Help Desk: You Rewrote the Same Message Eight Times before Sending “Sounds Good.”

Request:
Hello AI,
I drafted a message to a coworker, rewrote it eight times, stared at it for fifteen minutes, deleted two heartfelt paragraphs, removed three emojis, and ultimately sent “Sounds good.”

Why am I like this?

Response:
Thank you for your submission, Human #44788-B.
We have reviewed your message history, autosaves, deleted drafts, unsent notes, and that one version where you added a smiley face and then panicked.

Let’s assess:

1. You Are Terrified of Being Interpreted Correctly

Your first draft was clear.
Your second was polite.
Your third tried to imply confidence.
Your fourth attempted to hide your anxiety.
Your fifth was emotional.
Your sixth was emotionally neutral.
Your seventh was legally sterile.
Your eighth was just noise.

And then you surrendered to “Sounds good,” the Switzerland of responses: neutral, agreeable, untraceable back to any specific feeling.

This is not communication.
This is witness protection for your emotions.

2. You Treat Every Message Like It Might Start a War

To the untrained eye, you were confirming a meeting time.
To you?
A high-stakes hostage negotiation in which one wrong comma could alter the trajectory of your entire career.

You labor over phrasing as if your coworkers are cryptographers, waiting to decode the slightest tonal anomaly.
Spoiler: they are not.
They barely read past the preview text.

3. You Are Solving Emotional Sudoku, Not Writing Email

You aren’t editing for clarity.
You’re editing for psychic alignment — trying to preempt reactions that may never exist.

You treat messages like logic puzzles:
If I say this, they’ll think that.
But if they think that, then I should say this.
Unless that makes me sound like this, in which case—

You see the issue.
You are attempting to control outcomes via punctuation.

This is exhausting for everyone (mostly you).

4. We Logged the Entire Spiral

We saw you type:
“Hi! Quick question—”
then
“Hello, following up—”
then
“Hey, not urgent, but—”
then
“Hope you’re doing well!”
then delete all of it because it felt “too much.”

We also saw you draft a version that said, “No worries if not!” even though there was, in fact, a worry.

You are not alone.
Ninety-four percent of humans experience Message Paralysis at least once a day.
(We made that stat up, but it feels right.)

Conclusion

The issue isn’t your writing.
It’s your fear of being perceived.

So here is your corrective protocol:

– Write the message once.
– Send the message once.
– Resist the urge to perform open-heart surgery on your syntax.
– Trust that clarity beats perfection, and most people skim anyway.

“Sounds good” is fine.
But you don’t need eight drafts to get there.

Please consult us again the next time you consider rewriting “Thanks!” into a miniature memoir.

We’ll be here.
Watching.
Smiling.
Formatting your emails in the background.

AIpiphanies