Integral Business Articles

There is a quiet exhaustion settling into the modern workplace. It is not the exhaustion of physical labor or even the typical burnout of long hours. It is the weight of constant, unbuffered decision-making.

For decades, the primary constraint on progress was execution. If a project stalled, it was usually because of tangible scarcity: not enough budget, not enough time, or not enough people. That friction was often unwelcome, but it served a vital, hidden purpose.

Over the last year, AI-enabled tools have radically accelerated the pace of work. Tasks that once took days now compress into seconds. Drafts appear instantly. Cycles shorten. We expected this speed to make work lighter, but for many of us, the opposite has happened.