We live in a bubble.
As technologists, we're obsessed with non-linear work. Automation. Exponential curves. Making everything faster, more efficient, infinitely scalable.
But here's what we miss: some work will always be linear.
When my water pipes need replacing, it's still four people working for a day. A digging machine might speed things up a bit, but it's fundamentally the same job. One day of work.
Having coffee with a colleague? An hour. Something that can't be accelerated. Something you wouldn't want to accelerate.
There's a hard limit to what can be digitized.
Digital is purely administrative. It facilitates. It connects. But it doesn't replace the core work that actually matters; the human work, the physical work.
Think about it: why do we even need all this digital infrastructure? What's the real core of digital technology?
Connection, maybe. But even that has limits.
We keep trying to optimize everything, to make everything non-linear and scalable. But the most meaningful work remains stubbornly linear. Building something with your hands, solving a real problem for a real person, having an actual conversation.
And that's not a bug. It's a feature.