AI Is Making You Busier. Here’s Why That’s the Point.

You’ve felt it. The quiet dread that creeps in around 3 PM, when you realize you’ve been ‘working’ for eight hours but have accomplished nothing you actually care about. You’ve answered a hundred tiny requests from your AI tools, generated a dozen drafts, and somehow, the important thing—the real thing—is still sitting there, untouched.

You’re not lazy. You’re not bad at time management. You’re caught in a trap that’s being sprung on every heavy AI user right now, and it’s built into the very nature of the technology itself.

I just spent time in Silicon Valley, talking to the people building this future. AI scientists, founders, engineers—the ones living and breathing this stuff. And the same phrase came up again and again: ‘The models are getting stronger, but my work hours are getting longer.’

Think about that for a second. We were promised liberation. We got a treadmill that never stops.

One AI scientist I met, a guy who once simulated a thousand agents creating a society in Minecraft, described his setup: three tables pushed together, nine screens, every one of them running AI agents waiting for his input. He said something that’s stuck with me: ‘Playing a game until 2 AM feels shameful. Working with AI until 2 AM feels virtuous. So it’s even more addictive than games.’

The promise of AI was less work. The reality is that it has made you the bottleneck of your own endless production line.

AI didn’t free you from your old tasks. It convinced you that you were capable of a hundred new ones. It didn’t make you more efficient. It made you feel powerful enough to give yourself a thousand new jobs. This is the addiction. And the cost isn’t your time. It’s your attention.

The Real Commodity Is Now Judgment

Dan Shipper, the co-founder of Every, wrote a piece called After Automation that cuts right to the bone. His company automated everything. Codex, Claude Code, the whole stack. What happened? They didn’t fire anyone. They just found themselves with more work than ever.

Why? Because AI’s real function is to make yesterday’s abilities cheap. You couldn’t code before? Now you can. You couldn’t make a video? Now you can. When something becomes free and ubiquitous, everyone does it. And the market instantly becomes flooded with near-identical output.

There’s a name for this: AI slop. Or as they brilliantly translate it in China, ‘AI swill’.

I saw a guy in a group chat bragging that he was using AI to publish 20+ articles a day across a network of accounts. My morbid curiosity got the better of me, and I clicked in. Every single article had exactly 2 or 3 views. A 500-person group, and I was the only one dumb enough to look. He had multiplied his output by a hundred, and he might as well have never created anything at all.

That’s the paradox. When everyone can produce cheaply, the thing that becomes truly expensive is difference. Non-consensus. A point of view.

The more AI can do, the more valuable it is to be a human who can decide what is worth doing.

You Are the Bread, Not the Filling

Dan Shipper has a great metaphor. He says a person is the two slices of bread in a sandwich. The top slice is your judgment upfront—setting the direction, defining what ‘good’ looks like. The bottom slice is your judgment at the end—deciding if the output is actually worthy.

The filling in the middle? That’s the AI.

AI has all the action, but it has zero intent. It can run 99 steps, but it can’t decide which steps matter. It has no ‘why’. That ‘why’ is the only thing you possess that cannot be automated.

Think of a comedian like Jerry Seinfeld. He famously refused to let McKinsey consultants optimize his production process for Seinfeld. He said, ‘If you’re pursuing efficiency, you’re working in the wrong way.’ The show succeeded because of the thousands of micro-decisions he made himself. The right word, the right cut, the right cast.

That’s the stuff that can’t be handed over. The tiny, almost invisible judgments that no one else can make. The ‘yes, this’ and ‘no, not that’. These are the building blocks of your unique value, and AI will never have them. A friend of mine calls this the ‘balloon model’. Our general abilities are the smooth surface of the balloon—and AI is flattening all of them to the same level. But each of us has a protrusion, a bump where our unique personality and taste push out. That bump is your worth. AI can’t create it, and it can’t erase it.

The Real Threat Is Drowning, Not Replacement

But here’s where it gets dangerous. It’s not the fear of being replaced that should keep you up at night. It’s the fear of being submerged.

AI can do everything, so you start asking it to do everything. Can it make an image? Great, now every paragraph needs one. Can it make a slideshow? Great, now every thought needs a deck. Can it edit video? Great, now everything needs to be a clip.

Each one of these tasks takes only ‘five minutes’. But you’re not losing five minutes. You’re losing your train of thought. You’re fracturing your focus into a hundred tiny pieces. AI’s greatest trick isn’t taking your job. It’s taking your attention, breaking it into pieces, and handing each piece back to you as a ‘quick task’.

The real competitive advantage in the age of AI is the discipline to do less.

The AI scientist I mentioned, the one with the nine screens? He eventually did something radical. He decided to be deliberately idle. He had to actively resist the machine that was pushing him to do a hundred things, and instead, pick the one thing that mattered.

He realized that being pushed by AI to do a hundred tasks is a hallucination of diligence. But consciously choosing to do one hard thing, the thing that only you can judge? That’s the real skill.

So here’s the uncomfortable truth. Don’t ask what AI can do for you. Ask what it’s distracting you from. The future doesn’t belong to those who can do the most. It belongs to those who can decide what not to do at all.