If you spend your time trying to control everything, you won’t get a chance to see where life wants to take you.’ I heard this line on Sullivan’s Crossing, and I was struck by how profound it was. The show follows Maggie, a neurosurgeon whose carefully built life falls apart after a scandal. She returns to her hometown in a village. The prestigious career is gone. In its place: a slower rhythm she didn’t choose.
Watching her, I found myself thinking that the rest of us are being pushed in exactly the opposite direction.
Artificial intelligence has changed not only how we work, but how fast we’re expected to deliver. What once needed a team working for days can be done by a single person, within hours.
In software engineering, the best engineers today aren’t valued only for the code they write, but for how well they direct AI, question its output, and make sound calls. Experienced engineers adapt well. Years of judgement travel with them into this new way of working. Younger engineers are on shakier ground. Trial and error used to be the teacher. The slow grind of getting something wrong, then figuring out why, built their instincts. Now the machine gets there first. A structure handed over before the foundation’s been laid
The same pattern shows up everywhere. Companies need fewer interns because AI has already done the preliminary work. Consultants, analysts, designers: all of us are expected to produce more, faster, with less.
Nowhere is this more visible than on LinkedIn. Scroll your feed and you’ll notice that all the posts increasingly sound like they were written by the same person. The tools that help us write, also sand down the quirks that make our voices ours. Efficiency, it turns out, comes with a hidden cost.
This constant acceleration is exhausting. We’re all working harder, trying to keep pace with something that never needs to rest. We evolved for seasons. For pauses. For recovery. We did not evolve for this kind of speed. The strain shows up quietly: a restless mind, a shrinking attention span, the inability to sit with one thought without reaching for the next.
Opting out isn’t realistic. AI is here to stay, and learning to use it well is part of staying relevant. But what we should guard against is, handing it our every waking moment. The only antidote is slow, intentional living. Cultivate it. Hone it. Practise it, like a survival skill.
It can be as simple as a walk without your phone, writing in a journal with a fountain pen instead of typing or cooking a traditional meal from a handwritten recipe book.
It can also mean disappearing for a few days, which is exactly what I plan to do. As I write this, I’m packing for a trek through the Himalayas, where there’s simply no mobile signal and no motorable roads. I’m already craving that silence far more than I can explain.
Maggie Sullivan had to lose almost everything before she learnt to slow down. Most of us won’t need life to be that unkind to teach us the same thing. We just need to loosen our grip often enough to remember: Efficiency helps us make a living. Presence is what helps us make a life.