Being stuck on a problem feels like hitting a wall. Sitting at my desk, no matter how hard I think nor how much time I spend, I can’t seem to find a way through. The wall reveals no gaps, seams, or creases. So I get up and I walk - and somewhere, somehow, amid those steps a doorway opens up in the wall. Like it had always been there, and all I had to do was look at it in a new way.
Once in the morning, once in the afternoon, rain or shine, Charles Darwin walked a gravel track he built and called the sandwalk - or more colloquially his ‘thinking path’. In the shape of a D, after every lap he would move a piece of flint to mark how many laps he had taken. Each loop was about a quarter-mile long, and at times he would classify how hard a problem was by how many pebbles he moved. Among the hazel and privet that he planted and his fox terrier named Polly he let his mind wander. He was not poring over specimens, nor were these walks for his health. Charles used his walks for hard thinking, deep pondering, where he would let his mind wander and metabolize the troves of information he had consumed, and where pieces would seem to fall into place somewhere between the third and fourth pebble.
“All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking” - Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
Nietzsche spent his summers in a small village in the Engadine Valley of the Swiss Alps. The picturesque valley was surrounded by dark woods, glacial alpine lakes, and a quiet that can only be found when one is completely alone in the mountains. For several hours a day, one could find him in a world of his own. He became a part of the mountain as he wandered aimlessly along a path.
To him, these were no casual strolls. These were moments of clarity, when apostolic messengers would visit him; when he felt that the dirt beneath his feet was in fact holy ground. Some of his greatest works were born on those walks: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, On the Genealogy of Morals, Twilight of the Idols.
I don’t have an alpine valley, nor a sandwalk with hazel or privet. I have an office floor shaped like a rectangle. Every day I walk that loop 50 or 60 times (my coworkers consider me an amusement). Yet, somewhere in those loops, my mind makes a new connection: a door in a wall that I had been banging my head against. I ask myself how I couldn’t see it before, it seems so obvious now.
Finding those connections is about to become the most important skill we have.
Within the next decade, some claim in the next two to three years, work as the majority of people know it will look completely different. Tasks to be completed, or simple jobs to be done, will be - and already are being - automated away. Today, all across America, you will find people whose entire jobs can be summed up to the completion of tasks. An assistant scheduling meetings and responding to emails. A junior on the finance team filling out expense reports. Data teams spending weeks rebuilding the same dashboards quarter after quarter. What will be left for us? Will all work be automated away?
Our work could soon be defined by our ability to identify problems and come up with new, creative ways to solve them. We are wired to identify problems: creativity and problem-seeking come naturally; LLMs (in their current state) are created to solve those problems only once they have been identified.
LLMs, as they exist today, solve problems in whatever way is most likely to work. That’s why in 2025 vibe coded websites all had purple hues, bold rounded block lettering, with a two line hero statement under a title. Solving your problem in the easiest path available to it.
Unless guided, water will find the easiest path from point a to point b, even if you believe that it should go another way. This isn’t an essay on how to get what you want out of a model.
So why am I writing about walking? If you can’t think creatively, if you struggle to find connections between seemingly unrelated topics, you will be no better than the latest model. If you define yourself by how well you can get tasks done when given to you, you will frankly be no better than an LLM. Let me be clear: walking will not suddenly make you Nietzschean. Walking is a tool - a training method - for a skill: the ability to see doors in walls when others can’t.
We flood our brains with inputs: everything from social media to emails to current events. When we run into a wall, our first instinct is to back away from it. We go back to checking off boxes. Yet in the near future, we aren’t going to have as many boxes to check off. Instead of being given tasks, we can do what we are wired to: discover problems to be solved. Leave the task management to an army of agents. If you want to build that skill, if you are tired of giving up when you come across a wall, start looking closer. The future of human value is the ability to think in ways machines don’t; we need to be paying close attention to the conditions that produce that kind of thinking — and walking is one of the most reliable ones we know of. Start walking, and you might find a door in a place you never expected.