The Efficiency Trap: What Are We Actually Doing With All This Time AI Is Supposedly Saving Us?

So AI is here to free up our time. Helping make us more efficient. Letting us focus on what 'really matters'.

And yet, somehow, with the uptake of AI in 2025, we're all feeling more exhausted than ever.

Many of us are entering 2026 with an exhaustion hangover.

What's going on?

We've fallen into what Nassim Taleb calls the 'efficiency trap'. We've spent decades optimising everything for predictable conditions. Think of it like building Formula One race cars when what we actually need are vehicles that can handle country roads full of potholes.

Because the future is uncertain and the road ahead is a bumpy one.

We've designed systems that run beautifully when everything goes according to plan, but collapse the moment reality shows up with different ideas.

Now it seems AI is turbocharging this productivity madness.

Where This Madness Actually Comes From

Before we blame AI for our collective burnout, we need to understand the underlying issue it's accelerating: achievement syndrome.

Writer and researcher Michael Simmons named this pattern brilliantly. Achievement syndrome is when external markers of success hollow out the internal experience that made our work worth doing in the first place. We're no longer building the thing. We're building the identity of someone who builds the thing.

To be clear, this isn't burnout. It's what happens before burnout, when success becomes a performance and our lives turn into résumés. It's the cultural operating system that spreads through schools, workplaces, parenting norms, startup memes and productivity podcasts. It rewards the behaviours that burn us out.

In Japan, they call it karoshi: death by overwork. In the West, we call it 'drive'.

How We Got Here: The Five-Stage Slide

Achievement syndrome doesn't arrive like a thunderclap. It builds slowly, layer by layer, until one day we can't feel the current anymore. Here's how it sneaks up on you:

Stage 1: Early Programming

It starts innocently. We get praised for being good. Smart. Responsible. We begin to learn that love has terms and that value is earned. Gold stars, report cards, badges, trophies. Each one is laying a tiny brick in our identity. The message we can is that if we're exceptional we'll be safe. If we're impressive, we'll belong.

I've reflected on how this shows up in my own life. My parents divorced when I was 7 and I was living with a very hard working single mom. I didn't get the validation I needed at home, so I learned very quickly that by being smart, funny and polite would win the affection of my teacher's, peers and friend's parents. The praise I got felt great, so I kept doing it.

Stage 2: Identity Fusion

We double down and become 'the achievers'. We do it, because it works. We get noticed, promoted and celebrated. Until eventually the person and the performance become indistinguishable. We're not just doing well, we've become our output.

I continued to seek validation through my career by trying to be the best. I hit every KPI I was given, so much so that one contractor role had become a full-time role which was created for me.

Stage 3: Optimisation Overdrive

The hustle kicks in full steam head. We do things like schedule in specific time for friends. We try to hack our morning routines. Some of us join the 5am club. Every moment becomes an opportunity to get ahead. It's not that we don't care. It's that we've actually forgotten how to care without producing something.

As an entrepreneur there's always more that we can be doing, achieving, creating. I landed a gig with McKinsey, ran my own conference, invited two of my heroes to Australia from the US to run 3-day intensives that are normally run at Stanford. I kept doing more and more yet never actually took stock of what I'd achieved. It's like what I was creating didn't even matter, I was just focusing on the next thing to do. As someone being in the business of serious play, I became far too serious and a lot less playful.

I came across the concept of success amnesia. It's basically when you achieve something like write a book, land a big client, pull off something you've been working towards for months and then... nothing. It doesn't really land. You don't feel proud. You just move straight on to the next thing.

It's like your brain has a faulty filing system. Failures get archived in high-definition and wins barely register before they're deleted to make room for whatever's next on the to-do list.

This hits entrepreneurs, performers and people with ADHD particularly hard. We're constantly fixating on what went wrong or what needs to happen next, never stopping long enough to actually clock what we've just accomplished. Which means our confidence tanks, imposter syndrome sets in and we end up in this relentless hustle loop where nothing ever feels like enough. Where we never feel like enough.

You just keep running, but you never actually feel like you're getting anywhere. Because you've forgotten everywhere you've already been.

Stage 4: The Diminishing Curve

And so, the more we succeed, the less it lands. The goals get bigger, but the satisfaction shrinks. We start wondering, 'Wait...is this it?' Our Sleep suffers. Relationships slowly erode.

Our smiles in group photos don't quite reach our eyes.

Stage 5: The Break

Then there is a breaking point. We can feel numb or have a full on breakdown. Maybe it's the slow ache of not recognising ourselves anymore, where we can't remember the last time we were in our body or felt real joy. This is the crisis point, the threshold moment where we either keep hustling...or begin to wake the f*ck up.

If we do keep hustling, what happens? We BURN OUT.

The Efficiency Trap: Or How AI Turbocharges Our Dysfunction

The cruel joke is that every efficiency gain just raises the bar. AI writes your emails faster? Great, now you can send 500 instead of 50. It drafts your reports in minutes? Wonderful, here are ten more projects. Are we using time we save to actually live, create, innovate or question? It seems instead we're using it to cram in more productivity metrics, more optimisation and more performance theatre.

What We're Actually Losing

Achievement syndrome doesn't just exhaust us, it totally fragments us. It's a full-body, whole-life hijack that changes how we relate, rest and breathe.

Relationally: We're physically present but mentally elsewhere. Our conversations get clipped. We show up to dinner but forget how we arrived. The people we love feel like background tabs in browsers we never close. Connection starts to feel...inconvenient.

Somatically: We override our bodies for long enough and they start to whisper, 'Hey, this doesn't feel too good'. Then they start to shout, 'Hello! We're f*cked!' Sleep becomes a distant memory. Our shoulders stay tense. Our jaws stay tight. It's like our head is a balloon on a string, completely detached from our bodies. Total and utter disembodiment.

Emotionally: We still produce and perform. We still hit the metrics and KPIs (which actually stands for 'killing people's imagination'). But joy? Wonder? Flow? They're rare. Our emotional ranges narrow to two gears where we're either experiencing low-grade anxiety or flatline fatigue. Even success feels totally anticlimactic.

Existentially: We've delayed meaning for so long, we forget what it feels like. We say, 'After this project...' or 'Once we reach that next level...' But the needle keeps moving. We're not sure what we'd even do with free time, because unstructured space feels threatening and uncomfortable.

Depression and anxiety stemming from work-related stress cost the global economy $1 trillion annually in lost productivity.¹ But beyond the calculable economic costs lie the incalculable human ones where dreams are deferred, relationships are fractured and joy is forgotten.

The Stuff That Actually Matters

What we throw away in the pursuit of productivity is our capacity to play, experiment and be the adaptive miracles that we are rather than efficient machines.

We stopped building cubby houses and started building résumés. We learned that play was no way to get ahead in life.

But our biology never got that memo.

What we actually need isn't more efficiency. What we actually need isn't more efficiency. It's what the scientists figured out during COVID when they stopped hoarding data and started collaborating: collaboration and collective intelligence that emerges when we remove institutional barriers and work together differently. Vaccine development got compressed from 10–15 years into 10 months, not because they worked harder, but because they worked together differently².

So What Should We Actually Do With the Time?

So what should we be doing with the time AI gives us? Not filling it with more tasks or optimising ourselves into oblivion. Maybe we should be remembering what we're actually optimised for – our evolutionary intelligence, capacity to adapt and play with uncertainty rather than trying to eliminate it.

Here's what we could be doing with this spare capacity:

• Trying to solve bigger problems.

• Fixing what is broken.

• Finding ways to connect and engage our people.

• Learning a new skill.

• Actually playing and not the gamified productivity kind, but the genuine messing around kind.

• Building relationships that aren't transactional.

• Experimenting without needing a measurable outcome.

• Resting without feeling guilty about it.

• Asking 'what if?' instead of 'what's next?'

• Reconnecting with the parts of ourselves that aren't useful or impressive.

The real question isn't whether AI will make us more productive. It's whether we'll use it to become more human or continue being productivity machines.

If this resonated, you'll probably want to read Full Stack Human, the book I wrote with Tāne Hunter about how to stop optimising yourself into oblivion and start actually being human again.

Preorder you copy here for 25% off: https://amzn.to/47QOUFo

Footnote:

¹ World Health Organization. (2023). Mental Health at Work. WHO Press.

² Nature Editorial. (2020). COVID-19 Vaccine Development: A Shot in the Arm. Nature, 586(7831), 354–355.