The Incompressible Remainder
Often the point isn't the answer, its the struggle to find it
I have seventeen tabs open with productivity tools: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Figma, Gamma, the list goes on. Each can help write, code, design, analyze. They compress most tasks into minutes or seconds.
Yet I still like to spend hours manually writing a Google Doc or Markdown Note to watch it come alive. Not because I have to. Because something in me needs to see the words take shape, the structure emerge and reshape its flow and contents under my hands.
For the most part, machines can help do this seconds. I know this.
I sometimes choose the hours anyway.
What Compresses
Code compresses. An eight-year-old can build apps now.
Creation compresses. Months collapse into minutes.
Information compresses. Markets trade in microseconds.
The machine swallows the mechanical.
But here's what you and I won't often say out loud: What if 90% of what we called "knowledge work" was always just friction? What if you and I were mostly never creating but just wrestling with syntax?
What if we've been padding our days with the digital equivalent of digging holes and filling them back up?
What Remains
You can’t compress the pause when the CTO1 says, "This works, but here's why we don't do it this way.”
You can’t compress trust. Or the scar tissue from failed launches. Or knowing in your bones when something's wrong.
You can’t compress suffering. Every shortcut around struggle is a lesson lost.
But what happens when no one struggles anymore? When the junior never learns why we don't do it that way because AI already knows? I often think to myself if we’re the last generation to understand how things actually work?
The models know everything and understand nothing. They are brilliant amnesiacs who largely forget the conversation the moment it ends.
What if that's us in five years: dependent on machines that compress away not just our work but our need to struggle to think?
The Inversion
As machines compress everything compressible, what remains becomes infinitely precious.
When everyone can generate code, knowing what to generate matters.
When anyone can create, taste becomes everything.
When information is infinite, wisdom turns scarce.
But who's going to teach taste to the generation that never had to develop it?
Who passes on wisdom when the struggle that created it disappears?
What if we're so busy celebrating democratization that we don't notice we're creating a world where everyone can do everything but no one knows why?
Living in Incongruity
So we must master both worlds. Use AI to compress the forgettable.
But pour yourself into what resists compression: the relationships, the judgment, the slow accumulation of knowing why.
Sometimes write it yourself. Not because it's efficient. Because the struggle teaches what reviewing never will.
But will we? Really? When the machine does it better, faster, cheaper: who chooses the hard way?
Who voluntarily suffers when suffering becomes optional? Are we just lying to ourselves about preserving what machines will inevitably replace?
What Makes Us Human
What humans experience is part of human experience. The experience of the ox is part of the experience of oxen, as the vine’s is of the vine, and the stone’s what is proper to stones. — VIII. 46
The future belongs to those who compress the right things to make space for what can't be compressed.
The deep conversations.
The trust built in crisis.
The wisdom that comes only from falling and getting up.
Or does it? What if the future belongs to those who never knew there was another way?
What if incompressible human experience becomes a luxury good. Something only the wealthy can afford while everyone else lives in the compressed, efficient, soulless middle?
What makes us human isn't what we can do.
What makes us human is everything that won't compress: how we fail, how we connect, how we suffer, how we aspire, how we love.
But what if we're wrong? What if even these compress, just on a timeline we can't see yet?
That incompressible remainder: that's where you and I live now.
Looking at you Sean Johnson