I build LLMs for a living. Here's why I wrote a book about slowing down.

My job is to make machines think faster.

I work daily with large language models and generative AI systems. I fine-tune, optimize, reduce latency, eliminate friction. My entire professional value is measured in throughput, tokens per second, inference speed.

And then one evening I noticed something: it was 11 PM. I had been "productive" for 14 hours straight. My thumb was scrolling through my phone — screen off. Just muscle memory. My brain was too fried to even choose what to look at, but it kept reaching for stimulation anyway.

That was the moment I realized something was deeply wrong. Not just with me — with how we, as people who build fast systems, have started treating ourselves like fast systems.

The paradox nobody talks about in tech

We spend our careers removing friction, automating repetitive tasks, optimizing pipelines. The promise is always the same: "this will save you time."

But somehow, the more time-saving tools we build and adopt, the less time we feel we have. We're busier than ever. More anxious than ever. More connected than ever, and more exhausted than ever.

I started digging into the neuroscience behind this. What I found changed how I think about work, attention, and time.

The ancient Greeks had two completely different words for time:

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  Kronos — chronological, measurable, ticking time. The kind you track in Jira tickets and calendar blocks.


• 
  Kairos — qualitative, dense, meaningful time. The kind where an hour feels like a minute because you're fully present.

Modern knowledge work, and especially tech culture, has become obsessed with Kronos. We fill every second. We context-switch 50 times a day. We treat rest as wasted clock cycles.

But here's what the neuroscience actually says: your brain does its most important work — creativity, memory consolidation, emotional regulation — precisely when you stop optimizing it.

The Default Mode Network (the part of your brain that activates during rest and "mind wandering") is not idle. It's processing. It's connecting dots you couldn't connect while you were sprinting.

We've been so busy optimizing Kronos that we've completely destroyed our Kairos.

What I did about it

I started writing down protocols for myself. Not productivity hacks. Not "wake up at 5 AM" routines. Just practical, neuroscience-backed ways to protect my attention and reclaim some sense of pace in a job that constantly demands more speed.

Things like:

• 
  Monotasking blocks: single-context work sessions where notifications don't exist


• 
  Cognitive cooldowns: intentional transition rituals between deep work and shallow work


• 
  Digital friction by design: making the default action the slow one, not the fast one

The notes grew. I kept refining them. Eventually they became a short book: The Art of Slowing Down in the Age of Hyper-Speed.

Writing it felt deeply ironic — an AI engineer writing a manifesto against the very culture his work accelerates. But that's exactly the point. We're the ones building the machines. We're the ones who should understand, better than anyone, why the human brain can't run like one.

The one thing I'd leave you with

If you work in AI, ML, or any fast-moving area of tech, you probably already feel this tension. The industry screams FASTER every single day. New model, new framework, new benchmark every week.

You don't have to opt out of all of it. But you do have to protect some space for Kairos. Otherwise, you're just a very expensive server running at 99% CPU with no garbage collection.

And we all know what happens to systems with no garbage collection.

Thanks for reading. If this resonated, I'd love to hear how you deal with the pressure to optimize everything — including yourself.