Easy or effective

I read a tweet this morning that said that there's a kind of mania that you get into when you're running multiple agents in a swarm to accomplish something. You feel the sense that you're getting somewhere. You feel the sense of speed, but in reality, nothing meaningful is getting done.

Two years ago, I was locked in a particularly busy season of life. I found myself out of time, stretched thin, and exhausted. I wanted to push that to its breaking point, so I decided to run the David Goggins 4x4x48 on a treadmill. That protocol, if you're not familiar with it, is to run 4 miles every 4 hours for 48 hours. That's 12 individual 4-mile segments. That's 48 miles, and I did the whole thing on a treadmill.

It's the epitome of going fast but getting nowhere. I had grand ideas for it. I thought I would meditate and pray on a particular person with a particular intention for every yard. A yard is one of those 12 segments. I thought I would use it to contemplatively access something important about how to break out of where I felt stuck, but all I accomplished was exhaustion.

It seems right now the entire world is running a 4x4x48 on a treadmill. Anyone who's experienced the models, anyone who has leaned heavy into reaching for that extra productivity, realizes pretty quick that the models are really good at making you feel like you're going fast when you're going nowhere at all. They can produce a 1,000-word article with a simple 2-second prompt, but often we learn that what's easy isn't valuable. What's fast isn't effective. I learned that on that treadmill.

Around yard 5, I was caught with the question of whether I should continue, stuck between my expectation of myself and wanting to finish for finishing's sake (in the palpable sense of irrationality of doing something that got me nowhere). The market is feeling that right now. The previous binary of heaven or hell has morphed into something else: easy or effective.

Effective work means true creative output. It means doing something that only you can do. It means using your gifts, your wiring, your background, where every wound, every accomplishment, every proclivity and inclination merges into something beautiful into something only you can do, into something that you were made for in that moment. AI, or now, as we call it, SI, blinds us to these unique opportunities. It turns stock analysts into engineers, engineers into biological researchers. It drifts our focus into areas where we have no business applying creative output.

Take writing, for example. I've long enjoyed writing as a practice, something I do to engage my mind, update my wiring, wrestle with beliefs, and incorporate my thinking from the world around me into my values and belief structure. Writing is more about the process than the output, and yet, core to every writer's desire, to every writer's internal drive, is the longing to write well.

Writing well means writing in your voice, with all of its imperfections, rough edges, and unique tells. Those characteristics make what I write unique, and yet those same characteristics are the things that I look to sand out before I publish a finished work. AI produces the appearance of a finished work without the outcome of updated thinking. It produces 48 miles of felt progress without one inch of actual progress.

The mania we are wrestling with as a society is a question of meaning: what is it that we humans do? What is it that we should do? What is it that we ought to do? And unlike my decision at yard 5, you dont have to continue...