The Shortcut Generation
I’m listening to this song, and it moves me.
The man’s voice is in Arabic. Deep, penetrating. The jazz underneath bends it in a way that transforms it. I listened on repeat. Sent it to people. Played it in the car, alone, volume up. I’d light a cigar, smoke for twenty minutes, the song loud, tears running down my face.
A few weeks later, I found out it was AI.
I didn’t know what to do with that.
The song made me feel what it made me feel. My emotions were real. But then I thought more about it, and I felt deceived. No one had toiled for this. No one stayed up all night and bled for it.
Yes, someone put effort into prompting the platform. But in the end, it was manufactured. Engineered to come out right.
Whether it’s a song, essay, book, or video, the end product isn’t created. It’s generated. Built to catch you, to deliver surface-level dopamine and call it joy.
My philosophy is that joy, real joy, follows effort. Follows suffering.
We are living in the age of the shortcut.
The moment I rode an e-bike in London a few summers ago, I discarded the bicycle. I told myself I wasn’t using it for exercise, just to move quickly. I chose ease over effort. Evolutionary biology tells us we are built to conserve energy. We will always choose less effort over more.
The danger is this: the gap between wanting something and having it has collapsed to almost nothing.
Want a song? Generate one.
Want an essay? Narrate your thoughts and let the machine arrange them.
Want a body? Ozempic and Mounjaro suppress appetite, strip fat, and often take muscle with them. And now RETA is coming, a peptide that targets fat without touching muscle. Half the time, same result.
Want better cheekbones? People are carving themselves now, literally reshaping bone, chasing a face the algorithm decided is optimal. This is called looksmaxxing. I’d like to call it fringe. I’m not sure I can.
Last week, I heard about the Enhanced Games, athletes competing with full permission to use performance-enhancing drugs. The marketing pitch is transparency: no more hypocrisy, no more hiding. But what you’re watching, underneath the branding, is the dismantling of the idea that the body’s limit is the point.
Shortcuts are everywhere.
I use Claude to write. Not to generate (I want to be precise) but to help.
My writing system: I narrate into my phone, give the story, the headings, the experience. I rewrite it on my laptop, changing words as I go, forcing myself to feel every sentence. Then Claude edits. Pushes back. Catches what I missed.
Is that a shortcut? I’ve turned the question over many times.
What I’ve landed on: it’s a collaboration. The origin is mine. The thinking is mine. The experience is mine. The machine doesn’t give me the feeling. It helps me find the form.
But when I heard about that AI song, the first thing that unsettled me wasn’t the song. It was the mirror. Where does your line actually fall? I still don’t know. And I’m not sure the line is as clear as I need it to be.
GLP-1s are saving lives. AI songs are somehow moving us. Claude is helping me write better.
What’s coming next? A bionic knee that keeps me athletic into my eighties. I can’t say no to that. Genetic engineering that removes a cancer gene from an embryo before birth?
The moral dilemma will only deepen.
But one belief stays unshakeable: Meaning is made from suffering.
Not suffering as punishment. Suffering as the unavoidable fact that the things which matter cost us something: time, failure, uncertainty, the long darkness before you get good at anything. That cost isn’t incidental to the meaning. It is the meaning. The struggle is what makes arrival feel like arrival.
When I trained six months for my first HYROX in Barcelona, I crossed that finish line and didn’t just feel tired. I felt like someone. The sum of every early morning, every session I didn’t want to do, every time my body said stop, and I didn’t.
Self-knowledge is produced only under pressure.
When a writer suffers through an essay, throws drafts out, loses the thread, finds it again at two in the morning, what comes out carries all of that. The reader doesn’t know the history. They feel the weight. There’s a density to earned writing that generated text cannot replicate, because density comes from compression, and you can only compress what you’ve actually lived.
This is what we are quietly dismantling.
Not just craft. Not just standards. The mechanism by which human beings come to know who they are and what they’re capable of. We are building a world where you can have the output without the process: the body without the training, the song without the years, the essay without the struggle.
We call this progress. What we are actually doing is removing the experiences that turn a person into someone with something to say.
You want to be a writer? Suffer through writing. A body you’re proud of? Earn it. Music that moves people? Spend the years learning what music actually is. The suffering isn’t the price you pay before you get the thing.
The suffering is the thing. It’s where the meaning lives.
And without it, you might have the output. But you won’t have yourself.
My fear isn’t about AI, or peptides, or people chiselling their cheekbones into an algorithm’s ideal.
My fear is quieter. It’s the look on the face of someone who got everything they wanted without earning any of it, who stands there holding it all, and feels nothing. Not happiness. Not pride. A faint, persistent sense that something is missing, with no idea where to look.
That emptiness has a name. We call it a meaning crisis, and it is everywhere. People have more comfort, more access, and more capability than any generation before them. And they are more lost.
That is not a coincidence. We optimised away the friction that used to produce orientation. The struggle told you who you were. The difficulty told you what mattered. Remove them, and you are left with everything except the one thing you needed.
The difficulty was not a bug. It was the point.
You cannot optimise your way to meaning.
Every time I hear the song now, there’s a shadow over it.
It has become a symbol of the meaning crisis, yes, but also of something more personal: my own defiance.
A reminder to myself that for meaning to last, there has to be blood, sweat, and tears.