In the Name of Efficiency

The loud chorus of boos that met former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s commencement speech (in which he urged University of Arizona graduates to embrace an AI-shaped future) is a protest against a culture that has made efficiency its highest value, directly addressing the central tension of this article. 

WHEN BREAKFAST WAS HARD

A hundred years ago, breakfast took work.

Before the sun rose, someone had already stepped into the cold. Boots were crunching against frost, hands were stiff, and breath was visible. Eggs weren’t retrieved from a carton but gathered from a coop. Milk didn’t come pasteurized in a jug but warm from the cow, requiring care, timing, and trust. Bread wasn’t pre-sliced or sealed for shelf life; it was kneaded, proofed, and baked,its success dependent on instinct as much as instruction.

Nothing about the process was efficient.

Transportation was no different. A trip across town meant time, real time. Roads were inconsistent, vehicles unreliable, and distance was something you felt in your body. Journeys required planning, patience, and often, endurance. Communication followed the same rhythm. Letters were written slowly, thoughtfully, and sent with the understanding that a response would take days, sometimes weeks. Conversations had weight because they had cost.

Life, by modern standards, was full of friction.

And yet, something else was present too, something harder to measure.

Attention. Craft. Presence.

QUICK SERVICE WORLD

Today, we have eliminated much of that friction.

Food arrives in minutes. Transportation is optimized by algorithms. Communication is instantaneous, constant, and nearly effortless. We have engineered a world where time is compressed, choices are simplified, and effort is minimized. Efficiency has become one of our highest values, so much so that we rarely question it.

But efficiency is not neutral.

Every gain in speed carries a corresponding loss, even if subtle.

When food becomes efficient, it often becomes detached from land, from process, from gratitude. When transportation becomes efficient, we lose the sense of distance, of journey, of anticipation. When communication becomes efficient, we trade depth for immediacy, reflection for reaction.

In the name of efficiency, we have removed the “in-between.”

And it is often in the in-between where meaning lives.

We are now standing at the edge of another transformation, the dawn of the AI age.

The promise is clear. It includes faster decisions, automated creativity, reduced labor, and optimized outcomes. Entire categories of work will become more efficient, perhaps radically so. The friction that once defined thinking, making, and building will continue to dissolve.

And the temptation will be the same as it has always been:

If we can make something more efficient, we should.

But this is where we must be careful.

Because not everything that can be optimized should be.

EMBRACING FRICTION

Consider the act of writing.

There is a version of writing that is purely efficient. It is generate, refine, publish. The output is clean, coherent, and quick. But there is another version, one that wrestles. One that requires sitting with incomplete thoughts, revisiting sentences, questioning assumptions, and enduring the discomfort of not knowing exactly what you’re trying to say.

The first produces content.

The second produces clarity.

And clarity rarely comes efficiently.

Or consider relationships.

Efficiency would suggest we streamline connection. This would mean quick check-ins, short messages, and optimized scheduling. But anyone who has experienced deep friendship or meaningful collaboration knows that these things are built in unstructured time, in conversations that wander, in moments that feel unproductive, in shared experiences that don’t “scale.”

Efficiency can maintain a relationship.

It cannot deepen one.

There is a quiet danger in a culture that worships efficiency. We begin to mistake ease for value.

We assume that if something is slow, it is broken. If something is difficult, it is inefficient. If something requires effort, it is outdated.

But what if some of the most important parts of life are inherently inefficient?

What if struggle is not a problem to solve, but a condition to embrace?

THE SCULPTOR AND THE MACHINE

Imagine a sculptor working on a block of marble.

Each strike of the chisel is deliberate. Imperfect. Sometimes wrong. The sculptor steps back, reassesses, and adjusts. Hours pass. Days pass. The form emerges slowly, not just shaped by the artist’s hand, but by their attention, their patience, their restraint.

Now imagine a machine that can scan the desired form and carve it instantly. Perfect symmetry. Zero error. Complete efficiency.

Both produce a sculpture.

But only one produces a sculptor.

This is the tension we face.

Efficiency is a powerful tool. It can reduce waste, expand access, and unlock new possibilities. But when it becomes the goal rather than the means, it begins to reshape us.

We become less patient. Less attentive. Less willing to endure the very processes that form us.

In the name of efficiency, we risk becoming efficient people, optimized, productive, and increasingly disconnected from the deeper experiences that make life meaningful.

THE RESISTANCE

So what does it look like to resist?

Not to reject efficiency altogether, but to reclaim our agency within it.

It might mean choosing the longer conversation instead of the faster reply. It might mean engaging in work that requires iteration instead of automation. It might mean creating space for boredom, for wandering, for the kind of thinking that cannot be rushed. It might mean asking a simple but radical question.

What is worth doing inefficiently?

The future will not lack efficiency.

What it may lack is people willing to slow down enough to remember why anything mattered in the first place.

And that is not a problem technology can solve.

It’s a choice we have to make.

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