We declare ourselves busy. It is the reflexive reply, the badge of belonging, the safest way to account for a day without having to examine it too closely. I reckon that the claim is a deception. Our exhaustion is not the result of thinking at the edge of our ability. It is the slow, corrosive buildup of small, ceaseless obligations. That exact accumulation, not intellectual effort, has become the true, corrosive signature of our working lives.
Most days do not collapse under the weight of difficult problems. They dissolve instead. We move from one minor mandate to the next; responding, acknowledging, rescheduling, confirming. By evening, the calendar is full, yet we cannot point to an output proportionate to the attention consumed.
We are not executing complex tasks; we are operating as the human lubricant for systems that are unable to sustain themselves. Our attention is devoured not by the substance of the work, but by the choreography surrounding it. The confirmations. The scheduling rituals. The repeated cycles of validation. We spend our days administering friction that should not require administration. The mind is stretched thin.
This condition is not a personal failure to be honest. It is a structural failure of design. Work has been systematically fractured into units so trivial, so conditional, and so numerous that they mandate constant human presence while demanding almost no human thought. These tasks must be settled, but they do not deserve the time of a sentient being.
The infrastructure of modern assistance has offered no true liberation either. Its innovations are largely acts of relocation. The effort is shifted from a voice call to a shared link, from a long thread to a ticketing system. The work itself does not vanish. It is merely repackaged, relabeled, and presented behind a new dashboard. Progress is claimed, but the core burden persists.
The individual is not freed; the individual is conscripted into maintenance. We are now responsible for configuring, teaching, and auditing the very tools meant to lighten the load. We live inside systems that require the mind to first decompose intention into atomic steps, translate purpose into precise commands, and then stand guard against the inevitable failure. I wouldn’t consider this delegation. It is dictation with better branding. The entire gravity of context and final authority remains anchored to the human consciousness.
This arrangement produces a persistent injury: it forces the thinking mind to hover over work that does not require thought. To understand the depth of this drain, we must separate the kinds of effort we conflate.
There is Creation: The domain of judgment, synthesis, and original thought. The capacity to recognize the unstated problem, to forge the non-obvious connection, or to impose coherence where none existed before. This work commands attention because it justifies the expenditure.
And then there is Alignment: The domain of compliance, verification, and endless confirmation. Ensuring the format is correct. Confirming the attachment is present. Transcribing data from one vessel to another. Waiting for acknowledgment, then checking again. This labor is essential to the system’s momentum, yet it is utterly degrading to the mind performing it. It is the work of a mechanism, performed by a person.
For decades, we tried to automate this connective tissue with fixed logic. Rigid rules and brittle flows fractured instantly under the subtle, constant volatility of human collaboration. The effort required to maintain these systems routinely exceeded the effort they saved. When the mechanism failed, the human; adaptable, cheap, and always available - was pushed back into the breach.
From this chronic failure emerged an unspoken, pervasive mandate: that all necessary labor must be supervised labor. If a task holds consequence, we assume it must be watched, initiated, and approved by a thinking mind at every step. This belief has become so normalized it is invisible. Yet it is the single greatest drain on our vitality - the low, constant hum of trivial checking that prevents the mind from ever achieving the quiet necessary for depth.
The shift that is coming will not arrive through faster interfaces or richer dashboards. That is merely the old architecture, accelerated.
The true change lies in the systemic withdrawal of the thinking mind from the duty of perpetual supervision. It requires a capability that can carry the full weight of intent forward without requiring continuous human presence. Not systems that wait for commands, but functions that understand an objective and manage the necessary alignment without demanding attention at every juncture. This would not be the arrival of just another tool. It is the disappearance of an entire stratum of effort.
The mind must be freed from the low, ceaseless friction of coordinating its own intentions.
We are left, then, with an unsettling question: If a vast category of labor exists that is necessary for the system, trivial to execute, and yet exhausting to supervise, what happens to the meaning of our professional lives when the demand for constant human vigilance is finally lifted?
*****
Currently immersed in Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy. It’s a vast, sprawling work, and I find myself pulled by caprice through various thinkers and eras. I hope to eventually distill these disparate observations into a focused lucubration once I’ve turned the final page.