Busy was always avoidance

Busy wasn’t productivity. It was avoidance wearing productivity’s clothes.

Stay busy. Stay competent. Stay rewarded. The motion itself becomes the point—because it prevents you from noticing where you are. From asking whether the work matters. From sitting with the possibility that you built a career around avoiding harder questions.

AI interrupts that motion. Not by making you less busy, but by forcing a pause. And in that pause, the question you were avoiding finally catches up.

What am I for?

I’ve watched this pattern in consulting work for years. High performers who can’t stop moving. Executives who schedule every hour. Teams that measure productivity by output volume. None of them slowing down long enough to ask whether they’re building anything that matters.

It looks like dedication. Commitment. Strong work ethic.

It’s actually fear. Fear that if you stop moving, you’ll have to face what you’ve been running from: the possibility that there’s nothing underneath the role. That if you strip away the outputs, the competence, the professional identity, there won’t be anything left.

This is the abyss. Not unemployment. Not irrelevance. The question that work was supposed to answer but never actually did: What am I for?

Many careers are built as avoidance strategies. Stay busy enough and you don’t have to ask. Produce enough output and you don’t have to justify the direction. Hit enough metrics and you don’t have to examine whether the metrics measure anything real.

The motion prevents the question.

Here’s what denial looks like: believing that staying busy is the same as being purposeful. That hitting targets means you’re pointed in the right direction. That career success is evidence you’re doing something meaningful.

But targets can measure the wrong things. Direction can be arbitrary. Success can be climbing a ladder that’s leaning against nothing.

You know this already. You’ve sat in meetings where everyone is busy but nothing important is happening. You’ve shipped features nobody needed. You’ve hit quarterly goals that didn’t advance anything that mattered.

And you kept going. Because stopping means asking what it’s all for. And that question is dangerous when you don’t have an answer.

AI forces the pause. Not by stopping the work, but by removing the constraint that made busyness necessary. When execution becomes instant, when drafts generate in seconds, when the time between idea and artifact collapses—the motion that kept you from thinking can’t be sustained.

You built your professional identity on being fast, being productive, being reliable. And now those things aren’t scarce. The machine can be faster, more productive, more reliable than you ever were.

So what’s left?

This is where the abyss opens. Not because AI took something from you, but because it revealed that the thing you were doing—the staying busy, the producing outputs, the proving your value through motion—was always avoidance.

The work you were avoiding is still there. You just can’t outrun it anymore.

I should be clear about my own stake in this. I’m someone who uses motion as thinking. I pace. I stand at whiteboards. I build diagrams while working through problems. For years I told myself this was how I work best.

Some of it is. But some of it is avoidance too. Staying in motion so I don’t have to sit with uncertainty. Building frameworks so I don’t have to face what the frameworks can’t capture. Teaching concepts so I don’t have to examine whether I’ve actually integrated them.

The pause is uncomfortable. Sitting still with a hard question, no motion to distract you, no output to prove you’re being productive—that’s harder than staying busy ever was.

But the pause is where the work happens. The actual work. Not the work of producing outputs, but the work of becoming someone who knows what outputs are worth producing.

That’s not a skill you develop by staying busy. It’s a capacity that only emerges when you stop.

When you feel threatened by AI’s speed, by its ability to generate and execute and produce without stopping, what you’re feeling is the recognition that speed was never the point. That the busyness you built your identity around was just sophisticated avoidance.

This is what we deny: that we knew the work was often meaningless, and we stayed busy anyway because busyness felt like purpose. That we cooperated with systems that measured motion instead of meaning because motion was easier to perform.

The denial isn’t about AI. It’s about admitting that decades of career success might have been climbing in the wrong direction. That productivity might have been preventing exactly the clarity you needed.

That’s the abyss. And you can’t skip it. Solutions offered too early are just new forms of avoidance. If you don’t actually feel the loss—of the role, the identity, the motion that held the question at bay—whatever you build next will be built on the same lie.

The abyss strips away false necessity. It shows you what was propping you up without ever being you. The job title, the expertise, the productivity metrics—none of it was you. It was scaffolding. And the scaffolding is coming down.

In that clearing, something else has room to speak. The capacities that couldn’t develop while you were busy: judgment, discernment, the ability to see meaning not just metrics. The questions you stopped asking: Is this answer right? Does this work matter? What am I actually for?

These don’t have quick answers. They don’t fit on task lists. You can’t speed-run them by staying busy.

You have to stop. Actually stop. Sit with the discomfort of not having an answer. Let the motion that kept you from noticing finally cease.

That’s where the work begins. Not with tips for staying relevant, but with the uncomfortable truth that the version of yourself you’ve been performing might not be you at all.

The work isn’t learning new productivity systems. It’s not finding ways to stay busy in the AI age. It’s stopping the avoidance. Facing what you were running from. Reclaiming the capacities that busyness prevented you from developing.

Judgment instead of just execution. Discernment instead of just speed. The courage to ask whether work matters before doing it efficiently.

That’s the work of being. Not staying relevant. Not adapting to new tools. Becoming actually human again instead of pretending motion was purpose all along.

This is what The Work of Being explores—not as self-help, but as honest engagement with what happens when the avoidance strategies stop working. If you’re ready to stop running: The Work of Being: Staying Human in the Age of AI