Who Has the Time?

You get about four thousand weeks.

That’s the entire allotment. Oliver Burkeman ran the numbers in Four Thousand Weeks, sold a mountain of copies, and a meaningful percentage of those readers closed the book, sat quietly with their own mortality, and concluded that the correct response was to start milling their own flour.

Life is short. People are busy. For two centuries this was the opening line of every argument for every labor-saving device ever built. Suddenly, it became a character flaw.

So let me make the unfashionable case. I use AI for everything. Not “for first drafts.” Not “as a starting point that I then heavily revise, because of course the real work is still mine.” Everything. And I’d like to explain why the people composing their objections in longhand are, with enormous sincerity and genuinely lovely penmanship, spending the only resource they cannot get more of.

We have run this exact experiment before

In 1980 the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics looked at the pocket calculator and said, essentially, fine. Use it. A generation of adults responded as though someone had proposed removing the children’s thumbs. Arithmetic would die. Rigor would die. The mind, unexercised, would go soft as a peach in August.

Reader, the mind went soft as a peach in August, and we put a man on Mars anyway. Well. We put a rover there. The point stands.

Hans Rosling gave a TED talk in 2010 about the day his family got a washing machine, and how his grandmother — who had spent her life heating water over a fire — pulled up a chair and watched the entire cycle, front to back, like it was a movie. She wasn’t mourning the loss of a craft. She was watching a machine give her back her afternoons.

Nobody hand-washes a load of laundry for the soul of it.

Fine — somebody does, and they have a Substack, and the essay is called What The Washboard Taught Me About Presence, and it is 3,400 words long, and it took them nine hours, and those nine hours are gone now, and they are not coming back, and the shirt is somehow still damp.

There are also people who won’t use electricity at all. We call them Amish, we admire them profoundly, and we do it from a distance, in a car, on the way somewhere air-conditioned.

Certified human, ten dollars

The resistance has professionalized, which is how you know it’s over.

There is now a badge — Not By AI, tens of thousands of sites, honor system, no audit — that you paste on your work to certify you didn’t get help. There are pledge registries where artists swear off generative tools and link their portfolios. There is a writers’ collective whose entire organizing principle is no AI at all, which is a hell of a value proposition, roughly equivalent to a moving company advertising no trucks. And the Authors Guild will now sell you a seal, ten American dollars, certifying that no machine wrote your book.

Ten dollars. For a sticker. That says you did it the hard way.

My favorite is the startup that certifies human authorship by monitoring your creative process — keystroke telemetry, session recording, the works. To prove you are a free and unassisted mind, you consent to being watched by software the entire time you use it.

My brain connectivity is down and I’ve never felt better

The scientific case against me is a preprint out of the MIT Media Lab, June 2025, and it went off like a grenade. They wired 54 people to an EEG, made them write essays — some with ChatGPT, some with a search engine, some with nothing but the raw meat of their own skull — and found that the ChatGPT group showed the weakest neural connectivity. They called it cognitive debt. LinkedIn called it cognitive collapse, invented a statistic about a 47 percent reduction that the authors never claimed, and rode it for a solid nine months.

Here’s my problem with cognitive debt: it’s a loan, and I’ve read the terms, and there’s no collection date.

A CEO’s neural connectivity while their assistant books the Lisbon flight is also, I’d wager, catastrophically low. We don’t call that debt. We call that delegation, and we pay people two million dollars a year to do it at scale. The entire ladder of human achievement is one long story of people getting worse at something on purpose so they could get good at something else. You cannot start a fire with sticks. Your great-great-grandmother could have done it in the rain, in a skirt, while judging you.

Every generation banks a skill it will never need again. Mine is “writing” this blog post.

Everything means everything

So: everything. My emails, obviously — inbound and outbound, which means on a good day two models are negotiating a meeting time while both humans are outside. My performance reviews. My grocery list, sorted by aisle, by store, because why would I hold a floor plan in my head. Legal correspondence. My birthday message to my mother, in her voice, which she says is the most seen she’s felt in years.

My sister’s wedding toast. Standing ovation. She hasn’t spoken to me since, but that’s unrelated and predates all this.

The condolence notes. And before you get precious about it — what exactly do you think a condolence note is? It is a formal object with a fixed shape whose entire function is to arrive. The grieving do not need your fumbling originality at the worst hour of their life. They need a card, on time, that sounds like a person. Two out of three has always been the industry standard.

(I did have it draft my father’s eulogy. It was good. It was better than good, and I have chosen to make peace with what that means about the two of us.)

The old-fashioned crowd keeps saying the same thing, in slightly different fonts: but you’ll lose something.

Sure. You’ll lose something. You lost something when you stopped walking to the well, and something when you stopped memorizing phone numbers, and something when you stopped knowing which direction north was in a city you’d lived in for a decade.

And in exchange you got Tuesday afternoon.

You’ve got four thousand weeks. You just spent seven minutes on this.

Relax. I didn’t spend any.