The Jewish Case for Inefficiency
I keep thinking about this question when it comes to everything we do that requires us to build strength.. not just physical but mental as well
What if some of the inefficiencies we’re trying so hard to eliminate are actually good for us?
I spend a lot of my time looking at organizations and seeing things that could work better.
A process has too many steps.
Someone is doing manually what technology could handle.
People are sitting in meetings they don’t need to be in.
My first thought is always:
There has to be a better way.
And most of the time, there is.
But lately I’ve been thinking about the value of inefficiency
Sometimes the inefficient way is where the growth happens.
A student struggles through a book instead of reading the summary.
Someone wrestles with a problem before asking AI for the answer.
A new employee makes a mistake and has to figure out why.
A group sits around a table debating something that could probably have been resolved my looking up an answer
A parent watches a child struggle with something they could easily fix for them.
None of those are particularly efficient if you abide by the true definition of efficient.
But something happens along the way.
We learn.
We think.
We develop judgment.
We understand other people.
We become better at something.
And sometimes we become a little better ourselves.
That’s becoming much more important as AI makes the efficient path easier and easier to choose.
AI can summarize the book.
Write the first draft.
Solve the problem.
Give us the answer.
And I think that’s world changing
But there’s a critical distinction I think matters enormously:
We should eliminate friction that wastes human capacity.
We should be careful about eliminating struggle that builds it.
Judaism has understood something about this for a very long time.
Once a week, we have Shabbat.
We stop.
From a purely efficiency-driven perspective, that’s ridiculous. (no offense)
There is work to do.
Emails to answer.
Things to build.
Problems to solve.
Yet Judaism deliberately creates a space where productivity isn’t the goal.
Maybe that’s not inefficient at all.
Maybe it’s a reminder that efficiency was never supposed to be the goal in the first place.
The goal is what efficiency makes possible.
More time for people.
More room to think.
More opportunity to learn.
More capacity to create, connect and grow.
As AI gets better, we’re going to have more opportunities to remove friction from our lives.
We should.
But we’re also going to need the wisdom to recognize which friction is actually doing something for us.
Because sometimes the long way is wasteful.
And sometimes the long way is how we learn.
The challenge is knowing the difference.
