Every product pitch, every investor deck, every LinkedIn post chants the same thing. Get stuff done faster, become more efficient, automate, optimize, and accelerate with AI. And I get it. I really do. I build. I design. I use these tools every day.
But lately, a question keeps nagging at me, one I can’t seem to shake: Faster for whom? And toward what?
If we zoom out far enough, the whole AI rat race starts to look a little strange. We’re building tools to help us move quicker, so we can serve other humans quicker, who are also using tools to serve us quicker. Everyone is running. And nobody has paused long enough to ask why in the most authentic manner. It has always been about superficial, time-bound reasons, such as gaining an edge, becoming more valuable, and making more money in the process.
It feels like the world is ending tomorrow and we’re racing against an invisible clock. And it’s that “pause” — the one nobody’s really talking about — that might be the most important thing we’re losing.
What confusion actually did for us
Here’s what I mean. When I was younger, learning something meant wrestling with it. You’d read a few pages, not understand them, go back, draw little diagrams in the margins, ask someone, sit with the confusion for a while. That confusion didn’t feel like a bug. It was the process. Sometimes you’d not find the answer immediately when you’re curious, but the answers appeared serendipitously when you least expected. And it made the eventual “aha” feel like something you’d actually earned. The friction shaped you. It built intuition.
Now, with AI, that friction is optional. And most of us, myself included some days, are quietly choosing to remove it because it’s easier to do so.
It’s true that AI adds perspective, generates angles we wouldn’t have considered, drafts, summarizes, predicts, builds, designs, and makes decisions on our behalf. It’s like an extra layer of intelligence woven into our daily thinking. And that’s genuinely powerful and I’m not here to argue otherwise.
But in a world that’s already hyper-stimulated, I keep wondering what we’re quietly trading away.
Boredom isn’t empty. It’s fertile.
Think about the way we live right now. We’ve got a phone that never leaves our hand, social feeds designed to hijack our attention, streaming platforms that auto-play the next episode before we can sit with the one we just watched, a smartwatch tapping our wrist with tiny urgencies we feel obligated to obey. And probably even more ways to keep us contained within a stimulated bubble that fights the very concept of “emptiness.”
But here’s the thing about that emptiness — ideas come in quiet gaps, insights surface when there are no inputs, and self-awareness grows when there’s nothing distracting us from ourselves. When we eliminate it, we also eliminate the space where original thought quietly forms.
And now add AI to this already accelerated world.
Work becomes a checklist. Life becomes a checklist. Even learning becomes a checklist. And somewhere in all that relentless optimization, presence slips right through our fingers.
The irony that actually stings
Which brings me to the part I find genuinely unsettling. We are building some of the most intelligent systems humanity has ever created, while slowly outsourcing our own depth.
If every answer is instantly generated, what happens to curiosity?
If every blank space is immediately filled, what happens to reflection?
If everything becomes instant, what happens to patience?
Being human isn’t just about executing what we already know, faster. It’s about becoming. It’s about wrestling with ambiguity. It’s about feeling stuck and staying there long enough to discover something we didn’t expect.
AI can absolutely enhance us. But if we’re not careful about the relationship we’re building with it, it can quietly numb us too.
And maybe the problem isn’t AI at all?
Maybe it’s our relationship with speed — that manufactured urgency. Maybe it’s our fear of stillness. Our deep discomfort with not knowing. Our addiction to constant stimulation, which was already a problem before AI handed us another lever.
So I’m not suggesting we reject these tools. I’m suggesting we actively reclaim slowness. To intentionally leave some problems unsolved for a while, write without assistance sometimes, sit without input, and be bored without immediately escaping it.
Because in those quiet, unoptimized spaces, the ones we keep aggressively filling, something deeply human still lives.
And I’m genuinely not sure we can afford to lose that.
Akkshaya Varkhedi 