Gluttons for Punishment

Rethinking what hard work looks like

When I first worked at MediaCom a lady used to come around at 7 every night with a trolley full of the day’s unsold sandwiches and Club biscuits to provide dinner for those still at their desks.

It was fucking bleak.

It was also a badge of honour. I reckon I ate at least one of those sandwiches a week for about 2 years. “Seeing the sandwich lady” earned you membership to the club of people deemed to be high performers or ‘going places’.

The work I was doing between 5.30-7 was utterly inconsequential -following up invoice queries or loading campaigns onto booking systems - but the act of doing it marked me out as someone of value.

Collective Masochism

Ask someone in advertising what "hard work" looks like, and the answer will likely involve long hours, diligent research, endless redrafts, and attention to detail. We admire the people who devour theory, who can recall obscure case studies at will, who bury themselves in the grind of a brief and emerge, eventually, with something brilliant.

Even in an era of big public pronouncements about work-life balance and mental health, working weekends is still common, and worn half-proudly like a battle scar. People who leave a bit early to live their real lives are treated with a bit of suspicion and contempt.

With a £20 a month ChatGPT subscription I now have a tool on my laptop and my phone that can digest vast amounts of information in seconds, surface insights, suggest strategic opportunities, and complete mundane bits of admin.

In an industry running on wafer-thin margins staffed by people buckling under the weight of their inbox you’d think the champagne corks should be popping. Instead, I hear suggestions - or read outright declarations - that AI-produced work is crap, that using it is lazy. That it’s undermining the "real" work.

Why?

In part I think this stems from a (reasonable) suspicion that somewhere a middle-aged white man in a navy suit is cooking up a way to use it to make you or someone you know redundant.

But also I think it’s because the advertising industry places a moral value on effort. Hard work isn’t just a means to an end—it’s a virtue in itself. The hours you put in, the depth of your reading, the pain you endure all become markers of worth. In this worldview, the use of AI—by making some of this effort unnecessary—looks suspiciously like cheating.

The implication is that if something is easier, it must be lesser. If it doesn’t involve struggle, it isn’t real work.

But should we really be measuring effort in units of exhaustion?

What are you afraid of?

If you take it as a given that our industry is full of people who like to work hard and want to create things they’re proud of, then AI creates the opportunity to shift massive amounts of our time and effort toward higher-order thinking: strategy, storytelling, creative problem-solving.

But that’s only possible if we’re collectively willing to accept that creative thinking is as valuable as laptop-based grind. And I suspect that, deep down, many people don’t quite believe that.

Because thinking—true, open-ended, creative thinking—often looks like not working. It looks like sitting in silence. Going for a walk. Doodling on a notepad. Talking through an idea in circles until something clicks. It doesn’t come with the same visible signals of effort as combing through 300-page reports or refining a spreadsheet at midnight.

So here’s the challenge: If you bristle at the growing use of AI, ask yourself why. Do you genuinely believe that manual research and long hours make the work better? Are you just nostalgic for the suffering? Or jealous that the generation below us won’t need to go through the same struggle?

Or have you, like so many of us, absorbed the idea that difficulty is proof of value?

And if AI gives you more time to think—to properly, deeply think—do you trust yourself to use it well? Or are you more comfortable in the safety of the grind?

Because in an industry augmented by the adoption of AI, the real question isn’t whether it’s cheating. It’s whether we have the confidence to stop measuring our value in struggle, and start measuring it in ideas.

Let me know what you think.

Greg