Faster isn’t always better. Sometimes, taking a long, arduous detour is far more fulfilling than taking a shortcut to your destination.
That’s all I want to say here. Those two sentences are the essence of what follows, and if you get what I mean, you can stop reading, and we can go our separate ways.
However, if you care to know more, I have some things to tell you, and I think we can talk better if we walk for a bit.
Let’s go this way. It’ll be a nice detour.
I remember the exact evening when I first used a large language model. It was Boxing Day 2022, and my family and I were sitting on cornered couches in front of a fireplace that we didn’t bother turning on. Someone was decorating the living room with Christmas ornaments, while someone else was fetching more gingerbread from the kitchen. It was then that my brother, somewhat randomly, said, “Have you heard of ChatGPT?” We all shook our heads. “Well,” he went on, “it’s this new chatbot. You can ask it pretty much anything, and it’ll spit out a human-like answer.”
Pretty much anything?
As it happened, I’d been in strong need of answers to pretty much anything since I’d been studying for an exam in theoretical philosophy. And yet I was skeptical. Surely, a machine wouldn’t be able to perform the sort of intellectual stunts I’d been rehearsing for the past weeks. I whipped out one of the prep questions — something about Frege’s distinction between “concept” and “object” — and typed it into the chat.
That’ll do it, I thought. The smug smile on my face broadened.
The chatbot spewed out three perfectly structured paragraphs. It was the sort of answer that would’ve taken me months of painstaking work to produce. Now it was in front of me, generated within seconds.
Okay, I thought, beginner’s luck. But the chatbot went on to solve each of the prep questions with the ease of Roger Federer playing tennis against a monkey armed with a racket. As I stared at my laptop screen, which seemed unreasonably bright in the dimly lit living room, I thought, This is going to change everything.
And it did. Just not how I thought it would.
The change was less technological and more philosophical in nature. What I didn’t realize then was that although efficient answers can feel like progress, they eliminate the necessary frustration, self-sufficiency, and fulfillment that lie in the pursuit of getting those answers. Inefficiency is a virtue in its own right. Or, to put it differently, there’s a productivity in taking a detour.
Let me try to explain what I mean.
I’m currently listening to the audio version of Stephen King’s The Stand. It’s a behemoth of a book. The audiobook’s length is 47 hours and 47 minutes. The print version runs 1328 pages. When the book was first published in 1978, it was too expensive to print. King was forced to trim it down by 150,000 words (the equivalent of 400 pages) without changing the story’s gist. It was only years later, when, due to the overwhelming success of the book, they added those pages back in.
A question: Why all this extra weight if the story remains the same?
King himself poses the rhetorical question in the preface to the uncut version: “Isn’t it indulgence after all?” Well, to explain why it obviously isn’t indulgence, King retells a bare-bones version of the fairy tale Hansel and Gretel. (To push King’s point, I shortened it even further):
Hansel and Gretel are left in the forest by their parents. They find a gingerbread house owned by a cannibalist witch. Gretel tricks the witch and Hansel shoves the witch into the oven. Free at last, they return home with the witch’s treasure and live happily with their father.
The End.
Another question: Would it be indulgence to reinstate all the elements we love about the tale?
We all know the answer.
For instance, one famous detail is that Hansel leaves behind breadcrumbs on their path so they can find their way home. Later, birds eat them. Technically, then, the breadcrumbs are redundant. Plot-wise, they don’t add anything new. And yet, elements like these imbue the story with texture, tragedy, and tension.
At this point, I’m only twenty hours into the uncut version of The Stand, but as far as I’m concerned, the extra pages aren’t indulgent. Quite the opposite, they transform the story into The Story. I still have 27 hours left to listen to.
Thank God it’s not a minute less.
A few years ago, I saw many writers arguing on Twitter that every book could’ve been a blog post and every blog post could’ve been a tweet. But based on what we’ve just seen, this argument is bullshit served on a silver platter.
Sure, I agree with the advice to omit unnecessary words. But that doesn’t imply that every book needs to be trimmed down to its bare ribs. Not even non-fiction books. If that were the case, I could summarise the entire self-help sphere — a $12 billion industry — in a few sentences right here and now.
- Exercise.
- Meditate.
- Get good sleep.
- Eat real, healthy food.
- Process your childhood.
- Spend time with friends and family.
It’s not that short advice is wrong. Rather, it’s too efficient to sink in. The sieve-like membrane of the brain can’t retain salt-grain-sized pieces of wisdom. It needs to bite on chunky, chewy bits. Again and again and again.
I’ve read many non-fiction books that, strictly speaking, were longer than necessary. One of my favorite examples is Dopamine Nation by Dr. Anna Lembke. While reading it, my literary senses weren’t exactly aroused. Sometimes I found it boring. And yet, simply by spending time with this book and the topics it addressed, the message began to seep in and tangibly impacted my life, such as limiting my excessive YouTube consumption. Conversely, if I’d simply read a one-sentence summary of the book (“Pleasure is not always good for you”), I would’ve thought, Huh, that’s true, only to discard the insight seconds later.
So, if there’s extra fat for extra fat’s sake, I’m all for cutting it out. But if the fat lends structure to the bones and adds flavor to the dish, then by all means, I want it in my belly. It’s as if I can only then absorb all the nutrients.
And yet, in my daily life, I often catch myself doing the opposite.
I often put myself under pressure to reach my destination, goals, the end of my to-do list, and whatnot as quickly as possible. I tell myself that I must be fast and efficient. That I mustn’t waste time. But as I argued elsewhere, this is a sign of confusion. The virtue of good stories — including our life stories — isn’t to cut to the chase. Rather, it’s to take detours, dive into rabbit holes, get lost, and end up in places you never expected when you started.
In his brilliant book, Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman refers to this phenomenon as “the efficiency trap.” It’s the observation that efficiency and its sneaky cousin convenience sacrifice depth for comfort. Convenience, Burkeman argues, “makes things easy, but without regard to whether easiness is truly what’s most valuable in any given context.”
What happened on Boxing Day 2022, then, was that I stepped into a massive efficiency trap. Of course, at the time, I felt powerful because I’d gotten quick answers to my prep questions. And briefly, I had a thought that, I suppose, I share with many students these days: What’s the point of learning all this stuff when I can just look it up?
But as in so many cases, it’s not about the information itself or getting quick answers. It’s about the feeling of mental gears grinding and churning until an idea finally clicks.
The point here is not that efficiency and convenience are wrong by design. I’m all for keeping my electric toothbrush, washing machine, and word processor. Instead, the point is that efficiency removes more than just the time to complete a task. It removes the friction that, though uncomfortable at first, can lead to creative breakthroughs and surprisingly rewarding detours. In a rat race to efficiencize everything, we might, as Burkeman puts it, “accidentally end up eliminating things we didn’t realise we valued until they were gone.”
The great irony, then, is that not being efficient can become productive and profound. Go back to the first two sentences. My entire argument is there: Faster isn’t always better, and so on. But hopefully, by talking about it in greater detail, by telling you about my first flirt with ChatGPT, reading King’s Stand, removing Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs, and sitting with Dopamine Nation — hopefully, by taking these detours, I provided more depth than those two lousy first sentences ever could.
All of this is just another way of saying that I’ve been adopting a more cumbersome approach to doing things whenever possible. Detours are productive in their own way. Not because they help us meet non-efficiency values like rest or mindfulness, but because they begin to dissolve the rigidity and seriousness behind the very metric of efficiency.
And that’s when we can begin to ask a question that’s far more enticing than how to be more productive or how to get faster at doing chores or how to read more books:
Is efficiency truly what’s most valuable in this context?