This is the paradox of our time: the very tools designed to free us from labor are trapping us in an endless cycle of escalating work. As our productivity increases, our standards and expectations rise even faster, creating a psychological Jevons Paradox that threatens to consume our humanity in the pursuit of ever-greater output. We become victims of our own efficiency.
The term arrived in 1865 when William Stanley Jevons noticed something peculiar about coal: make it more efficient to use, and people burned more, not less. This paradox has shadowed every technological leap since. Efficiency doesn’t tame our appetites; it whets them. Our innovations become trampolines for our desires.
Traditional economics might predict that AI-boosted productivity would reduce working hours, a four-day weekend for tasks that once took five days. But reality has different plans. We’re witnessing what I call the “labor rebound effect”—productivity doesn’t eliminate work; it transforms it, multiplies it, elevates its complexity. The time saved becomes time reinvested, often with compound interest.
Leisure’s opportunity cost skyrockets. When an hour of work generates what once took days, rest becomes luxury taxed by your own conscience.
Today, I see a psychological version of Jevons Paradox reshaping our relationship with time itself. As our tools amplify each hour’s potential yield, our internal expectations don’t just keep pace, they outrun our capabilities like shadows lengthening at sunset. There’s an exquisite tension between what we can theoretically accomplish and the stubborn limitations of being human. When every hour holds tenfold possibility, rest feels like surrender, like watching gold-threaded potential slip through your fingers into a river.
The anxiety manifesting across industries reveals the central paradox of the 10x future: as our tools enhance our capabilities, they simultaneously deepen our sense of inadequacy. When speaking with founders and creators, a common thread emerges: the fear is no longer about meeting standards, but about optimizing every variable in an increasingly complex equation.
When everyone could theoretically work more hours, everyone eventually had to. The West’s fear that “all our code will be written in Bangalore or Shenzhen” missed the point entirely. What actually happened was more complex: technology democratized software creation globally, creating new categories of work faster than we could name them. The phenomenon fundamentally transformed the nature of work itself, reshaping expectations around output, availability, and the boundaries between work and life. Workers everywhere faced boundless possibilities, and relentless pressure.
The Jevons paradox applies to creative work too: if AI makes everyone a better storyteller, the demand for storytelling does not decrease — it expands into unnamed categories. The question of what genre or format comes next becomes less relevant when the sheer volume of competent output erodes distinction, and much of what gets produced drifts toward mimesis rather than originality.When everyone suddenly gets 10x more powerful, the hard part isn’t doing things—deciding what’s worth doing in the first place. My friend at a high-profile AI startup told me recently that their biggest challenge isn’t training better models, but figuring out which problems these models should address, and how their solutions integrate with human values and needs. In other words, “measuring what matters.“
Impact depth over efficiency. The most thoughtful AI implementations I’ve seen don’t ask “how can we do more?” but “how can we go deeper?”
Intentional constraints. Some of the most interesting creative work happening now involves deliberately limiting AI’s role. An artist I know uses AI for initial concepts but insists on manual execution, embracing the “beautiful mistakes” that emerge from human imperfection. By imposing artificial constraints, she creates work that feels distinctly human. Open-sourcing ideas. Projects that focus on collective flourishing (network building) rather than individual optimization can partially escape the treadmill effect. As technology moat of software decreases, open sourcing software or knowledge that creates positive externality to the surrounding community ended up creating (and eventually capturing) more value than close-sourcing ideas. Redefining success entirely.
In that moment of vulnerability – that beautiful imperfection – the audience leaned in. I felt my chest tighten with recognition. I heard whispers in the crowd afterwards:“That wasn’t my best performance technically, but it felt really real.” That’s the paradox we face: in a world where AI can generate flawless execution, our humanity shines brightest through our limitations, not despite them.
In the Midjourney’s Discord, we see glimpses of this future: artists, developers, and enthusiasts fluidly moving between roles, their enhanced capabilities allowing them to operate as both creators and curators, teachers and students, often simultaneously. The traditional boundaries of profession and practice blur not because they’re being forcibly eroded, but because they’re becoming irrelevant to how value is actually created.
“To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable documentary that details one’s failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for every screening. (…) To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.”
What if the most game-optimal play in the new system is actually to become relentlessly, unapologetically you?
