The Sunday Scaries: When Your Weekend Needs a Weekend

I Survived the AI Spiral - and All I Got Was This Broken Bracket!

It’s late Sunday night - so late, in fact, that this will probably get published sometime Monday while I’m flying to Las Vegas for ShopTalk. But that feels oddly fitting. Because this weekend, I didn’t just feel the Sunday Scaries… I lived in them.

Now, to be fair, this wasn’t the usual dread-of-Monday vibe. This was something else entirely - a whirlwind of well-intentioned productivity that somehow spiraled into chaos by Sunday night.

It started innocently enough. I planned to get organized: update my summer curriculum, prep for a few work projects, and prep a bit for my upcoming panel at ShopTalk and Brand Innovators. Maybe even spend time with my wife! Manageable, right?

But then came the rabbit hole.

What began as light exploration into a few new AI tools quickly turned into a full-blown AI binge. I’ve been using Perplexity for a while now, but then I jumped back into Gemini… and somehow found myself deep inside Notebook LM. From there, things snowballed. I started sketching podcast ideas based on some of the retail history I’ve researched using animations from Fotor. Designing a new presentation template in Canva. Then, I got invited into the beta for Manus, so I started experimenting - bouncing back and forth to ChatGPT along the way. Before I knew it, I was producing an intro video for Global Commerce in a Modern World - using one tool for images, another for animation, a third for voiceover (11ElevenLabs), and a fourth to do the transcribing and then stitch it all together!

Oh, and just for fun, I even had them generate dueling March Madness brackets. (In case you’re wondering, all of them are DOA, but the AI counsel assures me it was my prompts, not their logic, to blame.)

It was exhilarating - like discovering a new set of tools in a creative playground. But that’s the paradox of exploration in the digital age: the more we can do, the more we feel like we should do. With every new capability comes a new decision to make, a new feature to test, a new rabbit hole to tumble into. And somewhere between curiosity and overload, what was meant to be inspiring became, well… a little exhausting.

By Sunday night, I wasn’t burned out from work - I was overwhelmed by possibility. Too many tabs open - both literally and mentally - and I started to feel like I needed a vacation from my weekend.

Naturally, my attention bounced around like a pinball machine. I watched travel videos for an upcoming UK trip. Ran errands and picked up a few essentials. Dipped in and out of curriculum updates. Reviewed panel notes. In theory, it was a productive weekend. In practice, it was a sensory marathon.

And somewhere in that blur of tasks and tools, I even replaced the left back directional light on my Jeep - a rare mechanical win that cost me less than nine dollars instead of a seventy-five-dollar trip to the dealership. No AI required, thank you very much. Just a simple, tangible fix - a moment of quiet satisfaction in a weekend otherwise filled with algorithms.

Now, as I wrap up this whirlwind of a weekend, I find myself having a quiet conversation with Ms. Musewell - the ever-patient AI companion who helps me gather my scattered thoughts over a virtual cup of tea. Because sometimes, the only way to make sense of it all is to write it out - with a touch of wit, a bit of grace, and just enough reflection to carry it into Monday.

Because that’s the thing—sometimes the Sunday Scaries aren’t about what’s coming on Monday. They’re about how much we’ve already packed into the weekend trying to do it all.

We try to rest. We try to be productive. We try to explore. But somewhere in the middle of all that effort, we need to remind ourselves that the point is to feel renewed - not overwhelmed.

I’m not complaining. I got a lot done. I even learned a few things. But if anyone needs me… I’ll be the person quietly sitting on this flight to Vegas, hoping no one talks to me - and silently wondering whether my weekend to-do list deserves its own PTO!

P.S. - and yes, my wife and I did spend time together, running errands, visiting the NEX, and listening to a Spotify playlist I'm putting together for my eventual goal of hiking the Camino de Santiago. We've agreed - by myself!