TL; DR
AI did not create shallow thinking or performative engagement—it simply made both faster and easier. Hustle culture and workaholism trained us to value speed, volume, and visible activity over reflection, discernment, and original thought long before AI arrived. From non-comments on social media to bragging about how much we consume, we have confused keeping up with actually understanding. The fix is not rejecting efficiency altogether, but becoming more deliberate about what we read, what we share, and whether we are rewarding real thinking or just the appearance of it. (I also see the irony in writing a TL; DR and key insights for an article about slowing down and absorbing what we consume. The summaries are for AI, not the humans!)
Key Insights
- AI did not invent shallow engagement; it scaled habits that hustle culture already rewarded.
- We have been taught to treat speed as virtue, volume as accomplishment, and visible activity as substance.
- The “non-comment comment” is a symptom of a bigger problem: performative productivity and performative consumption.
- Consuming more information is not the same thing as thinking more deeply about it.
- When everything is optimized for speed, discernment, originality, and trust start to erode.
- In a world full of instant takes and synthetic noise, real judgment and thoughtful perspective become more valuable.
- The better path is not to reject efficiency entirely, but to slow down enough to absorb, question, and form an actual point of view.
Hustle Culture, AI, and the Cost of Shallow Thinking
A couple of months ago, I wrote an article about how AI comments on social media are out of control.
You know what I’m talking about. The comment that summarizes whatever the original poster published, making it clear they used AI and didn’t actually read what they’re commenting on.
It’s technically a comment, in that words were assembled and posted in public, but it contributes absolutely nothing. No opinion. No expansion. No evidence that a human being actually read the thing at all, let alone skimmed it.
And yes, AI has made that kind of engagement easier, faster, and even more irritating.
But in the discussion that followed, Alan Kercinik made a point that has been stuck in my head ever since. He wondered why, even in a well-intentioned conversation about efficiency, there always seems to be a watermark underneath it that says: get through as much of this ocean as you can.
Mic. Drop.
The problem is not just that AI can now help people fake engagement at scale. The problem is that we’ve built a culture where speed is treated as a virtue, volume as accomplishment, and visible activity as substance.
The non-comment comment is just one tiny artifact of a much bigger disease.
We say we want thoughtful work. We say we value perspective, insight, and originality. But the systems many of us work inside—our companies, our clients, our platforms, our inboxes, our own overachieving and ADHD little brains—reward something else entirely.
They reward responsiveness. Output. Throughput. The appearance of keeping up.
So, of course, people reach for tools that help them move faster. Of course, they summarize instead of reading, react instead of reflecting, and comment instead of contributing.
We have made it very clear, culturally and professionally, that more is the goal.
AI didn’t invent that pressure. It just arrived with a very efficient new way of doing things.
Hustle Culture Was the Warm-Up
Long before AI started writing comments no one asked for, we were already being trained for this.
Hustle culture had been whispering in our ears for years that faster is better, busy is admirable, and exhaustion is what ambition looks like in sensible shoes.
Workaholism stopped being a warning sign and became, in far too many circles, a personality trait. We didn’t just normalize overwork. We polished it, put it on LinkedIn, and called it leadership.
Somewhere along the way, we began treating constant motion as proof of value. If you were slammed, you must be important. If you were booked back-to-back, drowning in Slack messages, replying at all hours, and consuming content at industrial scale, clearly you were serious about your job.
Reflection, meanwhile, started to look suspiciously like laziness. Thinking took too long. Reading deeply was indulgent. Stepping back to form an actual opinion? Adorable, but could you do it by 2 p.m.?
That is the part I cannot stop thinking about.
Because AI did not invent shallow engagement. It did not invent the urge to skim, summarize, optimize, and move on. It just showed up at exactly the right moment for a culture already addicted to hustling. Of course, we handed it the keys. We had spent years building workplaces and professional norms that prized efficiency over depth, speed over discernment, and visibility over actual value. AI simply made those habits faster and easier to maintain.
It is, in many ways, the perfect tool for a workaholic culture. Why wrestle with a complicated article when you can get the gist in seconds? Why sit with an idea long enough for it to become yours when you can generate a passable reaction and get on with your day? Why read, think, and respond when you can appear to have read, thought, and responded?
That last distinction matters more than we want to admit.
Because what hustle culture has always sold us is not excellence. It is performance. The performance of being informed. The performance of being engaged. The performance of being indispensable. AI did not create that performance. It just made the illusion easier to obtain.
And once you see that, the non-comment comment starts to look less like an isolated annoyance and more like the logical outcome of an entire way of working. We built a system that rewards people for getting through the ocean as quickly as possible. It should not surprise us that fewer and fewer people are stopping to ask what any of it means.
The Performance of Consumption
Every year, during that break between Christmas and New Year’s, my social feeds fill up with people proudly announcing they read 200 books, 300 books, 500,000,000 books, as if reading has become an Olympic event and the gold medal goes to whoever turned the most pages at the highest speed.
And every year, I have the same reaction: You did? Great. What do you remember from even one of them? Which was your favorite? Why?
I read a ton. But I read heavy, thought-provoking books that I spend a lot of time with. The characters become friends. I mourn the loss when I finish a book, and I usually need time to decompress before I pick up a new one.
That, to me, is the whole point.
And yet, we’ve turned consumption into a metric and then quietly agreed that the metric is what matters.
It is not just books, of course. It is articles, podcasts, newsletters, webinars, LinkedIn posts, summaries of podcasts, summaries of articles, summaries of the summaries, all delivered with the same breathless subtext: keep up, keep moving, keep proving you are informed. We are no longer simply consuming information. We are performing our ability to consume a lot of it.
But that is not the same thing as thinking.
The culture we have built leaves little room for that kind of relationship with ideas. It rewards completion. Speed. Volume. The ability to say, “Yes, yes, I got through it,” whether or not anything actually got through to you.
That is the real loss in all of this. Not that AI can summarize things for us, but that we were already halfway to outsourcing the experience of being changed by what we read, watch, and consume. AI just met us there with a clipboard and a cheerful little time-saving suggestion.
So now, instead of asking whether something moved us, challenged us, or taught us anything worth keeping, we ask a different question entirely: how quickly can I get the gist and move on?
Which is efficient, I suppose. It is also a spectacular way to make sure nothing sinks in.
What This Is Costing Us
All of this would be mildly annoying and mostly harmless if the stakes were limited to insufferable LinkedIn comments and aggressively optimized reading lists.
They are not.
Because when you build a culture around speed, volume, and the appearance of being informed, you do not just get shallower engagement. You get shallower thinking. You get more sameness. More borrowed language. More passable opinions dressed up as original insight. More people are reacting before they have had time to form an actual thought.
And eventually, everything starts to sound like it was written by the same overcaffeinated committee.
That matters because discernment is not a luxury. It is the job. Especially for communicators, marketers, leaders, and anyone else whose work depends on knowing what matters, what is true, what is noise, and what is worth saying out loud.
If everyone can generate an instant take, then the value of having a take at all is no longer there. The value is in judgment. In context. In taste. In knowing when not to say the obvious thing as quickly as possible.
That is what gets lost when we confuse speed with substance. Not just depth, but perspective. Not just originality, but trust.
People can feel the difference between something that has been processed and something that has merely been produced. They may not always have the language for it, but they know it when they see it. One feels considered. The other feels assembled.
And in a world already clogged with synthetic noise, that distinction starts to matter a lot.
The irony, of course, is that the faster everything gets, the more valuable thoughtfulness becomes. The more content we produce, the more rare actual perspective feels. The more we outsource the work of reading, reflecting, and making meaning, the more obvious it becomes when someone has actually done it.
Which means this is not really a nostalgic plea for everyone to slow down and journal by candlelight.
It is a practical argument.
If everyone else is racing to get through the ocean, the people who stop long enough to understand it will have something the rest do not: a point of view.
What to Do Instead
If we want better thinking, we have to stop treating every piece of information the same.
Not everything needs a summary. Not everything needs a comment. Not everything needs to be consumed at all.
During our most recent parent-teacher conference, we spoke with our seventh grader’s humanities teacher about the massive History Fair project they had just completed. She talked us through our child’s big growth moments in this last trimester, including finishing that project on time (it was a beast for ALL of us). But the biggest growth moment she had has stuck with me.
Her teacher said our child thought she could read one article and create an argument based solely on that. She quickly learned she had to do more than that—she had to read a book, watch a documentary or two, read lots of articles online, and take notes. So many notes. She had to spend time learning, absorbing, and then slowly dissecting it all into her argument.
It was a project that lasted five months for that very reason.
It’s such a great lesson for all of us. We, of course, don’t have to do a massive History Fair project, but we can absolutely slow down and absorb what we’ve consumed.
Read one smart article and take notes on it instead of skimming seven and remembering none. Finish a book and let it sit with you for a day or two before reaching for the next one. Listen to a podcast and ask yourself what you actually learned before forwarding it to six people as proof of professional engagement.
Another is to stop outsourcing first contact with ideas. If something seems worth reading, read it before you read the summary. If you are tempted to comment, make sure you have something to add that is more substantial than “great point.” If all you have is agreement, perhaps the bravest choice is silence.
We can also add more friction to our own process. Keep a running note of what is sticking with you and why. Block a little time to think after you consume something dense or challenging.
Ask better questions:
- What changed my mind?
- What do I disagree with?
- What is worth using, sharing, or testing?
The point is not to become less informed. It is to become more deliberate.
And for those of us who lead teams, there is an uncomfortable but necessary question here, too: Are we rewarding actual thought, or are we rewarding the performance of speed?
Because if everything is urgent, if responsiveness is always prized over reflection, if the person who fires off the fastest answer gets the gold star, then we are not creating thoughtful organizations. We are creating very efficient panic.
None of this is revolutionary, but it is inconvenient. It asks us to do less showing off and a little more paying attention.
But that may be the real opportunity in this moment. Not to use AI to get through the ocean faster, but to become more honest about what is worth diving into in the first place.
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