AI Makes Sitting With Discomfort Feel Shameful

Ben Nadel reflects on how the AI era has transformed the emotional experience of slow, deliberate learning. What once felt like virtuous, character-building struggle — spending days researching database row locking, refactoring code, writing blog posts — now feels shameful and wasteful under the constant cultural pressure to use AI agents for maximum productivity. He mourns the loss of meditative, discomfort-driven learning as a meaningful practice, and resents the zeitgeist that frames anything less than AI-assisted 100x output as irrelevant.