Shortcut culture
Summer travel season is nearly upon us. And if, like me, you lack any sense of direction, Google Maps can be a real life saver, especially when exploring a holiday destination on foot.
For all its many advantages, the app has one serious flaw. If you fail to pay attention to its route settings, it will guide you on some truly adventurous side streets, alleyways, and barely visible foot paths, winding through neighborhoods that range from the desirable to the downright desolate and dangerous.
To be sure, shortcuts are a welcome alternative when time is of the essence, or when the hustle and bustle of tourist hubs and main transit arteries is one stimulus too many. Choosing a faster, easier, or more direct route should not, however, become the default setting for work and life in the 21st century, no matter how insistently corporations push us into that direction.
The allure of quick gains and instant rewards earned with relatively little effort can be difficult to resist. Take Ozempic if you want to drop weight rapidly. Ask Claude if you need to brainstorm, write, code, or analyze promptly. Complete a skill badge from a tech monopolist if you want to pad your resume overnight.
The issue becomes more complicated when we remember that weight loss drugs, generative AI, and micro-credentials were not originally intended to help people skip steps. They were designed for people with legitimate health, pattern recognition, and upskilling needs.
What is needed is a new cultural framework for meaning and reward.
Granted, every human innovation carries the potential for abuse and exploitation. Think only of how cheaply manufactured drones have evolved from tools for recreational photography, used to capture the perfect wedding group shot, to lethal weapons in military theaters the world over.
But this isn’t a story about good intentions gone awry. This is about slowing down the victory march of the microwave mentality and stopping the optimization wave from consuming itself and our humanity in the process.
There needs to be room for learning, thinking, and human development along less mechanistic lines. And here’s why.
The longevity paradox
The average life expectancy has more than doubled in many regions across the globe since the start of the 20th century. People not only live longer and healthier lives, they also work longer, with average retirement ages steadily rising. All signs point to the conclusion that the scenic route, not the shortcut, should now be in style.
Yet as our lives expand, attention spans contract. Deeper forms and pursuits of meaning are on the decline. Public trust in experts who have carefully honed their skills over years and decades continues to erode.
Silicon Valley’s ‘tech bros’ may admire the timeless craftmanship of J.R.R. Tolkien’s immortal elves. Yet the tools they unleash upon the world often undermine the journey of mastery and self-improvement that characterizes humanity at its best, turning their customers into, well, corrupted elves, better known as orcs.
Through the Bildungsroman, the coming-of-age story, literature offers a powerful reminder that personal growth unfolds gradually over time, forged by setbacks as well as efforts to overcome them. Now picture the same genre without the arduous path toward maturity. Hardly a page turner, if you ask me.
By filling our expanding lives with shorter, shallower uses of time, we ironically make ourselves more vulnerable to being overtaken by AI platforms that excel at repetitive and high-volume tasks. In so doing, we surrender the very advantages – depth, sustained effort, and empathy – that machines struggle to replicate.
A new social contract
From the Industrial Revolution to the current AI craze, history offers plenty of examples of productivity gains that did not translate into more free time or time for more meaningful pursuits for all but a privileged few.
Still, pinning our shortcomings solely on technology is as unfair as it is unwarranted. Technology amplifies and mimics human behaviour; it does not create it. Clearly what is needed is a new cultural framework for meaning and reward.
The belief passed down by previous generations that a good education and hard work will inexorably lead to a life of comfort, possibly even abundance, has not worked out for many born after 1981. For many Millennials and the generations that followed, the contract was broken before they ever had a chance to sign it or read the fine print.
With big promises unfulfilled and hard-earned skills rapidly becoming obsolete, it is not difficult to understand why many young people succumb to the siren calls of populist politics, speculative investment opportunities, dangerous health hacks, or AI plagiarism. Why work hard and better oneself when reward and redemption seem attainable without either? Or the more likely scenario, why work hard and better oneself when others are reaping the benefits in one’s stead?
Reversing this erosion of faith in human(e) progress and decency may require more than better policies and guardrails. It demands a new social contract. Ideally one that decouples human worth from economic output everywhere except in domains where participation is genuinely voluntary, restores belief in the powers of prolonged engagement and experimentation, and defines societal and planetary contributions in ways that resist the inanimate logic of efficiency.
Because contrary to what your favourite navigation app and current gas prices might suggest, some destinations are only worth reaching if it took the long way to get there.
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