The Effort Is The Point

The philosopher Martin Heidegger would often retreat to a small, three-roomed ski hut in the Black Forest, at an elevation of 1150 m, to do his work. In his essay Why Do I Stay in the Provinces?, Heidegger paints a vivid picture of what it was like to work in that remote location.

“On a deep winter’s night when a wild, pounding snowstorm rages around the cabin and veils and covers everything, that is the perfect time for philosophy. Then its questions must become simple and essential. Working through each thought can only be tough and rigorous. The struggle to mold something into language is like the
resistance of the towering firs against the storm.”

Heidegger’s example feels like the opposite of the kind of working life promised by the AI evangelists. Heidegger is working through each thought in a tough and rigorous way. AI boosters suggest we should outsource the struggle to an AI that will think on our behalf.

We could extend that further and imagine an AI content strategy for a modern philosopher. Rent a cabin in Aspen and surround yourself with all the smart and beautiful people. Spend the day in a spa with mountain views while the gentle pummelling of your masseuse helps you unlock a list of prompts you can feed to the AI as it writes your next bestseller.

By contrast, Heidegger’s cabin might have sounded romantic, but it was rather rustic. He wasn’t surrounded by his peers or society’s elite. His neighbours were farmers and folk who had lived their lives in the mountains.

For Heidegger, this was the point. He contrasts being known and remembered by the mountain folk with the ephemeral nature of popularity in the city, where your status and press coverage rise and fall with your latest efforts and changing fashions. He talks about an elderly neighbour who would traipse through heavy snow just to check if he was okay. And who remembered him even on her deathbed.

And rather than nature giving him the inspiration to work, he saw work as giving him the framework to understand nature. Working in solitude gives Heidegger the sense that his own being can open up to and merge with what he calls “the presence of all things.”

AI is sold to us as a way to remove the effort involved in everything from making art to writing emails for work. This flattening of human existence is in itself revealing. Work emails are often a mundane chore. Creating art or literature or music is the greatest expression of our humanity. But what if these things – writing emails and making art – are not the same? And what if, in these and other fields of human endeavour, the effort is the point?

This isn’t to suggest that exploitative jobs and harsh labour doesn’t exist. But there is a difference between alleviating harm and eliminating effort altogether. We should use technology to make work safe and humane.

But, it takes a particular kind of cynical moral calculus to believe the least effortful way of working will always produce the best results. I’m not about to give up my washing machine or power tools. But we are suspicious of cutting corners for good reason. We know that sometimes the slower or more laborious way of cooking a dish will yield the tastiest results. And we would rather receive a handwritten card from a loved one than an AI-generated text message.

Consider music. Plenty of AI companies are offering to “democratise music” by making it possible for anyone to create songs in seconds. While I like the idea of more people making music as a hobby, this endeavour feels so misguided.

Making music is hard because it requires you to rewire your brain and change your body. In a sense, we can all sing and tap rhythms. But learning music is like learning a language. The vocabulary of jazz or classical music is just as complex as the grammar of Japanese. And neuroscientists can use brain scans to predict the instrument a musician plays from the way the folds of the brain have evolved in response to the physical requirements of the instrument.

The effort changes the artist.

Even in the case of mundane chores, effort is not useless. Consider chopping onions. A burdensome task for sure. But do it enough times and you become attuned to the way that simple act is telling you something about the ingredient you are going to use. How hard or soft, sweet or not, are the onions you’re about to use? How will you have to adapt the recipe as you cook?

Even with those dreaded work emails the effort is not in vain. Any act of writing is an exercise in organising our thoughts. Finding the right words invites us to clarify our commitments and responsibilities. I often find that when email becomes hard or overwhelming, it’s because there is something out of whack in my relationships with the people or organisations I am communicating with, or in the work I’m doing. I can’t outsource solving that existential dilemma.

In these examples, and every other one I could think of, the effort shapes us and our relationship to reality. It’s not always as dramatic as Heidegger in a wintry, Black Forest cabin, but it’s akin in spirit.

A musician practising scales is not engaged in drudgery. They are shaping themselves through something that approximates a spiritual practice. The office worker communicating with colleagues is crafting a shared landscape of action and meaning and thought.

And as we apply effort, we also apply ourselves. The effortful moments are exactly the times we bring our unique perspective and insight and experience to what we do. Rather than the effort of work dehumanising us, we humanise the work through our effort.