I was hopping between clarity and confusion, excitement and burnout. No serious progress, but lots of unfinished projects.

And a tech-backed promise that all could be done, if you just pull the right lever and have the right system.

I’ve been feeling drained and disoriented, ironically from creating systems to feel less drained and disoriented.

And I hit a wall recently. With the over-digitization of everything, the poisonous productivity, the fine-tuned models to optimize it all…

When misplaced or overdone, it kills the spark. The spark and willingness to waste time, tinker, and stumble around in the unknown, maybe to find something, but not always. A little messy and inefficient, quite, but that’s the point.

Outsourcing this and automating that. Somewhere along the way, I think I lost my head. Maybe if life wasn’t so complex, I wouldn’t need so much of this.

But wait. Why is life so complex? Shouldn’t all this efficiency make it simpler? Why do I still have 4 email accounts, multiple socials that nobody likes and less time than ever before despite an abundance of productivity secrets showing me how to do it better?

Maybe the minimalists were right.

Then again, maximalism is cool too though. But maybe that’s just for design—not all my digital clutter.

I guess what I’m saying is I’d like to become more inefficient. On purpose. More analog and more patient.

More human.

Automations and productized productivity got the best of me, making me feel like I could finally squeeze more things into my life, when really, those extras never needed the spotlight in the first place.

At least not all at once. Your story movie has a sequel. And another. And another.

If I truly focused on the things that mattered most, I wouldn’t need an Eisenhower Matrix or a Peak Performance plan to optimize my mornings.

By the way, I’m speaking as a single dude with a pretty minimal life, so I can understand there may be some parents out there rolling their eyes.

But this isn’t for them. This is for the creatives and dreamers who know it’s all possible, if they could just get things going.

The priorities I stacked so cleverly are starting to look like a pile of Jenga blocks…and I can’t quite remember what my core purpose even was to begin with.

Just because you can stack on more than ever before doesn’t mean you should.

Everything seems like an opportunity and FOMO is unhinged. When it’s possible to do everything (or have a robot do it for you), that’s exactly when you shouldn’t.

Too much efficiency and automation strips away the whole purpose of a project: the journey itself.

And if you keep shortcutting that, the next thing you know, there’s no journey left.

I want to keep the muddy unknown. I don’t want the journey taken away just because a tool can do it “better”

I’ve been multiplying the things in my life because with technology and efficiency, you can. But maybe…I need to do the opposite.

Do less, but with more intensity.

I’d like to become more inefficient, artistically.

This is what the (unfinished) painting below is about, but I didn’t plan it like that. It just revealed itself after the fact, because an intuitive hit told me to make one arm robotic. Then I wondered why she was suddenly half-metal.

Welcome to the unplanned unknown—inefficient tinkering without a plan. Surprises await.

Meaning is often discovered only in retrospect. Or never at all.

How inefficient.

Sometimes I feel like I’m half robot, mutating into something unplanned. So I want some more analog and a slower pace. To stay in control.

To not lose myself. And to preserve the human element, I’m carbon for a reason.

Something deeper with meaning, a project that spans years to complete…that changes directions multiple times because that’s what a real journey looks like…something that comes from from a nuanced experience I had as a human…and delete the hour-long consult session with Claude; I’m just gonna trust my gut on this one.

I’m burned out by too much efficiency. It’s time to collapse back into something inefficient.

And I’m not against digital. I’m not even anti-AI (if it’s used to do my laundry, literally and metaphorically).

I just hope that some portions of life maintain their messy human je ne sais quoi.

Creativity, emotion, imagination, adventure, serendipities…love…these things should never care about efficiency or timing.

They should run towards the unknown and swim in it, waste time in it.

Well-placed inefficiency is creative.

And I’d like some more of it, please.

Here’s my point: If you find yourself constantly looking for ways to optimize and become more efficient. Maybe a better system isn’t the answer. Maybe deletion is.

In my next letter, I want to talk about killing your darlings, because it’s something I had to do recently, and as painful as it was, it was also freeing and cathartic.

Anyways, thanks for reading, chat soon ✌️

:]