I think I’d thrive in the role of stay at home husband. Not stay at home dad - my partner and I have already made plans to never have kids - but stay at home husband. The hardest part of my day should be choosing which happy hour to go to. The busiest part of my day would be the singular zoom call I got on as a volunteer for some local community improvement club.

It’s a great vision with one major hurdle: how to finance it. When you’re deeply motivated, you find a way, right? For many smart and enterprising folks, the simplest path to the good life is to marry someone with a trust fund. Why work when you’re partner is bringing in the dough? That’s called working smarter, not harder!

I was unsuccessful on that front. My partner shares a fairly similar dream to mine. In her ideal life, she’d be a full time artist. Think, “South of France, exploring how light dances across the treetops,” sort of lifestyle. So, we split the difference, both of us work, neither of us get what we want. Compromise!

The most difficult part of this arrangement is the soul crushing awareness of the finite nature of time, as it slips away while we toil under the oppressive weight of Capitalism. Shit sorry, I didn’t mean to… let me rephrase. What I meant to say was that the most difficult part of this arrangement are the work hours. See? Same message, slightly less doom and gloom!

By work hours, of course, I mean the nine to five - thank you, Dolly Parton. At nine am, the emails start flowing in. We do our best to keep them from piling up, stop every now and then to refuel, and then get back to it. The battle rages on until five pm rolls around. Another day in the trenches. The war continues tomorrow.

My partner and I have it better than most: we both work remotely, primarily from home. We’re both contractors, so while we report to our clients, no boss can hold our feet to the fire. And we’re mobile, we have no kids, and live a fairly self contained lifestyle. Not much to complain about there, unless you’re me. Overall, not a bad life, but still a far cry from the dream.

So, if we’re dedicated to the vision of Brooke as an artist and me as a socialite, the question stands: how do we get there? And I have an answer: edging. No wait! That’s not… Ok. Probably the wrong word to use. But’s roll with it and see where it takes us.

Edging (under Capitalism, you dirty animal) is the process of pushing your work life to the brink of irrelevance, only to pull back at the last moment to reengage for a while. In practice, this looks like maximizing the personal life and minimizing the work life, almost to the point of ruin but without sacrificing long term goals. For a lot of folks, quiet quitting, where you camp out in a job only to do the bare minimum, is part of this process.

I don’t think I like the phrase quiet quitting, though. We’re not quitters: we’re thrill seekers. And we’re not showing up to the office day in and out, only to underperform. Quiet quitting is wasting time. I’m talking about maximizing it.

At the time that I am writing this, Artificial Intelligence is just beginning to disrupt the fabric of every industry across every culture in the world. Which, yes, dates this essay to a very specific moment in time. Like saying DVDs have just been introduced to the market or the Twin Towers had just come down.

I’m imagining this piece being read in the year 2050 by some culture reporter at the Alphabet-Blackrock-BerkshireHathaway Techno-Apple Gazette. Yeah, I’m talking to you you little shit. When I say, “the introduction of mass AI,” you know intuitively that the years I’m talking about are 2023 and 2024.

With greater power to automate away the very meat of our day jobs - that is, those things we spend ourselves doing from nine to five - society has pretty much universally latched on to the following narrative: AI makes us more efficient. AI makes us better at our jobs. Every company, every non-profit, and every entrepreneur is asking themselves right now how to make their team do more with AI.

I think this approach is coming at AI backwards. I believe that the broad application of these tools should not be to expand an employee’s scope during a 40 hour work week, but should rather be to allow that same employee to do their job faster, and then to get back to the more important things in life: raising a family, engaging in community, making art or music. Yes, we need to reimainge our tax codes and our work structures and all sorts of other things, but first, we need to reframe our goals around AI and automation.

I’d like to make the case for the South of France model for Artificial Intelligence. Rather than doing more in more time, I think we should be pursuing a different vision of the future: one where we accomplish the same amount, in less time. And then we all fuck off and go thrill seeking.