Intelligent people will go to incredible lengths to be lazy.

There’s a well-known quote from Bill Gates that perfectly sums this up: “I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”

Smart people so detest menial work that they'll spend months working on an app that prevents them from doing one repetitive action.

It’s a silly contradiction, but an important one: Hustle culture teaches us that the answer is just to keep grinding harder and to suck it up, but with AI, we’re all searching for the tiniest inefficiencies in our workflow and finding ways to automate/solve them.

Perhaps it’s a compulsion. Perhaps it’s misguided.

But I’d rather spend months solving a problem for good than getting carpal tunnel syndrome by copy and pasting the same thing every day.

(Spoiler: I also get carpal tunnel syndrome in my elaborate efforts to avoid carpal tunnel syndrome. Life is hard.)