The Filthy Necessity of Slowness
It’s like pouring water over a flat rock
Here we are, then. The relentless, exhausting march of modernity, all driven by the simple, bovine belief that faster is always better. A belief so idiotic it ought to come with a warning label and a picture of a melting iceberg.
We’re utterly obsessed with immediacy, aren’t we? We want the answer now. We want the perfectly phrased response instantly. We want the complex, messy tapestry of reality distilled into a three-bullet point summary before the kettle’s even boiled.
And, of course, the AI is gleefully facilitating this dreadful rush toward intellectual shallowness. The machine treats everything in the universe - from understanding the geopolitical ramifications of a minor trade dispute to knowing where I left my bloody reading glasses - as a problem that should be instant. It’s the ultimate enabler for the impatient, under-caffeinated modern bloke.
But some things, you great, hurrying fools, should simply take longer.
Understanding a truly complex problem, the kind that makes your forehead ache and requires you to chew your pen like a nervous badger, needs friction. Building a proper, decent, actually-going-to-last-more-than-a-week relationship requires tedious, slow, repetitive investment of time and tolerance. Learning something properly, not just enough to pass a dreary online quiz, demands grinding through the difficult, unpleasant bits where your brain feels like it’s being squeezed through a mangle.
The problem is that instant learning is shallow learning. It’s like pouring water over a flat rock; it runs right off. You get the quick hit, the immediate gratification, but you miss the deep, sticky context that only comes from staring at a wretched problem until you want to scream. Instant solutions miss the messy, vital bits of nuance, the stuff that actually matters.
And instant output lacks the depth that comes from working through the damn thing yourself, from the messy, frustrating process of writing a terrible first draft that gradually, painfully, morphs into something decent.
You’re trading the investment of time spent for the hollow reward of time saved. You’re swapping genuine, embedded understanding for a brittle veneer of competence. It’s a cognitive disaster of epic proportions, like trying to construct a sturdy brick wall using only chewing gum and a vague sense of optimism.
So, here’s my miserable instruction: Slow down on purpose.
Not for everything, obviously. Don’t start taking a week to pay your gas bill. But for the things that matter, the thinking, the creating, the connecting, force yourself to linger. Fight the urge to hit that ‘Generate’ button. Stare at the blank page a bit longer. Let the frustration build.
Because time spent on those difficult, grinding problems isn’t time wasted; it’s time invested. And when the inevitable, glorious AI apocalypse finally wipes us all out, you’ll want a brain that’s well-invested, not one that’s been operating on a disastrously efficient overdraft for the last decade.