Read time: 3 min.

Yesterday I visited my grandmother.

We were sitting together, flipping through old photo albums. She pointed to a picture of the backyard. Clotheslines zigzagging across the garden like a spider's web.

"That was Monday," she said. "Wash day."

Not Monday morning. Monday. The whole day. Washing, wringing, hanging, praying for dry weather, bringing it back in before the frost hit at night. And that was just the laundry.

The term "housewife" wasn't a social construct back then. It was a full-time job description.

Now we have washing machines. Dryers. Robot vacuums that clean the floor while we sit on the couch watching the robot vacuum clean the floor.

"I never could have imagined this," she told me.

And then I asked myself the question I haven't been able to shake since:

What can we not imagine right now?

We've spent a century getting faster.

Faster communication. Faster transport. Faster food, faster decisions, faster everything. And yet, ask anyone how they feel and the answer is almost always the same.

Rushed.

Here's the paradox: we didn't get less busy. We got more efficient at being busy.

The washing machine didn't give my grandmother free time. It freed up time she immediately filled with something else. And we've been doing that collectively, as a society, ever since.

But here's what I think is actually going on beneath the surface.

We're addicted to busyness

Not because we have to be. Because it's easier.

Being busy gives you an identity. "I'm slammed this week" sounds important. It sounds like you matter. Like the world needs you.

It also gives you a convenient excuse to avoid the harder questions.

Questions like: Who am I when no one is telling me what to do? What do I actually stand for? What would I choose, if the choice were entirely mine?

Busyness is the world's most socially acceptable way to avoid thinking.

And freedom, real freedom, is terrifying precisely because it removes that excuse.

Most people, when given true freedom, don't expand into it. They fill it. Frantically. With Netflix, social media, or side projects they don’t care about.

Because the alternative is to sit with an uncomfortable truth:

Freedom is responsibility

And responsibility is heavy.

This is why most talented people stay in jobs they've outgrown.

It's not fear of failure. It's not lack of skill. It's that a 9-to-5 does something deeply comforting: it tells you what to do. It fills your calendar, your identity, your sense of purpose. Someone else sets the agenda and you execute it.

Starting something on your own isn't primarily a financial leap. It's an identity leap.

It means answering the questions you've been successfully avoiding:

• What do I actually believe?

• What do I want to build?

• What do I want to be known for?

Those questions don't have easy answers. But they're the only questions worth spending your life on.

Now add AI into this picture.

In the next decade, AI will do what the washing machine did to housework. But for knowledge work. Administration, analysis, basic content, customer service, planning, reporting. Gone. Or at least, not yours to do anymore.

And what will remain? What can't be automated?

Creativity. Meaning-making. Vision. Direction. Human connection. The courage to take a position.

In other words, everything that busyness helps you avoid.

You were not born to clear your inbox

My grandmother couldn't have predicted the washing machine.

But if someone had told her it was coming, I think she would have asked: "So what do we do with all that time?"

That's the real question in front of us right now. Not how to do things faster. But what's actually worth doing.

I'm not going to tell you to quit your job or burn your calendar.

But I do think it's worth asking yourself, honestly, how much of what you do each day you actually chose. And how much just happened to you.

One day you'll have done everything on your list.

Make sure the list was yours.

Much love,

— Martijn