AI is GenX’s Longevity Pill

50 × 2 × 12 × 20 = 24,000

Roughly 50 slides a deck, 2 decks a month, 12 months a year, for 20 years. 24,000 represents the rough career slide count of an average consultant. When I was younger, my colleagues would joke about an internal odometer that every one of us carried, and that hitting 20,000 slides was the human equivalent of rolling 100,000 miles in a car.

I recognize the indignity in reducing 20 years of research and advisory work to a slide count. But it is one of the material realities of knowledge work — and as good a proxy as any for the cumulative wear this job puts on a person. So where does the effort actually go?

Let's reduce knowledge work into two buckets: planning and making.

Junior consultants might spend 20% of their effort planning and 80% making. This makes intuitive sense — short on experience, long on execution, learning by doing and occasionally taking a turn, back tracking and burning the hours on aligning boxes and arrows. It looks something like this:

• 20% Planning

• 80% Making

Over time, seasoned knowledge workers develop a third bucket: Judging. The sense to know what actually works in the real world and what matters to people, because you've seen it for yourself. It is the skill that experience grants freely, and mercifully requires little exertion to use. For old hats, the mix of effort looks something like this:

• 20% Planning

• 50% Making

• 30% Judging

The reality for many seasoned workers, though, is that the making bit is more tiresome now than in our youth. Uncovering the data feels like a shitty flowstate that doesn't end. Squeezing everything that matters onto a single page is an act of contortion. What used to feel like the smooth gliding over the keyboard and trackpad starts to feel like the careful pecks and drags of aging parents.

AI arrived, and its most natural home for knowledge workers was in the Making part. For younger workers, AI is compressing the part of the job they were already good at. Efficient, yes. Career-altering, perhaps. But for those of us further down the road, the effect is something different entirely.

Using AI as the engine for Making doesn't just speed things up. It makes work feel light again. It opens things up — more room to judge, more room to iterate. Changing your mind used to cost something. Now it just costs tokens. That gap between intention and output, which widens stubbornly with age, starts to collapse in a very satisfying way.

For a Gen Xer, AI is not a productivity tool. It's a longevity pill. It may lift all knowledge workers, but for older cohorts it is something more fitting — a complement, not just a boost. It lowers the cost of Making and raises the return on Judging. And somewhere in that rebalancing, knowledge work starts to feel like craft again — the kind where your mind leads and the work follows.