The Upgrade Is Ready. The Human Is Tired.
We sit down to finish one small task. A modest ambition. Something we might complete before the tea develops a personality.
Then comes a new tool, a new tutorial, and an exciting new way to do the thing we were finally getting comfortable doing. By lunchtime, we have explored the possibilities, welcomed the future, and forgotten why we opened the laptop.
The original task is still waiting. Apparently, it has failed to embrace innovation.
The hidden subscription
I like useful tools. I like learning. I also like getting something finished occasionally, just to keep the tradition alive.
But keeping up can become a job of its own. We learn where something lives, how it works, what changed, and whether our previous work still fits. Then we go looking for the button we used yesterday. It has moved to a more intuitive location. Nobody has intuitively found it yet.
Every change asks us to spend something: time, attention, patience, confidence. The price on the subscription page rarely includes the afternoon spent finding our feet again.
Even a useful improvement can arrive when we have no room for another learning curve. Enthusiasm and energy are separate accounts. Mine occasionally have a difficult conversation.
The quiet exit
Fatigue does not always write a complaint. Sometimes it closes the laptop and says, “I’ll come back tomorrow.” Tomorrow becomes next week. The unfinished draft gets another unfinished draft for company.
That is a dropout risk worth noticing. Someone may still value a community, enjoy the people, and want to create, while struggling to find the energy to participate.
Silence can mean many things. A quiet member may be busy, taking a break, or trying to recover a little space in their day. A community can make returning feel manageable.
A warm welcome back can help. A cheerful list of twelve things they missed might require a small lie-down.
Our brains have other tabs open
Online work shares a person with the rest of their life. Bills, family, jobs, caring responsibilities, health worries, and the ordinary business of being human all use attention too.
Yet we can start treating every new possibility as another obligation. Try this. Watch that. Automate something. Compare the results. Keep up with people who appear to have sixteen assistants and a spare nervous system.
Some of us have one nervous system. It is doing its best. Please avoid refreshing it during office hours.
If an afternoon goes into relearning the route to our work, that afternoon is unavailable for the work itself. We need to count that effort when judging how much we have accomplished.
A chair in the rabbit hole
One of the pleasures of a community is having somewhere to ask a simple question and be met with patience. We can help preserve that pleasure by making room for different speeds.
Share the useful shortcut. Keep a simple route visible. Let someone finish with the tool they already understand. When they ask for one next step, give them one next step. The complete expedition can wait until they have packed a sandwich.
We can also give ourselves a smaller task: choose one thing that helps today, use it, and finish something. There is relief in seeing a piece of work completed before starting another course about completing work.
Before we quietly disappear
This is my small warning from inside the rabbit hole: we need a pace that leaves us enough energy to stay involved. A community has people worth hearing from, including those who cannot keep up with every new possibility.
Progress should leave us enough energy to use it. I want to keep writing, learning, sharing, and enjoying the people along the way. I would also appreciate the occasional afternoon in which my brain remains compatible with my plans.
Otherwise, moss farming starts to look remarkably attractive. Moss grows slowly, requires no webinar, and has never once asked me to migrate.
What could we make simpler, so more of us have the energy to stay?
Thank you for reading and sharing!
Source OpenAI’s ChatGPT Language Model and DALLE – Images Picsart
