I Just Spent Thirty Minutes Writing An Email And I Think That's A Good Thing

October 29, 2024

I was required by my work to take a Udemy course about Microsoft's Co-pilot for Outlook or whatever. I forget. This was a couple months ago. I listened to the whole series of videos while folding and decorating mini zines for a Labor Day party my family was hosting. I thought a lot about labor during that time. Labor, for its own sake, can be a powerful thing. Labor can provide meaning to something that would otherwise be hollow and inhuman.

Back to the training. The training was about how you can use this A.I. tool to make yourself a lot more productive. You can whip up emails at the tap of a button, re-word as needed, and send them off as quickly as is humanly possible. You can also summarize emails so you don't have to slog through someone else's words (which are, presumably, written by A.I.). Everything is faster, and better. A truly optimized, efficient way to function as an employee.

This is a dumb example, because it's literally just stupid, but I have actually been thinking about optimization for a long time. Learning how to write software kind of poisoned my brain. There are always opportunities to make everything better. You can always future-proof more. You can abstract functionality and modularize features. You can systematicize anything. And if you don't, if you're not perfect, you're doing something wrong. I have applied this thinking to all aspects of my life.

Most of my free time is devoted to thinking about the best possible way to spend my free time. If I want to achieve fulfillment in my life, maximize the meaning in my days, I have to do the perfect thing at the perfect time. I have to strike a perfect balance between family, creative endeavors, relaxation, self-care, career development, and every other pillar of what I think is some sort of model of what it means to be a good person. It's suffocating. Part of me really, truly believes that if I just zoom out far enough, and refine the vision and mission for my life to a perfectly-tuned, unimpeachable purpose, and then strategize and execute based on that purpose, I will be... what? I don't know. I guess that depends on my purpose. But I will be good. I will meet the expectations I have for myself. Did I already say it's suffocating? It's suffocating.

So here's my current stance: a complete rejection of all societal measures of success.

I want to decrease my productivity. I want to do things slower and worse. I want to type out every single letter when I'm communicating with another human being. I want to spend a stupid amount of time crafting the exact sentence I want because it's what I want to say. I don't want it to be fast. I don't want it to be optimized. I want it to be personal. I want it to be imperfect. I want to make mistakes. I want the work to be about the work itself. I want to work for the sake of work, not some larger purpose. I want to live entirely within the confines of this one moment, this one gift I have been given.

So I will never use A.I. to write something for me. I don't want to become a middle man between A.I. tools harvesting souls for profit. I would rather just be my stupid human self and be dumb and mess stuff up a lot but then not even worry about it because who actually cares? I want the work to be mine. All the work. And other than that, I don't want to worry so much about it. It's not going to be perfect but it's going to be me. And that's all it can be. like the us army