I keep coming back to this question lately. Art, cooking, anything that gets created. When something takes effort, we instinctively value it more. We sense the time, the patience, the mistakes behind it. Effort feels like proof that someone stayed with the process long enough for meaning to form.

But now that more things are automated, machine-made, or even AI-made, I wonder what actually changes. Is it the work itself that loses its essence, or just our way of relating to it? Maybe effort was never the point on its own. Maybe it was simply how we learned to recognize care.