The Golf Ball Question

I do my best thinking on foot. Has been that way for close to thirty years. Most of the hard sermons got worked out on a sidewalk before they ever got worked out on paper. So it didn't surprise me that a question caught up with me halfway through this morning's walk and wouldn't let go until I stopped and talked it through, out loud, with an AI.

I'd said something to it before, almost in passing, that I believe down to my bones: AI doesn't change why we work. Only how we do it. This morning I wanted to actually unpack that instead of just repeating it. Why do we work at all? Not "how do you make a living." The thing underneath that. My neighbor's retired now, and he'll spend five hours in the sun chasing a golf ball he has no earthly need to chase. My daughter-in-law will call a full day of laundry, dishes, and a toddler who won't nap "work," and she's right, even though nobody's cutting her a check for it. A kid can spend an hour on a Lego castle with the same seriousness his father brings to a spreadsheet.

The AI gave me an answer I liked on first hearing. Something about agency, mastery, identity, and reciprocity. Four drives, four reasons a person picks up a task and won't put it down. I kept walking on it, though, the way you keep walking on a sermon point that sounds good but hasn't earned its place yet. I wanted to know if it would hold up once I stopped being impressed by it.

What held up

Turns out, most of it does, but not for the reason the AI gave me. There's a philosopher named Hannah Arendt who split human activity into three tiers back in 1958: labor, which is what we do just to keep living and which never really finishes, like laundry; work, which is what we build that outlasts us; and action, which is what we do in front of other people that shows them who we are. She ranked action highest. Not labor. Not even the built thing. The part of us other people can see and speak to, matters more than the thing we made or the maintenance we kept up.

That distinction did something for me I didn't expect. I've watched a lot of people over the years lose a job and lose themselves right alongside it. Not because the paycheck stopped, but because the action stopped. The place where other people watched them and knew who they were. I buried men who'd spent forty years at the same plant, and at more than one funeral the family couldn't find much to say about the man beyond the job. That's not a flaw in those men. That's what happens in a culture that let one kind of doing, Arendt's lowest tier even, carry the entire weight of a person's story.

The part that stopped me on the sidewalk

I looked into that golf-ball instinct too, and it turns out there's real research behind it. Some researchers built a study out of having people assemble IKEA furniture and fold origami, then asked them to put a price on what they'd made. People valued their own clumsy creations almost as highly as professional versions of the same thing. Effort alone made it worth more to them.

Here's what stopped me, though. The effect only shows up when the work gets finished. When the researchers had people build something and then destroyed it in front of them before it was done, all that added love disappeared. Effort that doesn't reach the finish line doesn't earn anything.

I sat with that one a good while. Because that's not really a statement about IKEA furniture. That's a warning label for AI. The danger was never "a tool helps me." I've used tools my whole life. A good tool has never once made me feel smaller. The danger is a tool that reaches the finish line a step ahead of me and hands me something I never got to complete. That's a different thing entirely, and most of the conversation about AI and jobs doesn't make that distinction.

I thought about it in terms I understand better than furniture, too. A friend forwarded me a study out of The Lancet Gastroenterology & Hepatology. Doctors who'd grown used to AI helping them spot signs of colon cancer during a colonoscopy were tested without it. Their own detection rate dropped, noticeably. Not because they got lazier. Because a skill they used to carry themselves had quietly moved into the machine, and they hadn't felt it leave. That one sat heavier with me than anything else I read this morning. I've sat with too many families in hospital rooms to read that lightly.

Where I think the AI's answer was too small

Here's where I want to push back on my own conversation this morning, not just add footnotes to it.

There's a man named Viktor Frankl who built his whole framework for what makes a life meaningful while he was a prisoner in a concentration camp, watching who survived and who didn't. He landed on three paths to meaning, not one: what you create or contribute, what you receive through love, and the stance you choose to take toward suffering you can't avoid. Work was one of three paths. Not the root of the tree. A branch of it.

If that's true, then a man who can't answer "who are you" without naming his job title isn't proof that work is the deepest thing in a human life. It's proof that somewhere along the way, work crowded out the other two branches: love, and the character a person builds by how he carries hard things. I think that happened to us long before AI ever showed up. AI didn't create that imbalance. It's walking into a room where the imbalance was already sitting, waiting.

I don't know that AI freeing up our time even fixes it, either, left on its own. Back in 1930, a well-known economist predicted that by now we'd all be working fifteen-hour weeks, with the rest of the time freed up for exactly what I'm describing: love, meaning, the things that actually make a life. He wasn't wrong about how much more productive we'd become. He was wrong about what we'd do with the time that bought us. The workweek fell for about forty years and then it just stopped falling, stuck right around forty hours, while everything we make gets absorbed into wanting more instead of resting more. Nobody handed us that outcome. We built it, one choice at a time, without much intention behind it.

That's the part I can't get past. If AI hands us back hours the way that economist thought productivity would, and we don't choose, on purpose with both hands, to spend those hours on love and contribution and character instead of just more scrolling, we'll have the same outcome all over again, except faster.

Where this lands

This is exactly the ground Pillar IV of the Guardian Manifesto stands on: the Subordinate Mind. AI makes an incredible co-worker, but a lousy king. It can propose. It can organize. It can execute the how, and do it brilliantly. What it must never be allowed to do is decide the why. That is not a technical limitation we are waiting on a future model to fix. It is a line we have to hold on purpose, the same way I'm learning I have to hold it on purpose in my own life, one golf ball, one Lego castle, one unfinished thing at a time.

I walked the rest of the way home without an answer, honestly. I still don't have one I'd call finished. If AI keeps taking the friction out of our work the way it already has for those doctors, what are we doing, on purpose with both hands, to make sure the hours it hands back go toward the people we love and the character we're building, instead of just disappearing into something easier? Honestly, in my own life I have already seen that if I do not "plan" free time with family or friends something else eats it up, as if there were nothing freed in my schedule. How about you?

In compliance with the Guardian Manifesto, this Chronicle was researched, written, and compiled by Dave Edwards with AI assistance.