The AI Busyness Paradox

We have always designed technology to give us our time back—to reduce the work and energy required to produce an outcome. This always went back to the simplest idea of work: how much energy do I need to expend to achieve the same result—to move an object the same distance? Think of a bicycle. With the same effort, you travel further than you would on foot. The work hasn’t disappeared, but the cost of it has dropped. What we often call “productivity” is really a reduction in the energy price of outcomes.

Digital technology does something similar for modern life. It removes much of the administrative burden—the attentional and cognitive work needed to produce results—and, in doing so, transforms both the amount of time and energy required, and the way that time and energy are spent. Think back to how much of life used to be taken up by small, repetitive tasks: filing, typing, scheduling, coordinating. We had secretaries. Then most of us didn’t, so we became our own secretaries—because you and your laptop could do, in a fraction of the time, what a person once did.

With AI, we are again transforming our work—and, in doing so, our relationship to time. In theory, this should give us more than just faster output; it should give us back time itself: time for hobbies, family, sport, interests, art—time to live out the life and pursue the projects we always told ourselves we would do if we “just had more time.” I’m the perfect example. I tell myself I’ll finally seriously pick up the piano—or the guitar, or the violin— again. Or that I’ll return to underwater photography. Or throw myself back into dog training—those things I was good at, that I enjoyed. And yet I’m drawn back into the next project. Work. Even when I deliberately free up time, and with technology have that much more time available to me, I still seem—if I’m not careful—to slip back down that slope of picking up tasks and projects that are not truly meaningful. 

With all this time supposedly being given back to me, I don’t suffice to complete the same workload, but in all my infinite wisdom, I fill it with more work. Rather than stepping back into the life we imagined we'd lead if we had more time, we expand our working capacity to meet the new limits of efficiency. This is the paradox of busyness: when efficiency increases, work does not shrink— because we keep adding to it. The question, for me, is why we do this? What does this disclose about us as humans? Do we genuinely need the extra work? Does it bring proportional value? Or have we become wired to equate busyness with worth, progress, or safety—sliding into overcommitting ourselves on autopilot? It is not a question of whether technology and AI has given us our time back, because in a way, it has. Is it about how, within all this space it has opened up, what we are doing with that time?

In our newfound time, is there not an invitation to become more deliberate?

Time isn't neutral

Time matters because it is never neutral. The way we live in time affects how life feels from the inside. It shapes our mood, our sense of self, and our experience of meaning. Conversely, the way we feel also alters how time seems to move. A rushed life feels fundamentally different from a spacious one. Fragmented days—constantly interrupted, constantly moving from task to task—can begin to feel less like living and more like getting through life. Perhaps it feels panicked, as though you’re grabbing at straws, spreading yourself so thin that you can’t gather yourself back together.

This begs the question of how much of what we call “productivity” is actually impulsive, unintentional busyness? And if so, why? What happens when time is experienced as something to get through rather than something to inhabit? Why do we so quickly slip into trying to conquer time, adding tasks to an already never-ending pile?

And yes—I’m well aware that this discloses something about me.

4 possibilities as to why

When I put my mind to it, I keep circling around four possibilities as to why we keep slipping into these patterns.

Learned habit

Are we so habituated to being busy that we maintain our level of busyness even when we no longer need to? We become so well trained to wake up and move through a daily checklist of chores and tasks that simply sitting with time can feel wrong. Boredom becomes unfamiliar—almost unpractised. Have we forgotten how to stop and ask why we move through life the way we do?

Measure of value

Have we come to equate the number of hours we work with our value? Do we assume that the more output we produce, the more we are worth—that it signals greater success—even when it adds nothing genuinely meaningful? And if that’s the case, how do we resist it? It’s one thing to intentionally increase output in a way that matters—when there is a real need for more of something, or a sense of fulfilment in tackling a challenge creatively. But there is something a bit objectifying about measuring ourselves by our busyness. You hear it all the time: the humble tired brag, the casual declaration of how busy someone is, as if it's a mark of honor. The near-collapse becomes a badge of honour, as though being run down is proof of how hard one has been working.

Avoidance of our own minds

When was the last time you went to the toilet without your phone? Or woke up and didn’t immediately check it? With stimulus always at our disposal, we’ve become unaccustomed to sitting with our own thoughts. And that begs the question: how intentionally are we actually living? Is some of this excess busyness a form of avoidance—an easy way not to confront what’s happening in our own minds? If we’re busy because we’ve forgotten how to just be, then it becomes problematic. We fill our newly found time with more doing and, in the process, neglect the things that actually matter. How well do we really come to know ourselves—not through pop-psychology explanations online, but through direct experience: our own patterns, our own desires, our own values? And if we did, how much easier would it become to focus on what truly matters, instead of whatever is simply loudest, fastest, or most immediately available?

Anxiety of redundancy

We’re living in an age where, through our own technology, we are steadily making ourselves redundant. And the question is: what then? The heart of the problem, is one of meaning, but existence and survival—what actually gives our lives a sense of purpose? The fact that we already fill our time with busyness suggests that our roles and outputs do provide meaning, even if only implicitly. For most of human history, going about one’s day to provide—for oneself, for family, for community—was life. Survival was life. Work and meaning were largely intertwined. But now, as technology renders more and more roles—and even our means of providing—redundant, what is left? Do we push harder because we feel compelled to produce as much as possible, hoping to outrun the future? Or is that effort itself a way of warding off a deeper anxiety? And if not—then what? Do we fall into despair? When people genuinely lose the ability to provide—through job loss that leaves families without income—what happens to meaning then? What is survival going to look like?

AI, Time, and Intentionality

The point I’m getting at is that perhaps what’s really been lost is a genuine, lived intentionality. Are we choosing how to live, or are we simply reacting to our own anxieties? There’s a difference between doing something and actually meaning it—between activity and intention. You can be busy all day and never once stop to ask whether this is how you want to be spending your life. Our current age of AI sharpens this question because it removes necessity as an excuse. When things take less time, the question becomes unavoidable: why am I filling the rest of it this way? In my view—drawn from my own experience—much of what fills our days isn’t chosen in any deep sense. It’s anxious, reactive, impulsive; quick-footed. And when we’re constantly being pulled in all directions, our ability to maintain focus is eroded—and with it, our ability to author our lives deliberately and with conviction.