The Quiet Collapse of Good Work
AI arrived. Productivity is up. Yet everything feels worse at work.
karmaṇyevādhikāraste mā phaleṣu kadācana mā karmaphalaheturbhūrmā te saṅgo'stvakarmaṇi The Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 2, Verse 47. Thy right is to work only, but never to its fruits; let not the fruit-of-action be thy motive, nor let thy attachment be to inaction.
Lord Krishna said this to Arjuna, a warrior, frozen on a battlefield, paralysed by calculation on what he would lose or gain if he picks up the bow to fight his teachers, relatives and friends standing on the other side, as the enemy. Sound familiar?
This is us right now. The battlefield is a Teams or Slack channel, and nobody's frozen. Everyone’s moving very fast. Just not towards anything they actually care about.
The Start
It starts with a single message from a team-mate. A prototype, a strategy document, an analysis which took days or weeks, produced in an afternoon using AI. The thread goes silent, not in admiration, but into a silence of recalibration. The recalibration of survival.
The New Scoreboard
Everyone knows the new rules.
Whose project made the rest of the team look slow and lazy?
Who got the most visible AI centric initiative?
It’s like people are buying domain names for words that don’t exist yet. Everyone’s busy racing to own territory before anyone else names it. And the tragedy is that the people doing it were once known for their ethics, credibility, and craft. Now they live by a single measure - pace.
And pace is a brutal thing to measure a human being against.
A river moving fast in every direction is a flood.
The Work Became a Move on a Board
Every idea feels like a chess move now. Everything is a strategy to get noticed. Every thought gets filtered through questions, "How does this make me look to the leaders?" , “Do I still matter here?”
This is what happens when people optimise for the scoreboard instead of the work itself. It’s the same mechanism as a writer who chases trending topics instead of the story they actually want to tell.
The Burnout Nobody Has a Name For
Usually, you burnout from too much work or empty work calls. But the new burnout is different. It comes from competition.
Healthy competition is good, don’t get me wrong, but this one, it comes from the particular loneliness of competing with people you once genuinely enjoyed thinking and working alongside.
Fear, when it has nowhere honest to go, becomes competition.
Nobody Here Is the Villain. Not Even the AI.
Nobody sat down one morning and decided to hollow out their team culture. They all just responded to instinct.
The problem is that the definition of team hasn’t been updated. Leadership is still measuring individuals the way it did before AI arrived, which means individuals are optimising on their own at the expense of the whole.
This is how aggression enters a team without anyone intending it. It may look like conflict but it’s actually a withdrawal. Someone going quiet in a meeting, an idea kept close and not shared, a collaboration that quietly stops feeling natural etc.
Do the Work. Drop the Fruit. ✅
The best work almost never comes from the person running fastest. It comes from the person who forgets to check the scoreboard because they are too absorbed in the work itself. This is what we call - flow.
There’s a reason for that. In Vedantic thought, which is my favourite direction to think, the ego, the I-ness, is also the part that gets in the way.
You cannot reach the flow state, which is the whole you, while monitoring how you are performing. When you’re doing something for the numbers, you’re always slightly outside the work, calculating the return, watching yourself, watching your back. But when you’re doing it because it genuinely pulls you, because the creative juice is real, you merge into it and you disappear.
That disappearance is where the best outcomes live.
Things somehow always work out for people who are genuinely absorbed in what they do, who keep showing up, keep noticing, keep being in the right room.
Arjuna’s problem on that battlefield wasn’t cowardice. It was that he had made the outcome the whole point. Krishna’s answer wasn’t to care less either, it was to return his attention to the only thing actually in his hands, the quality of the work itself.
Do the work because it’s the right work. Let the fruits follow.
We are Arjuna right now. Frozen yet frantic, in front of a battlefield we’re calculating rather than engaging. The flow will find us the moment we stop performing for the scoreboard and start focusing on the task at hand.
karmaṇyevādhikāraste mā phaleṣu kadācana
mā karmaphalaheturbhūrmā te saṅgo’stvakarmaṇi
Your right is to the work. The scoreboard will catch up 🪷.
Bhagavad Gita 2.47. Verse and translation sourced from shlokam.org