In 2024, I went on a work trip to Switzerland — more specifically a city called Uster. This work trip was 3-ish weeks (though I stayed extra for a little vacation). I felt it impractical to pack 4 weeks of clothes into a suitcase that I was going to lug to Europe. With the assumption that the hotel or at least the city would have a coin laundromat, I packed a weeks worth of clothes.

You can imagine my dismay to find that there are nearly no laundromats in not just my hotel or the city of Uster but the whole of Switzerland. (Note: you can find a laundromat in the northern part of Zurich, and it’s decent.) In my research of talking to locals and conjecture, there are two scenarios in which one will need to do laundry in Switzerland:

• You are a citizen of Switzerland. In this case, you nearly always have access to a laundry machine. Rental complexes must provided one. Home owners will likely have one.
• You are an employee at Money Inc. coming to Switzerland to do your money job. You likely have access to some piece of plastic that lets you get whatever you want.

I’m not the first one, sadly. I was sort of the second one though. As such, I did find one avenue to get my clothes cleaned: the hotel laundry service. Done and dusted right? Well, not for nothing, stuff is expensive in Switzerland — especially when it is adjacent to the business sector. So, to have the laundry service of my hotel clean a t-shirt of mine would have been 7 CHF (~10 USD). Now, I’m sure they would have steamed and pressed my tie-dye shirt with an embroidered skull on it. However, I felt a moral obligation to not give anyone 2 cool $5s to wash my t-shirt. Even though I well could have charged it to my room and my company would have paid for it, I just couldn’t do it.

So, I went to the local grocery chain and I bought a bottle of detergent. I quickly googled how to hand wash my clothes. In the bathtub of my hotel, I washed my clothes.

• I filled the tub.
• I soaked the clothes.
• I worked the water in.
• I added the detergent.
• I swirled the hulking mass of wet textiles around.
• I wrung and rinsed.
• I wrung and rinsed.
• I changed the water and did it again.
• I wrung all the water out I could.

This ordeal took me about 3-4 hours, and then it all had to be hung to dry. To be completely honest, it was fun. I was homesteading; I was tilling my land and doing what the pioneers did. Well… at least the first time. The second and third had much, much less novelty. On a call with my partner later that night, I claimed, “I would have invented the washing machine.” That’s to say, I wouldn’t have stood the work and humdrum of hand washing. I would have taken hint from the other industrialists around me and made a spinning drum with a water hookup. The washing machine is such a wonderful aid in our lives. It frees up so much time. Time, I can spend writing my blog to my avid reader.

While I wouldn’t say I hated hand washing clothes (my desk job makes my body often need if not want some movement in it), I had a strong inclination to not do it. Something I did hate, and only did out of necessity, was writing papers. When I was in school and university, I hung my whole identity on STEM. So if it wasn’t math or science, I loathed it. Every paper I ever wrote was done in one try with no editing.

So, had someone come along with a tool that could, say, generate a well written paper about anything . I have no doubts that I would have been very tempted by this tool. ( I would give myself the credit that I’ve always been a purist before a optimizer. I would never cheat on an assignment. Moreover, I had an obsession with doing it right. The hope being that I would learn the lesson the teacher was teaching. ) Imagine the deal, for 30 minutes of prompting and editing you can get a good if not great grade and have wayy more time to go do what a person in school really wants to do — not be in school. I would like to entreat upon you 2 reasons why this is a bad deal.

First, let’s look the tasks and outputs at hand. When your hamper is full or your drawers are empty, you need to wash your clothes. The task is to wash these clothes, and the point of the task is to make clean clothes. So, you can automate this task and get the output with way less effort. Your teacher assigned you a paper, so you must create a paper to complete this assignment. So, you can automate this task and get the output with way less effort. WRONG. This is an extremely harmful misconception of modern output measured schooling. The purpose of an assignment isn’t for you to make the work. No one will ever read your paper on The Great Gatsby — that’s not the point. The purpose of an assignment is for you to learn: learn the material, learn how to form an argument, learn how to pull apart a book or an idea. In automating the thinking out of the task you have starved yourself of the entire reason you were given it.

Second, there has been a good thing about the arrival of AI, the harbinger of death for original thought. We have had to think about what it means to contribute to something — why are we here? If AI can write a book or a web app or an image of a goose on a bike, what is left for little ole humans to do? You can go back and check, but I don’t think a single housewife has ever been cited missing the use of a washboard (or rocks in the river). But when I’m prompting AI to learn about a new technology and it dumps out an example app better than I could have, I feel a little sad about it. So, why?

AI still isn’t human, so it’s still important for us to be human. Making is so important to being a human — leaving a mark. Making something for a friend. Making something for yourself. Making something for humanity. As I said in a recent post, AI is good, but not great. Great media, pieces that make you cry (laughing or otherwise) take a long time and alot of work. I don’t mean work in. I mean work in preparation. Social media may have obscured this fact, but movements of greatness, even brief, have thousands and thousands of hours backing them. And AI is making those thousands of hours seem less and less worth it.

Long before AI came about, I had the tools to automate texting to my mom. My mom texts me, “Good morning,” each morning and, “Sleep well, I love you” each night. What a bitch, am I right? Well before I got my first tablespoon of maturity, I kinda thought so. The gall to want to talk to me every day! Don’t you know I’m desperately trying to define myself without you — I digress. With some Apple Shortcuts and a decent bank of rewordings of “I love mum. Have a great day!”, I would be off to the races. This even got to the point of flow design before I realized, do I want a program texting my mom for me? Imagine the crushing sadness that she’d feel when she’d find out.

That said, it’s important to let work be done for you. Delegation is a very important skill. But you can’t delegate away your own purpose. So, text your mom, write your papers, be a human, but let the machines wash the clothes.