The Paradox of Efficiency

On efficiency gradually erasing judgment and identity

11.51 PM. A soft ping breaks the silence. An email notification.

I switch tabs. Another meeting invite. Number six for tomorrow. I don’t recognize the attendees. I don’t remember the agenda. But the AI has marked me as ‘accepted’ and has drafted a prep response. It’s polite, cheerful, and even enthusiastic. I’m none of those at the moment.

My mouse hovers over ‘send.’ Muscle memory almost kicks in.

But then, I pause.

My calendar for the next day is already a solid block of green. There’s no gap. No white space for thinking. Just a seamless conveyor belt of commitments I don’t exactly remember making.

And staring at the screen bathed in that soft orange glow, I find myself asking the question that has started haunting most professionals:

When did I agree to become this?

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Right now, somewhere, a designer opens Figma for the tenth time today. AI generates three mockups while she analyzes the previous two. Her manager wants five more variations before the end of the day. Tomorrow, he’ll want ten more.

A customer service rep closes his forty-seventh ticket today. Yesterday, the count was fifty-three. AI now suggests responses faster than he can read them. His performance review says “exceptional output.” His therapist says, “on the brink of burnout.”

Everyone is working faster than ever. Working more than ever. Nobody remembers when this became normal. And certainly, nobody remembers agreeing to this.

The promise was: AI would give us our time back. It’d automate the tedious work. We’d get to focus on what matters. We’d get to work on what feels meaningful. It wasn’t just a possibility... it was an inevitability.

And we believed it. We taught ourselves the tools. We learned the prompts. We integrated the systems. And we braced for liberation.

We got acceleration instead.

the 1865 anomaly

This isn’t new. Something strange already happened in 1865.

Sitting in his study, William Stanley Jevons stared at a pile of numbers that didn’t behave right.

Decades earlier, James Watt had invented the steam engine. It sipped coal instead of guzzling it. Prevailing wisdom predicted a decline in coal consumption. It was supposed to go down. More efficiency, less fuel. Simple, straightforward math.

But the numbers told a completely different story. The coal consumption didn’t drop. At all. It exploded. A tenfold increase.

Jevons stayed with this contradiction. Until the pattern revealed itself.

Yes, the more efficient engines used far less coal. But that efficiency also made coal power portable.

Suddenly, you didn’t need a coal mine next door to run a profit. So manufacturing didn’t just expand; it sprawled. Factories crept up into the valleys and choked the skylines. Mills spread everywhere. Industries multiplied. Efficiency didn’t reduce consumption. It enabled more of it.

This is the Jevons Paradox.

Efficiency does not make you use less of a resource. It makes you burn far more of it.

And this pattern has been repeating itself ever since.

Look at your work.

Five years ago, an email used to take roughly ten minutes. You’d open up a blank message. Stare at it. Gather your thoughts. Maybe even read the preceding emails in the thread. Draft something. Read it back. Revise it. Judge it. Consider if it’s even worth sending.

Now you effortlessly feed the prompt into an AI. It spews something out in less than thirty seconds. Perfect structure. Polished tone. There’s nothing you’d want to change. And on paper, you saved nine minutes.

But you didn’t.

Why? Because the cost of responding has dropped to zero. The volume of emails has snowballed. You’re expected to process ten times more now. You didn’t save those nine minutes. You merely reinvested them in more noise.

The pattern is the same everywhere.

ChatGPT can summarize reports in seconds. So now, you analyze fifty instead of five. Gemini can create social media posts in an instant. So now, you post five times a day instead of just once.

The tools didn’t give you more time. They raised the baseline of what “done” looks like.

Every single efficiency gain eventually gets captured. Not by what helps you master the craft. It gets captured by increased expectations. By inflated obligations.

The work expands to consume the efficiency provided. Just because you can do it faster, you are required to do more of it.

You are running faster and faster just to stay in place.

what gets lost in efficiency

There is a subtle shift that happens when things become instant.

The gap between input and output vanishes.

But this gap was the very space where thinking used to happen. This was where you filtered bad ideas before they became expensive, regrettable mistakes.

When writing an email used to take time, you asked yourself, “Is it even worth sending?” When reports took you days to create, you sifted through what actually mattered. When a meeting required you to wrestle with five different calendars and book the conference room, you considered whether the meeting was even necessary.

Now everything is instant. You don’t pause to consider.
You’re efficiently producing things that might not need to exist.

Peter Drucker saw this coming. He famously made the distinction that escapes most people today: “Efficiency is doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right things.” They are not the same.

You can be incredibly efficient... at producing garbage.
You can answer a hundred emails... and create zero value.

As it turns out, the gap between input and output wasn’t really a waste. It was where judgment lived.

That judgment was called something else. Expertise. Consideration. Discretion.

Identity is judgment. It’s the pressure of your own standards deciding what passes through and what doesn’t.

Efficiency eliminates that judgment. It optimizes the you right out of the work.

And you can’t quite pinpoint when and where, but somewhere along the way, you stopped being a person who thinks and started being something that processes. You stopped being someone with judgment.

You became a pipe.

A pipe has just one job: let things flow through it with no resistance. Requests are fed at one end. Output emerges from the other. No questions are asked. No friction is applied. No delay occurs.

A perfect pipe has no bottlenecks. It is always available. Completely seamless. Almost invisible.

A perfect modern professional looks exactly the same.

the efficiency changes you

Pause for a moment. Reflect. Listen to the language we use to talk about “good work”. Look at the words we choose to describe the people we admire for “good work.”

“Responsive.”
It sounds virtuous. But in reality, it means always processing. Always available.

“Seamless.”
It sounds high-quality. But in other words, it means frictionless, invisible. It means you offer no resistance. You are essentially absent.

“Efficient.”
It signals competency. But it is code for never slowing things down. Never asking whether things should be slowed down.

On the surface, these might seem like compliments.

They are symptoms.

If you’re online, you’re “good.” If you’re not, you’re a “suspect.” The criterion is no longer that you’re engaged in your work. What’s expected is that you’re available for everyone else’s work. To reliably process their requests. To efficiently unblock their progress. To keep things flowing seamlessly.

Being good at your job now means being good at not being in the way.

The system celebrates those who just process. It rewards the fast, smooth, always-on pipe.

And slowly... without meaning to... you become one.

and it costs you

Yes, there is a cost to all this.
That cost is your identity.

When you let yourself be optimized into the frictionless pipe, you lose the ability to pause and ask, “Should this work even exist?” You lose the capacity that lets you distinguish between being busy and being valuable.

You lose access to taste. You lose access to the professional instinct that comes with the practice of choosing.

You lose access to judgment.

When you take time to review, you exercise judgment. When you rewrite something seven times, you aren’t being inefficient. You are doing the actual work. Not the typing. It’s the thinking you do between the typing. That’s the actual work.

But when everything happens instantly, at AI speed, there is no time for thinking. There is just input, processing, output.

Yes, you are productive. And yet empty.
Yes, you are busy. And yet searching for meaning.
Yes, you are efficient. And yet exhausted.

And this exhaustion isn’t physical. You can’t sleep it off.
It’s the exhaustion that comes from feeling hollow.
It comes from working without choosing.
Processing without thinking.

You are always moving, but you never arrive at a place that actually matters. A place that feels meaningful.

The hamster wheel is also efficient. But the hamster isn’t going anywhere.

the real trap

It is not that you are working too much. It is that you are working too fast to know whether you should be working on what you are working on at all.

The speed at which you are moving removes friction. That friction is what forces you to pause. To ask questions. “Does this post need to exist?” “Is this the work that matters?”

Those questions need the friction. They require the gap between stimulus and response. That gap is where thinking happens.

Eliminate that gap, and you don’t choose anymore. You react. You become a system optimized for output.

But you are not a system. You are a human. And humans need friction to function. To engage agency. To resist.

When you remove all resistance, you become cognitively fragile. You lose the ability to say no under pressure. To handle stress. To handle shock.

You have no way to distinguish between what truly matters and what doesn’t. Because of the speed at which you are moving, everything appears to matter. Everything has the same priority, until something breaks.

Usually, that something is you.

so what does resistance look like

Resistance is not bureaucracy. That is how governments work. They have friction with no purpose. They have resistance that doesn’t serve anyone but themselves.

Intentional resistance is different.
Intentional resistance protects value.

Your draft folder. Write the email response. Write the tweet. But don’t release it yet. Let it sit. Let it simmer. Come back when you are less reactive. When you have reclaimed authorship. When you can decide when something should exist.

Have a “no meetings” day. It protects deep work. Meetings aren’t bad, but some work does require sustained effort and attention. Meetings destroy the mental capacity for that work.

Amazon is famous for its six-page written memos before major meetings. They recognized something crucial. If you can’t write it down, you can’t think it through. And if you haven’t thought it through, you can’t really create value. That memo introduces intentional resistance. It forces the question: “Do we even know what we are trying to decide here?”

Basecamp has focus hours when real-time chats are banned. They realized that “urgent” and “important” are two completely different things. When everything is urgent, nothing gets sustained attention that important work requires.

These aren’t obstacles to good work. They are the conditions necessary for it.

The goal isn’t to be slow. The goal is to be deliberate. To create an environment where judgment can function. Where expertise can operate.

The goal is to let your identity shape the work.

the fork in the road

You can be frictionless, or you can be valuable.
You can be efficient, or you can make an impact.

These paths diverge.

One path absorbs you. You become part of the infrastructure. Invisible. Measured by uptime and output. Celebrated for never being in the way, while simultaneously being always available.

And you stay hostage. To a superior AI. To a more optimized process. To a cheaper contractor. Because infrastructure is always replaced when better infrastructure arrives.

The other path makes you essential. Because when it matters, we need someone who can think, not someone who can merely process. Someone who brings judgment. The kind that can’t be automated away.

The identity that delivers that flavor of judgment takes time to build. It requires friction that everyone is hell-bent on optimizing away. It requires taking the time to do it right instead of just fast.

With that kind of identity, you’ll produce work that matters. Work that comes from your expertise, your taste, your ability to see what others miss. Work that comes when you honestly answer the question: “Should it really exist?”

Yes, the pipe is efficient. But the pipe is also hollow. And you weren’t built to be hollow.

the ultimate efficiency

AI has arrived. And it makes you faster. That is not even in question.

The real question is: Faster at what?

Faster at creating posts that no one will read? Faster at clearing your inbox? Faster at organizing meetings that shouldn’t even exist?

Or faster at solving problems that really are worth solving? Faster at producing something that demands the best out of you? Faster at creating something that lasts?

The efficiency is here. The trap lies in what you do with it.

You can let every efficiency gain get captured by expectations.
You can let speed be its own justification.

Or you can add friction back into the equation. Intentionally.

That friction will not make you faster.
It will make you human.

Because when everything is instant, the ability to pause becomes rare. The capacity to think becomes invaluable. Exercising judgment to know what to pursue becomes irreplaceable.

The pipe is fast. The pipe is also hollow. It is the ultimate symbol of efficiency.

But ultimate efficiency = zero identity.

You are not a pipe.

Remember that.

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Be the friction

Nik Pathran

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PS: Writing this letter took me longer than I had planned. I felt the urge to rush, to “get it done.” Just so I could clear yet another task. But I forced myself to slow down. And the irony isn’t lost on me. The friction was the point.

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