I went into the July 4th weekend exhausted. It was the culmination of travel, client deadlines, multiple parallel initiatives. I have also been quiet here on LinkedIn. I published and then deleted posts because they seemed hollow, bereft of personality: as if written by a competent but dull doppelganger.
I know I am not the only one who is feeling this way.
There is a link between the exhaustion and the ennui.
AI made us a seductive promise. Unlimited intelligence on tap. Instead, it has increased the amount of drudgery. Research from ActivTrak shows that early AI adopters spent more time in email and chat apps and less time on focused work.
David Brooks, writing in The Atlantic, talks about the broader impact of AI in “There Are Three Types of AI Users”. He categorizes them into: Productive Passengers, who ride along with whatever the model says; Mental Marathoners, who use AI to expand their thinking rather than replace it; and Reluctant Optimizers, who see the hollowing-out risk clearly, resolve not to follow the AI blindly, and yet get pulled in anyway by deadlines and inbox pressure. Most of us fall into this bucket.
Brooks’ solution is for more of us to become Mental Marathoners, building endurance by doing difficult things the hard way. He is more optimistic than I am.
Most day-to-day work is a series of sprints, not a single marathon. There are competitive dynamics in play. I could refuse to use AI, but a consultant at a competing firm could use a frontier model to put together a flashy proposal while I am still getting oriented with the domain. Engineers are now incentivized to “Token-max”, deferring long-term cognitive decline to tomorrow.
Most executives will gladly take the short-term gains from AI, and not worry about long-term de-skilling.
So where do we land? Brooks says that “When intelligence is plentiful, volition is valuable.”
We could lean into true agency. We could build trusted client relationships where velocity today can be traded for a deeper, more productive engagement tomorrow.
The truth is that I don’t know how it will play out. I am caught between my ambition and the competitive dynamics on one hand, and my worry about the long-term viability of my skills, and my teams’, on the other.
I suspect you are too.
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(Postscript – written a couple of days after this draft).
A recent survey published in Lenny’s Newsletter on the impact of AI (see links in comments) show that burnout and ambivalence about AI are everywhere. This is a serious issue that leaders must be prepared to face and should consider addressing now before it blows up.