work friction and automation
Today, I asked myself what exactly bothers me so much in how streamlined large parts of my work are. Naming conventions of file names are useful and good, but I mean the boilerplate text blocks we copy into emails, and our separate, completely autogenerated emails I barely have to edit or not at all, just hit send on. Isn’t it convenient?
For every unusual case that deviates from the daily repetitive planned business and texts, my coworkers always want to develop a new text we’ll use in emails together and save it for everyone to use in future cases. Every single time - to be prepared, to expand the ever-growing library of boilerplate so they don’t have to write on the spot and everything is cohesive.
I understand their motivation: They want as little hassle, friction and insecurity as possible in their work. It feels safe and good to always have the same buttons to press, every file to be the same name, all email texts already prepared for them and for every outlier to have a pre-written response in a library they can use. They struggle with writing emails, even more so if in English, and it takes them a long time to do it. Copying a text block that was declared correct and valid to use is a big convenience to them, and I understand that. They are scared of sending something that is accidentally incorrect, incomplete, or otherwise lacking. They also like the idea of uniformity and an entire team acting like a singular entity towards others, instead of everyone doing things a little differently.
Unfortunately for me (who has less of a problem with writing and English), the ever decreasing friction and increasing automation actually decreases my job satisfaction. In a job where I barely have to talk to anyone or do things my way (no customer-facing job, almost no coworker interaction necessary to do the work, data entry, autogenerated prefilled emails and texts) it’s exactly the outliers, edge cases, odd requests and other things that do not fit the mold that are the only chance at my job to show my humanity and skills. You could say that everywhere there isn’t artificial intelligence or databases, I try to bring my emotional intelligence.
Those unsolved, new cases enable me to think about a problem or request and formulate the solution. I have a choice over my words and how to explain something or how to address someone. It activates my brain that has been put to sleep by just clicking buttons and copy-pasting the same things over and over again in a form of digital assembly line work. I enjoy being formally informal: still writing appropriately for the work, but not having a text chunk I am supposed to use. It makes the whole thing more deliberate, makes me feel more connected to the task at hand and the person who will receive the email. I become invested in providing good service to the other person, whatever it might be about.
Meanwhile with autogenerated emails and agreed-upon text blocks, I am disconnected. I feel un-personed, robotic, not genuine; I become an output machine, a mouthpiece for a vague entity. I care a lot less about the outcome and whether my reply was truly helpful. It also somewhat feels like disrespecting someone, depending on what it is. With someone asking for guidance or a document, slapping them with a generic response feels like I am swatting them away like an annoying fly.
Makes me a little uneasy seeing companies wanting to expand this into the rest of society - we are now encouraged to just press buttons and have lots generated and done for us, especially replies to something, even privately. I think if I wasn’t working this job, I’d feel more neutral about that and appreciate the convenience, but as someone who has been doing that for four years now, I know the feeling of awe and convenience is rather short-lived; at least for some of us, as my coworkers have no problem with it, which is fine. I once lamented the lack of agency within the job to them, and they were surprised and said I should go work at a startup then if I want that (lol).
The solution is obviously not to change the job itself, it’s for me to leave. It’s the wrong fit. This job is simply one that can be automated pretty well and will disappear in the future and is good for people who don’t want that much personal involvement and problem solving in their work and who see formulating thoughts and solutions as a needless hassle. They don’t want to have to put parts of themselves into the job.
That sounds harsh and judgmental, but isn’t meant like that; it’s a fair standard to have for a job, even if just for phases in life that are otherwise stressful and challenging in private. I enjoyed the above aspects more when I was still very sick and untreated/undiagnosed, for example, or when I was settling into my parttime degree. I recently even talked to my boss about how I always had to take it easier when I was sick, so I was grateful for some conveniences in the job that I have now outgrown, and she said “Understandable. It’s like you had to drive with the handbrake on.”
So I get it, but unfortunately it’s not for me anymore. And well, I guess I hope everyone sending and receiving AI generated sentences in the future doesn’t start to feel the way I do.
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Published 06 Aug, 2025