Protecting the Inefficient Self from AI

I’ve been doing a 12-part video series on AI literacy, and Episode 9 has resonated the most so far, especially given my current audience size. It focused on something I think deserves a deeper dive: our growing culture of optimization.

It’s the mindset that everything should be faster, smoother, and more efficient. If left unchecked, it’s going to roll over and crush us all into comfortable mush.

Would you like to be comfortable mush? I don’t.

So I’m doing my part to raise awareness, armed with my audience of 3 and a stubborn sense of duty to spread a bit of AI literacy wherever I can, I humbly offer you some food for thought.

The efficiency Trap

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not anti-AI. Quite the opposite, actually. But I try to stay self-aware. Efficiency feels good. I like when things work faster, cleaner, smoother.

Shaving minutes off a workflow or automating a small task that used to take hours is super satisfying.

AI efficiency is here to stay. But this constant urgency to optimize everything is manufactured, it’s a product of the current AI gold rush. There is no organic urge here, it’s all a marketed narrative. Everyone’s racing to automate, to integrate, to scale. It’s less about what’s truly useful and more about keeping up with the hype (🤢GROSS!!).

And when that pressure seeps into everyday life, it turns even our most human moments into something to streamline.

So my qualms aren’t with efficiency itself, but it’s when that mindset starts creeping into places it doesn’t belong. When it crosses over into things that were never meant to be optimized.

The conversations that unfold slowly.

The projects that need time to breathe.

The creative friction that gives ideas their shape.

Unchecked AI efficiency is something else; it’s more seductive, more dangerous. You get pulled into this addictive sense of progress, this hit of dopamine that feels like achievement, without any of the discomfort of process. It’s a trap that feels like progress, but it’s actually more like a quieter kind of erosion.

Not all friction is created equal

I think we need to make a distinction between meaningful friction vs avoidable friction.

There’s friction that wastes your energy, and friction that builds your capacity.

The first kind comes from broken systems, cluttered workflows, or redundant steps that drain you for no damn reason. That’s avoidable friction.

Yes. We should fix that. Go ahead, release the AI agent Kraken.

But then there’s meaningful friction; the kind that forces you to wrestle with an idea, sit with a feeling, create connection, or push through a problem that doesn’t have an instant answer.

That kind of friction refines you. It sharpens your judgment and deepens your understanding. That’s the whole point of life, no? To keep being shaped by what challenges us.

AI culture tends to flatten this difference. It treats all friction as waste, something to remove, automate, or skip. But sometimes what looks like inefficiency from the outside is actually where growth, skill, and insight are quietly forming.

Protecting the Inefficient Self

None of this happened by accident.

This rush toward endless optimization is being sold to us. It’s the marketing engine of the current AI gold rush. Every headline, every launch, promising to save time, to make us better, faster, more productive.

Don’t get me wrong again, there are a lot of genuinely useful, efficient tools out there. I’ll be among the ones exploring those use cases and even building some myself. But beneath all the excitement, there’s still the same old incentive: profit at all cost. The faster we move, the more we produce, the more we stay dependent on tools built to keep us producing.

This whole engineered urgency is a race none of us agreed to run.

So In this new era, we need to protect friction where it belongs, to be intentional about what we keep slow. I think we can do that through boundaries, little rituals, and the deliberate choice to leave some things manual.

We already live in a dopamine-driven culture, so we want to stay away from this automation-meets-convenience combo. Trust me, we don’t want that smoke.

1. Boundaries — Decide what deserves speed.

Not everything should be optimized, and not every moment deserves a shortcut.

Let projects breathe. Let ideas simmer. Sometimes the work needs time to surprise you.

Set boundaries between building and being. If we don’t, the tools will ultimately decide for us.

2. Rituals — Anchor yourself in slow repetition.

Slowness doesn’t have to mean doing less; it means being present when you do things.

That could be writing something by hand instead of prompting a model, or reading a full book instead of a summary.

Books! Yes, let’s read more books!

These rituals should remind us that attention is a skill, one that only sharpens through practice.

3. Manual Practices — Keep a few things un-automated.

We should micro-dose on discomfort and suffering daily. Keep a few things manual, even when it’s tempting not to.

Hand-wash your dishes even if there’s a dishwasher right there. Write without auto-correct. Actually memorize someone’s number again.

Count your daily steps out loud. Manually calculate your taxes using an abacus. Manually refresh web pages by retyping the URL every time.

OK now i’m tripping, but you get the point!

I once read that Russ (the artist) said he only goes to the studio to record, not to come up with ideas. The ideas show up throughout the day, when he’s doing completely unrelated things.

That stuck with me.

It’s a reminder that creativity often happens in the background, when your brain finally has the space to wander.

We think we need to be “on” all the time, but sometimes the best thing you can do for your work is to step away from it.

That’s what all this friction and slowness protect, the invisible work happening underneath, the stuff you can’t force.