I have been an office worker for several decades.
When I started, the internet was still clearing its throat. Salespeople carried pagers. Windows 95 was teaching us that folders could live inside other folders, which felt almost philosophical. Documents traveled by fax or post. Work was slow and inefficient.
Then came mobile phones, email, and the internet in our pockets. We could send more information than a human being could understand to the other side of the planet in a second.
Work that once took a day took half a day. Then a third.
We thought, “Wonderful. Now we can go home early.”
Naturally, we did not.
We poured new work into the empty space. Technology saved time, and we immediately gave that time back to work. It was rather like receiving a larger bowl and celebrating by filling it with more soup than we could eat.
Now generative AI has arrived. It writes, calculates, summarizes, and never asks for a lunch break. Once again, it gives us time. Once again, we reward ourselves with more tasks, more speed, and less breathing room.
People worry that AI will take our jobs. Perhaps the stranger problem is that it has not taken enough of them.
Technology was supposed to make life easier. Instead, we have used it to become more efficiently exhausted.
Why?
Maybe human beings possess a peculiar and rather useless seriousness. We do not merely work hard. We work hard at looking as though we are working hard.
So perhaps the next great innovation is not another machine.
Perhaps it is this:
Let us stop treating the appearance of seriousness as a virtue.
A little idleness may not be laziness.
It may simply be the time technology was trying to return to us.
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