it anyway. Because you have to tell someone. You got the remix. You know they were listening to Steve Jervier too. You know they’re awake. They know you’re going to call. This is how it worked.

There is no version of that phone call that exists today. Not because we can’t call people at 1am. We can, silently, risklessly, into the private rectangle in their pocket. But because the risk was part of it. You both had to be awake, both had to be listening, both had to care enough to be in it at the same time. The phone call wasn’t communication. It was proof that both of you cared about the same thing at the same time.

That’s gone. Not the ability to call. The stakes of calling.

And the tape itself was a gift. You’d produce copies for the people you cared about. The mixtape was how you said “I care about you” without saying it, because you were seventeen and you didn’t say things like that. You just handed someone a tape with your handwriting on it and hoped they understood.

Some of those people are still in my life. Some aren’t. But I could tell you every one of their names, and if you put us in a room together we’d be seventeen again in about four seconds. That’s what shared investment does. It doesn’t fade. It just waits.

Years later, I threw the tapes away. All of them. The ones I’d made and the ones I’d been given. I didn’t own a tape deck anymore, and life moves on, and you can’t keep everything. But standing over that bin bag with my box from my Caterpillar boots that housed all my tapes, I felt like I was throwing away my youth. Not just recordings. Memories. The handwriting on the labels. The hours in the dark. The love that went into the track order. It felt like I was admitting that part of my life was over.

And then I realised it wasn’t on the tape. It was never on the tape. The tape was just plastic and magnetic strip. What mattered, the knowledge, the taste, the 2am dedication, the friendships, I was still carrying all of it. The tapes could go. The kid who made them was still here.

I kept one. RCT 30. The label says The Keyboard Says QWERTY, because for some reason I’d started naming them. I’m not sure why I kept it. Maybe you can’t throw away everything. It’s in a box somewhere, and maybe one day someone will find it and wonder what it was and who made it and why it mattered enough to keep.

One of the songs that year was 93 ‘Til Infinity. Souls of Mischief. A one-hit wonder, as it turned out. One song. That was all they needed.

We thought infinity sounded romantic.

It turns out infinity is lonelier than ‘93.

We went deep because we couldn’t go wide.

And going deep made it sacred.

Now I open Spotify.

The algorithm serves me something it knows I will probably like.

It is almost always correct.

I have never loved a song it chose for me.

Because love isn’t optimisation.

Love is what happens when you give a damn for long enough.

I used to know every artist. Every name. Which hood they came from. Whether they were UK, East Coast or West Coast. Who the producer was. Was it Teddy Riley? Which label had signed them. Now the music passes through me like water. Perfectly temperature-controlled water, calibrated to my exact preferences. And I can barely taste it.

Sometimes I catch myself wondering where that kid went. The one who sat in the dark with his finger on the button. He’s in here somewhere. But he’s buried now, and the house is very loud.

It wasn’t just the music. It was everything. The same thing that happened to listening happened to knowing, to wondering, to paying attention to anything at all. The depth went out of it so gradually that nobody noticed the moment it left.

Here is a list of things I used to not know:

Why the sky was blue. What happened to the water when it went down the plughole. How birds slept without falling off branches. Why I got stomach aches. What my dad did at work all day. Why adults drank coffee when it tasted like mud.

I didn’t look them up, because there was nowhere to look them up. So instead I did something extraordinary: I wondered. I carried the questions around like pebbles in my pocket. I’d think about the fridge light for days. Does it stay on when you close the door? I’d open it, close it slowly, try to peek through the rubber seal, convinced that if I was fast enough I could catch it in the act. I developed theories. I asked my dad’s friend, who would give me a completely wrong answer with absolute confidence, and I’d believe him, and I’d build an entire worldview on that wrong answer, and it was brilliant.

The wrong answers were part of it. You’d carry someone else’s confident nonsense around for weeks, turning it over, testing it against your own observations, and sometimes the nonsense turned out to be more interesting than the truth. Because the nonsense made you think. The truth, when it finally arrived, just made you stop.

Curiosity, back then, wasn’t a click. It was a condition. You lived inside it. A question had weight and texture and duration. You couldn’t discharge it in four seconds with a search engine. You had to sit with not knowing. And sitting with not knowing meant your mind kept working on it. In the bath, on the walk to school, lying in bed with the sheep you were supposed to be counting.

And not knowing was where all the interesting things happened.

Now the answer arrives before the curiosity has finished forming. And the curiosity just dies. Gone before you even knew you had it.

I noticed it last week.

I’ve been annoying my youngest daughter with a song called Papaoutai. The Afro soul version. Singing it at her constantly, playing it in the car, humming it while making dinner. The way fathers do when they discover a song’s capacity to irritate. But it wasn’t just that. If I’m honest, I was being a kid again. Winding her up the way I used to wind up my mates, that stupid back-and-forth where you repeat something until everyone’s laughing and nobody remembers why it was funny. My eldest has crossed over. She’s become more like one of my mates now, someone I talk to as an equal, and that’s its own kind of wonderful. But my youngest is the last person I get to be a child with. These are probably the last years before she’s too old for it, and I’m just a dad again until maybe one day I’m a grandfather and I get to be silly all over again.

It worked. She couldn’t stop singing it. It was stuck, properly stuck, looping through her head for days.

And then she asked me: “Why do songs get stuck in your head?”

It was a beautiful question. The kind you could sit with for hours. The kind I would have carried around for days as a kid, building theories, asking friends, enjoying not knowing.

Instead, I said, “Alexa, why do songs get stuck in your head?”

I didn’t even pause. I went from being a child with her, singing, laughing, playing, to being the parent who reaches for the efficient answer. The shift was instant. I wasn’t even conscious of making it.

Four seconds. Repetitive melodic patterns. The brain’s need for closure. Something about short-term memory loops. Answer delivered. Question killed.

She said “oh” and went back to her room. Still singing Papaoutai.

And I stood there and felt something I can only call grief. Not for the past. For the wonder I’d just stolen from both of us. She didn’t fall into the trap. I did. I was the one who broke the spell. For how automatic it was. For the fact that I didn’t even notice I was doing it until it was done.

That’s the thing about rust. You don’t feel it happening. You only feel what’s gone.

That’s what AI does.

Not all at once. Not dramatically.

It relieves you. One small effort at a time. The email you didn’t draft. The question you didn’t think about. The slide deck you didn’t fine-tune from concept to story at midnight.

Each time, something disappears. Not a skill. Something smaller than that. A stretch of thinking you used to do alone.

This isn’t an apocalypse.

It’s slow rust.

And rust spreads when nothing resists it.

Anyone can be competent now. Efficiency is basically free.

And what isn’t practised, decays.

I call it constraint-trained depth.

AI won’t do that for you.

So we choose. Do we want everything easy and nothing felt? Or do we want less, and feel all of it?

When everything you do can be done for you, the only thing left is who you are. And who you are was never built by getting things done faster. It was built by scraped knees and midnight tape decks and a phone call that risked waking everyone up.

My parents grew up in East Africa with zero choices. They ate what there was. They became what was needed. And from that constraint, they built lives of incredible depth. I had one choice. One ice cream, one TV, three channels, one afternoon with nothing in it. And from that, without knowing I was learning, I learned to be bored, to be curious, to make a mixtape, to fall down and get up, to press play and record at the same time. Then the world gave us infinite choices. And we said yes to all of them. And now AI is arriving to choose for us.

Three generations. From zero to one to infinite to automatic.

The constraint was never the enemy. It was the curriculum.

If you’re not doing, who are you being?

Years later, I shared a Flake 99 with my wife. We had more of a choice by then. But really, there was only one.

So I know the answer is still in us. I’ve felt it in small moments like that. And I’ve felt it when the whole world felt it at once.

Step back to December 2022. Qatar. Argentina against France in the World Cup final. I’m neither French nor Argentine. But I sat at home with my family, all of us, and felt that thing in my stomach. That excited, uncertain, almost childlike feeling about what was going to happen. Secretly, I wanted Messi to perform and realise his ambition. It felt like the best match I’d ever seen. A final. And I didn’t know how it was going to end, only that I couldn’t look away.

Back and forth. The ping pong of it. Every time you thought the game was settled, it wasn’t. Every time one side pulled away, the other dragged it back. For two and a half hours the match refused to end. It was so human that you didn’t want it to finish.

At one point I realised I was standing up. I don’t know when I’d stood up. My mouth was open. I had no idea how long I’d been like that. My body had made the decision before my brain caught up. The match had taken me over.

Even if you’d had plans afterwards, you were cancelling them. You knew in your heart of hearts this was going to be epic. You didn’t want to miss a second. You didn’t step out to use the bathroom. You didn’t step out to get another drink. If you were eating, the food was crumbling down your front because your eyes never left the screen. It didn’t matter if you were in a pub or at home or on your own or with friends. Whether you loved Mbappé or couldn’t stand him. Whether you were French, Argentine, or neither. Even if you didn’t like football or called it soccer, you knew this was a moment. A moment to savour.

A family watching television together. Friends across the world lighting up WhatsApp groups. The phone call. Are you watching this? The commentators saying what you were already feeling, accentuating the moment even more. Humans with humans. Watching humans compete.

There wasn’t just one winner that day. It wasn’t Messi. It wasn’t Argentina. It was all of us.

And if you ever get the chance, make that experience physical.

Go to a concert. Actually, go to a Coldplay concert.

Eighty thousand people singing the same song, wristbands lighting up in waves across the stadium, colours changing with the music, and every single person is part of it without trying. Different histories. One voice. One is the song you fell in love to. One got you through a terrible year. One is the song your daughter sings in the car. One you don’t even like, but you’re singing it anyway because eighty thousand people are singing it and the feeling is bigger than the song. Everyone brings their own meaning to the same shared music, and for two hours it all exists at once.

And Chris Martin talks to the crowd as if he’s talking to one person. Eighty thousand people in that stadium but he makes it feel like he’s speaking to you. Just you. That’s why it works. That’s why people let their guard down.

You would see grown men weeping openly. Others singing at the top of their lungs. Both at the same time. Nobody pretending. Nobody performing. Just people letting something out that they didn’t know they were carrying.

It was the last time my family saw me cry.

And the line that did it, the one that broke the room open, was a promise that lights will guide you home. Eighty thousand people singing it to each other, to themselves, to nobody in particular. And I thought: maybe that’s what all of this is. Maybe AI, maybe the infinite, maybe even the loss, is the thing that finally shows us where home was all along.

No optimisation. No curation. No algorithm.

Just presence.

It is the most inefficient thing left in modern life.

And it is electric.

You were never meant to be a processor.

You were the person who stayed up past midnight for a song. Who pressed play and record at exactly the same time. Who called a mate’s house in the early hours and risked getting you both in trouble, because trouble with parents back then was a big deal, because a remix mattered that much.

You were the person who fell, bled, and got up. Who rationed four books across a fortnight. Who invented rules on a cracked playground. Who built sheep out of thin air. Who carried questions around like pebbles. Who wondered about the fridge light for three days. Who bit into a Flake 99 and tried to catch every crumb before it hit the ground.

That person is still here.

Older, perhaps.

Rustier.

But here.

That scares people. It scares me too. The idea that we might have to be human again in a world that’s been doing everything it can to make that unnecessary.

But this is what gives me hope: being human again isn’t something you have to learn from scratch. It’s something you have to remember. The irony is that we’ve always been human. We never stopped. We just buried it under process, under efficiency, under the endless noise of optimising everything. And now AI is stripping all of that back, and what’s left underneath is us. The same us that was always there. A question you don’t google. A song you actually listen to and feel. An afternoon with nothing in it. Leaving your phone at home so you’re actually present. That’s all it takes.

The world we’re walking into will not ask for any of this.

It will reward speed, optimisation, and compliance.

But it will break without depth.

I’ve started.

The question is whether we still remember how to finish.

All the way to the cardboard cone.

If you have reached here, I wanted to share that my book SuperSkills comes out in July. It’s about being human when the machines can do everything else.

Stay Curious - and don’t forget to be amazing,

Rahim

PS. If your organisation is grappling with how AI is reshaping work and leadership, I speak and advise on this.

Rahim Hirji Author, SuperSkills (2026) | Keynote Speaker | Advisor

Building human capability for the AI era.

→ thesuperskills.com

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• Refind: AI-curated Brain Food delivered daily. Pick your intelligence.

• Meco: Newsletter reader outside your inbox. Organise your intelligence.

• Prompt Cowboy: Prompt Generator. Extract intelligence.

• Manus: Best AI agent to do things for you. Agentise your intelligence.

• Chat Hub: Multi-model intelligence

• SuperSkills Intelligence: Ramp up your human intelligence

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