The age of AI: Why hustle culture is a strategic dead end
Soo Kim
For decades, corporate ethos has been defined by a clean, singular metric: efficiency. In the case of South Korea, the nation built a global economic powerhouse on the back of the “fast follower” model: taking a proven technology or successful market strategy and executing faster and with greater precision than competitors. Diligence, as a result, became a reliable national defense mechanism.
Today, that hyper-drive has evolved into the cultural phenomenon known as "god-saeng." For the younger generation, “living like a god” is equated to a life of hyper-optimization. Miracle mornings, productivity hacks and the performance of perfect discipline.
From the perspective of someone who spent years in the U.S. national security and intelligence communities analyzing how power and influence are actually wielded, there’s a brooding disaster in this trend. Many professionals — in Korea and elsewhere — are over-optimizing for a world that is rapidly evolving. Diligence and determination are never a bad thing, but overcorrection runs the risk of strategic paralysis. Ironically, by doubling down on hustle and strict routines, we are training ourselves to be the very things that artificial intelligence (AI) is designed to replace. We’re effectively trading our most valuable human asset — the ability to pivot — for a very efficient and perfectly scripted lifestyle.
In the age of generative intelligence, efficiency is no longer a competitive advantage but a commodity. In the race toward smooth productivity, the human will lose to the machine. True power in this age belongs to those who have the peripheral vision to determine when a routine has become a constraint and the agility to know when to step off that track to forge a new path.
This requires a rethink of how we view friction. We typically see friction as a bad thing. It’s a nuisance. It slows things down, creates bumps and inhibits progress. But in human life, the absence of friction paints a different story. If your day is so optimized that every minute is accounted for, you’re not just being disciplined — you may effectively be deleting luck from your life. We may think we’re eliminating time waste when in fact we’re blocking out the very pivots and breakthroughs that only happen when things actually don’t go according to our plans.
The god-saeng movement is our search for a default setting — the script that promises success and the very breakthroughs we so yearn for if we follow the steps. But isn’t following someone else’s script the opposite of exercising true power and agency?
Real power lies in the ability to pivot. It’s in the ability to observe a changing landscape and the decisiveness to orient yourself toward a new direction before most people have even realized that the map has entirely changed. Running full-speed on a treadmill produces a rush of adrenaline, but you’re still in the same spot once you get off the treadmill.
Which brings us to the convergence with AI. If our value is determined by how we can follow and diligently execute a pre-determined routine, we’re competing with an algorithm on the grounds of volume and speed. This is a losing strategy.
What we’re seeing today is more than just a technological shift; it’s a foundational change in what society values. Perhaps a different way of looking at the situation is that we’re moving from an era that rewarded labor and volume to one that rewards judgment and differentiation. The prize no longer goes to the person who works the hardest; it goes to the person who can make the best high-leverage decisions. And ironically, these types of breakthroughs call for a certain kind of mental space that a hyper-scheduled, hyper-configured life actively discourages.
The most effective people I’ve encountered — whether in the halls of the CIA or in boardrooms — are often “inefficient” in very specific ways. They might be the ones who intentionally ignore their notifications for a few hours or block out the entire morning to sit with a complex problem, free from the constant pingings of alerts and news cycles. This isn’t a lapse in work ethic but a refusal to let the “urgent” drown out what’s truly important. It’s a deliberate choice to reserve their time and mental energy for the most decisive. The most valuable asset isn’t their time but their ability to see what others miss.
In the current professional landscape, maintaining an edge requires the realization that “perfect maintenance” is not the same thing as effective performance. Hyper-optimization merely provides high-quality training for our eventual replacement. It’s clear that AI can replicate a routine, but can it replace a human “glitch” — that specific, messy intuition that leads to an entirely new way of solving a problem?
It’s worth looking at the “default settings” we’ve accepted and adopted into our lives and determining whether they truly serve us in the long run. When we chase the same certifications, adopt the same workflows or echo the same trending opinions, we’re putting a cap on our own potential. We’re trading away our individual edge for the short-lived comfort of a template path.
To be clear, reclaiming and optimizing “unproductive” space isn’t a sign you’ve lost your discipline. It’s a necessity. But by putting some “friction” back in your life, you’re giving yourself the space to observe what’s actually happening around you. In an era defined by machines, your most valuable moments aren’t the ones checking off a list. They’re the moments when you stop acting as a predictable data point in a system and start deciding which direction actually matters. For you.
Soo Kim is a former CIA analyst and strategic risk consultant, and the host of the YouTube channel @sklucidtv.