The Rising Opportunity Cost of Being Human

I was sitting on the couch with my wife the other night. No crisis. No conflict. No drama. Just talking about the day. And in the back of my mind, I could feel it. The temptation to think, This is not productive.

I know I want to be here. But part of me doesn't want to be here. But I want to want to be here. And now she's asking what I'm thinking, and I'm doing the whole metacognitive inception thing — which level of the dream are we in? — and the truth is, I'm not actually listening. Because I'm thinking about how I should be listening.

That's messed up. I know it is. (And before you think I'm oversharing — stay with me.)

I Thought It Was Just Me

Last week, I wrote about the tension between AI productivity gains and actually becoming more of what we value. I called it a values-allocation problem. I offered some discipline-based solutions — name your non-delegables, pre-allocate reclaimed hours, put Big Rocks before Bots (still proud of that one).

Then the messages started coming in.

Not "great post" messages. Confessional ones. More than twenty of them — from founders, executives, AI-forward leaders across industries — all describing some version of the same pull. A CEO who realized he hadn't had an uninterrupted dinner with his family in weeks. An entrepreneur whose spouse told her she talks to Claude more than she talks to him. People waking up in the middle of the night to check on their agents.

The thing that struck me is, these aren't undisciplined people. These are some of the most intentional, self-aware professionals I know. If willpower were the answer, they'd have solved this already.

Which means I missed something last week. I diagnosed the right problem — but I’ve come to realize that I offered a discipline solution to what is actually an economics problem.

The Greatest HBR Article Ever Written

Clay Christensen wrote what I believe is the single greatest article Harvard Business Review ever published. It's called "How Will You Measure Your Life?" (For those who don't know Christensen — he's the Harvard professor behind The Innovator's Dilemma, the only business book Steve Jobs said deeply influenced him. Christensen wrote this particular essay after being diagnosed with cancer, reflecting on what actually matters.)

His core insight is devastating in its simplicity: high achievers systematically over-invest in their careers and under-invest in their families — not because they don't care, but because of feedback loops.

As Christensen put it: "When people who have a high need for achievement have an extra half hour of time or an extra ounce of energy, they'll unconsciously allocate it to activities that yield the most tangible accomplishments. And our careers provide the most concrete evidence that we're moving forward."

Think about it. At work, feedback is fast. You ship a product. Close a deal. Finish a presentation. Get promoted. The loop is tight — effort in, recognition out.

At home? Christensen's observation is that you don't learn whether you were a good parent for twenty years. You can neglect your marriage, and on a day-to-day basis, it doesn't seem like things are deteriorating. There's no quarterly performance review for being a husband. No dashboard for being a dad. (And the resilience of the people who love you — the fact that they give you the benefit of the doubt, again and again — actually makes it worse. It lets you get away with it longer.)

Where does the "extra half hour" go? It goes where the feedback is fastest. Not because you're a bad person. Because you're a rational person responding to asymmetric incentives.

Christensen watched this pattern unfold among his own HBS classmates: "Over the years I've watched more and more of them come to reunions unhappy, divorced, and alienated from their children. I can guarantee you that not a single one of them graduated with the deliberate strategy of getting divorced." They didn't plan to misallocate their lives. The incentive structure did it for them.

That article was published in 2010. I've been thinking all week about why it's even more urgent now. (I think Christensen would be alarmed if he could see what's happening.)

AI Pours Gasoline on the Fire

What Christensen couldn't have anticipated: AI has turbocharged the fast-feedback loop while leaving the slow-feedback loop completely untouched.

When my output was one unit of human effort, the choice between an hour of work and an hour with my family was a 1-to-1 tradeoff. One unit here or one unit there. Painful, but manageable.

Now? With AI amplifying my output by 10x, 50x, 100x — investing that same hour in dinnertime doesn't cost me one unit of output. It costs me a hundred. The competition isn't missing an hour of my work while I eat dinner. They're getting a hundred hours ahead of me.

I said this during a Q&A at a recent keynote, and the words kind of fell out of me before I'd fully processed them: "I actually don't know whether we're prepared for those kinds of calculations as a species."

I still don't.

And it gets worse. The audience member who prompted that response — an AI power user at a major studio — told me his wife had started asking him to have conversations with her instead of with AI. He'd gotten so deep into AI rabbit holes that the people closest to him could feel his absence even when he was physically present. (Sound familiar? It did to me.)

This is what I now think of as the rising opportunity cost of being human. AI has made it more expensive — in purely economic terms — to invest in the things that can't be measured, optimized, or scaled. Parenting. Marriage. Friendship. Prayer. The things that don't show up on any dashboard but do shape who you become.

This Isn't a Character Flaw

I want to be careful with the framing here, because it matters.

If you've been feeling the pull — the guilt at dinner, the restlessness on the couch, the itch to check your agents at 2 AM — you might think you lack discipline. That's how I framed it last week.

But here's what I missed: it's not primarily a discipline problem. It's a rational response to new economics. The incentives have genuinely changed. The math is actually working against your humanity.

That doesn't remove responsibility. It clarifies the battlefield.

And that distinction matters, because it changes the prescription.

When you think "I lack discipline," the solution is willpower: try harder, calendar-block more aggressively, feel guilty when you fail. (And you will fail, because the incentives are relentless.) That's not strategy. That's drift.

When you recognize "the opportunity cost of being human has fundamentally changed," the solution is structural. You don't fight the current. You build a dam.

This is the same move I've made with other reframes. People think "I'm tired of AI" — the real issue is they're scared of it. Here, people think "I lack discipline" — the real issue is that AI has changed the underlying economics of being present.

The scary thing is that the very people who succeed most at becoming AI-capable face the greatest risk. If you've fully embraced the teammate mindset, if you feel the pain of idle agents, if you're keeping the GPUs full — you are precisely the person for whom the opportunity cost of dinnertime is highest.

This is how you end up with GPUs full and humanity thinning. Not because you're evil. Not because you stopped caring. Because the system rewards what is measurable in real time, and the most important parts of your life are not real-time measurable.

The Cultural Evidence Is Everywhere

Look around. The signals are hard to miss. Ask your most AI-advanced friend if they disagree.

Even Sam Altman — who has been vocal about calling the neglect of loved ones "a very stupid tradeoff" — bought a ranch in Napa with no cell phone service just to have a physical barrier between himself and the pull. (Think about that for a second. The CEO of OpenAI had to purchase a $15 million forced-disconnection device.) And he still says his daily routine has "fallen to crap."

These aren't cautionary tales about workaholism. These are structural symptoms. When the returns on work compound faster than ever, when agents run while you sleep, when every hour away from your keyboard is a hundred hours of potential output evaporating — the gravitational pull toward productivity becomes almost impossible to resist through willpower alone.

Christensen saw this pattern among his HBS classmates in 2010 and described it as "people allocating fewer and fewer resources to the things they would have once said mattered most." Sixteen years later, AI has amplified that allocation failure by orders of magnitude.

But here's what the math will never change:

No model can be a husband to my wife. No model can be a father to my daughters. No model can live my life for me.

If the cost of protecting those responsibilities has gone up, then I need a stronger commitment mechanism — not just a stronger will.

The Odysseus Contract

What do you do when the math is working against you?

You do what Odysseus did.

In Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus knows he'll sail past the Sirens — creatures whose song is so beautiful that every sailor who hears it steers toward the rocks and drowns. Odysseus doesn't try to resist through willpower. He doesn't say, "I'm disciplined enough to hear the song and not steer." He knows better. Instead, he has his crew bind him to the mast before the singing starts. He makes a structural commitment that holds even when his in-the-moment desire screams otherwise.

That's what I think the AI age requires. Not more discipline. An Odysseus Contract — a binding commitment you make before the sirens of productivity start singing, that holds even when every fiber of your being says "just one more hour."

Last week, I offered "Big Rocks Before Bots" — pre-allocate your reclaimed time to what matters. That's still true. But it's the what. The Odysseus Contract is the how. It's the binding mechanism that makes the pre-allocation stick when the incentives are screaming at you to defect.

Here's what this looks like in practice:

1. Make the commitment costly to break.

A calendar block is easy to move. An Odysseus Contract isn't. Tell your spouse: "Every Tuesday and Thursday, I'm offline by 6 PM. If I'm not, call me on it." Tell your team: "I don't respond to messages between 7 PM and 7 AM." Make it public. Make it accountable. Make it embarrassing to violate. (Odysseus didn't quietly ask his crew to maybe remind him. He had them tie ropes.)

2. Remove the choice from the moment of temptation.

Altman bought a ranch with no cell service. That's an Odysseus Contract. You might not need a ranch — but you might need to leave your phone in the car during dinner. Or set a screen-time lock that you can't override. Or give your spouse the password to your Do Not Disturb settings. The point is: don't rely on yourself to make the right choice in the moment. Design the moment so the choice is already made.

3. Name the exchange rate explicitly.

Write this down somewhere you'll see it: "Every hour I spend with my [kids/spouse/in prayer/at the gym] costs me X units of AI-augmented output. I am choosing to pay that price because [reason]." This sounds clinical, but that's the point. Christensen's insight is that we make these tradeoffs unconsciously. Making the math explicit is itself a form of pre-commitment — you can't un-see the calculation once you've named it, and naming it forces you to decide whether you actually believe what you say you believe.

4. Build an accountability loop that matches the speed of the temptation.

Christensen's whole point is that career feedback is fast and family feedback is slow. Build yourself a faster feedback loop for the things that matter. My weekly integrity check — "Did AI help me become more of what I say I value?" — is one version. But you might need something faster. A daily 2-minute check-in with your spouse: Did you feel my presence today? A nightly gut-check: Did my daughters get my attention or my residue? That's a quarterly review compressed to 24 hours. It won't wait twenty years to tell you the truth.

Back to the Couch

Christensen spent an hour every night at Oxford reading, thinking, and praying about his purpose — while the pressure to study econometrics was immense. He later called it the single most useful thing he ever learned. He was building his own Odysseus Contract before anyone had a name for it: a pre-commitment to presence and purpose that held even when the incentives pulled hard toward productivity.

I think about that a lot, sitting on my couch.

The question has never been whether I love the woman sitting next to me. The question is whether I've reckoned with the fact that AI has made it more expensive to be with her — in raw economic terms — than at any point in human history. And whether I'm willing to bind myself to the mast anyway.

Christensen watched his Harvard classmates "allocate fewer and fewer resources to the things they would have once said mattered most." He couldn't have known that fifteen years later, a technology would arrive that would make that pattern not just worse, but exponentially worse. That the same tool that gives us superhuman productivity would quietly raise the cost of being human.

I don't have this figured out. I want to be honest about that. I'm writing this as someone who feels the pull every single night, not as someone who's conquered it. But I do think naming it matters. When you realize the struggle isn't about discipline — it's about economics — you stop beating yourself up and start building structures.

The opportunity cost of being human has never been higher. And it's only going up.

The question isn't just whether you can produce more. It's whether, after all that producing, you're becoming more of what you value.

And what you're willing to bind yourself to in order to make sure you do.

Related: Are You More of What You Value?
Related: Do You Feel the Pain of Idle Agents?
Related: Clay Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life? (HBR)

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