The Great Time-Saving Lie

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You are likely saving massive amounts of time each day—in theory, that is. If you are a knowledge worker, you may have been marshalling the help of AI to research, summarise, analyse, and write stuff for a while. ChatGPT may shave hours, perhaps weeks' or even months' worth of labour time, off your working day regularly.

And yet you don’t leave work earlier. You are not on the beach, catching the afternoon sun. You are not in the garden contemplating the inner life of earthworms. You are not sipping wine with friends at 3 p.m., nor are you trying out recipes for miniature wasabi-and-prawn-filled ravioli.

It is also likely that, contrary to common belief, you are not concentrating on higher-level tasks and using your creativity more during your working hours since ChatGPT has popped up on our screens. Nor is it likely that you are suddenly taking time to optimise your systems and processes, bond more deeply with coworkers, or research potential market challenges for your services in 2035.

I suspect that instead, you are simply racing harder, working the same hours, or even longer, to respond to ever faster incoming demands. Perhaps you are vaguely wondering where all your saved time is going.

Welcome to the "lost saved time" paradox.

The Acceleration Trap

Throughout history, our technological innovations have promised us freedom from effort as well as more leisure time and comfort in our lives. Each new invention—from the washing machine to generative AI—is launched on the promise that it will save us time and energy and gain back more life. And yet, the more time tech "saves" us, the less we seem to have. Our frazzled minds and exhausted bodies know this to be true. What is going on?

Consider email. Invented to shorten the distance between sending and receiving messages, simply managing to stay on top of our overflowing inboxes has now become a major part of our day jobs. Cars were meant to cut travel time, but today, we spend more time than ever on blocked inner-city roads and jammed motorways, or on ever longer commutes to ever more distant workplaces. Vacuum cleaners were designed to ease the burden of domestic labour, and yet they have instead raised cleanliness standards to such an extent that we spend as much time cleaning as we did in the age of pig-bristle brooms and willow carpet beaters.

And now AI—supposedly the crown jewel of all time-saving efficiency tech—is digesting and reproducing existing knowledge for us in seconds. If we feed it clever questions, it gives us even cleverer answers. But we don’t put our tools down early, calling it a day. We don’t rest more. We don’t have more fun, joy, and connection in our lives as a result. We just feel more stressed and exhausted than ever.

In some ways, that is because we continue to be good Protestants in spirit, not daring to spend even a single minute of our gained time on luxurious leisure moments but unthinkingly reinvesting it into the productivity machine. Good for the captains of capitalism, bad for our mental health. We seem incapable of cashing in our time dividend and exchanging it for leisure. Like brainwashed shareholders, we hang on in there, forever chasing the chimaera of even greater future earnings instead.

The German sociologist Hartmut Rosa argues that our age of acceleration is marked by the dynamics of “frenetic standstill”: Everything moves ever faster, but underneath the surface, nothing truly changes. The deeper power and profit structures remain intact, while our psyches, bodies, and nervous systems become ever more frayed by the frantic attempt to keep up with the speed of our new technologies.

To be clear, I use ChatGPT like many people do. It can do some pretty amazing stuff, and it can save us time on mundane and boring tasks. I’m not a Luddite, nor am I a blinkered nostalgic or a believer in the "the machines are going to master and destroy us" narrative. But I do care deeply about the politics and ethics of time usage. I do believe that time and attention are our most precious goods as human beings, and that both are under serious threat in our current climate.

How we spend our days is how we spend our lives. And I don’t have the impression that most people’s days look particularly good.

Helicopters to the Summit

What is more, even in cases when AI does save us effort, that is not always a good thing. There is a particular emptiness in effortless things. When AI writes our essays or articles or even our new books, they may be technically sound and knowledgeable, but spiritually vacant.

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Why? Because they are devoid of the joyous highs we get from travelling through a valley of blood, sweat, and years of unravelling a knotty problem on an (arduous but satisfying) morning run, or in the shower. They lack the traces of gaining mastery through trial and error. They lack the power of serendipitous insights, which are always the best.

Using AI for creative tasks is like being dropped at the summit by a free helicopter. The view is the same, but we will never enjoy it nearly as much as when we have climbed that mountain ourselves, perhaps having trained months or even years to be able to climb it, and having overcome our fears and doubts and physical pain to make it to the top.

We learn absolutely nothing when we use AI shortcuts. Conversely, it learns a lot from us, of course, and long-term imbalances in learning behaviour are always a problem.

The Real Revolution Isn’t Technological—It Will Be Philosophical

We stand at a pivotal technological and temporal juncture. We can keep spinning the wheel faster and faster, continuing to believe in the old narratives that tell us that sharks that stop moving die, and that the competition will mercilessly out-AI us if we don’t immediately reinvest our saved time.

Or we can pause and ask a very old, urgent question: What is time well spent? What do we want to do with our lifetime? What is it for?

If our answer is “to produce more,” then we will continue to sacrifice meaning, connection, and our health and sanity on the altar of acceleration. But if the answer is “to live more”—to be more in being mode, to feel more, to attend to people and things with more care—then our whole definition of progress must shift.

Imagine workweeks structured around the quality of our care and attention, not the quantity of our activity or the speed of our output. Imagine a society in which a good work-life balance is the new status symbol, and being stressed and exhausted is as frowned upon as smoking and drinking, because we know that the consequences for our health are the same.

What might happen if we became time rebels—maverick revolutionaries who dare to cash in their saved time and use it for pleasure rather than productivity?

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