⚡ AI Is Making Us Faster. It's Also Quietly Burning Us Out in a New Way.
We talk a lot about the time AI saves. We don't talk nearly enough about what that speed is doing to our decision-making capacity. Here's what's actually happening for a lot of people who use AI seriously in their work: AI handles more of the execution, which means more decisions flow back to the human. Not fewer. More. Faster drafts mean more reviewing. Faster research means more evaluating. Faster output generation means more judgment calls about what to keep, what to cut, and what to redo. The bottleneck didn't disappear. It moved. And when decision volume goes up, something eventually gives. For most people, it's the quality of the decisions that matter most. ------------- Context ------------- Decision fatigue is not a new concept. The basic finding from decades of research is straightforward: the quality of human judgment declines as the number of decisions made in a day increases. Early in the day, with cognitive resources intact, complex decisions get better analysis, more nuance, more careful weighing of tradeoffs. Late in the day, after dozens of smaller decisions have accumulated, the brain defaults to simpler heuristics, or avoids deciding altogether. What AI has done is dramatically increase the rate at which decisions reach the human. It has not reduced the number of decisions that need to be made. It has just compressed the time between them. Before AI, the writing process had natural pacing built in. Drafting required thinking. Thinking created space. The work moved at the speed of composition. Now, a capable model can produce a draft in ninety seconds. The human's job is to evaluate it. Then improve it. Then evaluate the improvement. Then decide whether to send it or iterate more. Five decisions in the time it used to take to finish a first paragraph. At small scale, this is genuinely faster. But at the scale most people operate, with dozens of tasks, many AI-assisted, the decision volume compounds. And by mid-afternoon, the cognitive resources available for the judgment calls that actually matter have already been spent on a hundred smaller ones.