Every productivity bro wants to automate. Every founder's building some "this saves you 10 hours a week" thing. Me? I just want to feel something again.
Somewhere between my tenth Zapier workflow and the fifth time a Notion template promised to "fix my life," I realized: I don't want more automation. I want fewer things that need automating.
Because let's be real — the best parts of life aren't efficient. They're not trackable. And they definitely don't run on schedule.
Take restaurants.
Earlier, there used to be a menu. Now it's a QR code and a server who's too busy to look up.
But when I go to a restaurant, I don't want to scan anything. I want to talk to the chef. I want to tell him what I'm in the mood for. And I want him to tell me what I should eat. That's romance. That's real UX. Not this soulless, WiFi-dependent PDF pretending to be hospitality.
When I built our AI inbox agent, I didn't want it to just send me summaries. I wanted it to call me — like a friend, like a bandhu, like a slightly dramatic Punjabi concierge who knows when I'm procrastinating and says: "Bhai, just read this one. The rest can wait."
I want automation to serve my soul, not replace it. Because some things deserve the manual touch:
- Writing a birthday message
- Saying Waheguru without a calendar nudge
- Giving feedback with your eyes, not emojis
- Calling instead of DMing
- Sitting with a problem — not just solving it fast
Every time I think of automating more, I come back to one line in my head:
Let AI make it easier. But don't let it make you numb.
I'm building tools, sure. But I'm also holding space — for the chaos, for the poems, for the pauses. Because not everything needs to be fast. Some things just need to be felt.