Everybody has something to say about AI right now.

But there’s one thing I haven’t heard anyone talk about yet, and it has been stuck in my head for weeks.

So now we’re going to talk about it.

We Were Built for More Than This

Here’s the thing that got me started down this rabbit hole.

There’s a stat floating around that medieval peasants had roughly 150 days off per year. At first, that seems kind of insane – that’s more than HALF of the time!

Now – that statistic does need to come with the caveat that this only included work they did for their landlords/etc (and they still had to come home and do the domestic work which was WAY more than it is now because they had to weave baskets and make cheese and carve spoons and do all kinds of things).

But there’s something to it, and it’s kind of wild when you think about it.

But – feeling like this was still pretty nebulous, I went looking for something more concrete and found a University of Cambridge study on hunter gatherer tribes in the Philippines who were still living their traditional lifestyle.

These people sustained everything they needed in about 15 to 20 hours a week. The rest of their time was spent socializing, resting, and just… living.

(I mean… holy crap!!!! We are doing something WRONG!)

The study also looked at neighboring tribes who had adopted agriculture – same people, same culture, just focused on agriculture instead of hunting and gathering and it blew my mind but they found those people worked 10 more hours a week to sustain the same life.

More technology. More work. Not less.

Now – I’m not here to sit here and say hunter-gatherer life was easy. Far from it, and I am super aware of the fact that life as a HG was rough, precarious, dangerous, and SHORT.

But the point here is this – it goes to show that we were meant for a life with less… grind.

That pattern? It goes a lot further than farming.

The Washing Machine Didn’t Free Anyone

Before the washing machine existed, doing laundry for a family took literal days. Slapping laundry on rocks, boiling it, the whole thing. It was basically a part-time job by itself.

(Side note if you’ve never watched it, go watch Tales of the Green Valley which is a part of the BBC Farm Series, it will show you the drudgery that is laundry back in the day!!)

And before all that effort was required? The expectations around clean clothing (and how a housewife might spend her time) were completely different. Spot cleaning. Wearing things multiple times. Heavy use of aprons.

Then came the washing machine.

And yay, our lives got way less hard!

But… but but.

Did we get our days back? Nope. We got daily laundry, giant overflowing closets, delicate fabrics that need special treatment, and somehow, even higher standards than before.

We’re still busy and we’re still scrambling. Now it’s just… new and different things that we have to do as parents/housewives/housepeople/whatever.

That’s not efficiency. That’s a raised bar.

And here’s what really gets me. Think about what we’ve piled onto domestic life since then. Pinterest-worthy everything. Smash cakes and fancy birthday parties every year. The perfect gym body, the perfect meal on the table (and definitely different meals every day, never repeating), elaborate packed school lunches, fit in between all the sports practices and school events and PTA meetings and holy cow I am feeling stressed out just WRITING this.

The washing machine could have given women a whole extra day of leisure. Instead, it just changed what “enough” looked like.

A Few More Examples You’ll Recognize

Cell phones. I became a parent in 2006 and I swore my kids wouldn’t have one until they could pay for it themselves, same way I had to work for a pager in the nineties. But I had no idea that society would completely restructure itself around cell phone ownership. Now if a teenage girl pulls over on the side of the road, nobody stops to help because everyone assumes she has a phone. My 14-year-old has a cell phone. All my kids do. I caved, and honestly? You kind of have to.

Calculators. Being a banker used to be high-skill, high-trust work. Mental math, precision, real expertise. My great-grandfather supported an entire family as a banker, but when I went to get a bank job myself, it paid barely above minimum wage (because fact: it’s not as hard now!). Think of how different a job as an accountant would have been 200 years ago vs today. But guess what… we’re still doing the jobs… they just mean less. The technology didn’t free anyone up to do more meaningful work. It just commoditized the skill and moved the efficiency gain somewhere else.

Cars. Oh my gosh think about this for a minute… how motor vehicles completely have changed the landscape of EVERYTHING. Towns used to be built around walking distance. Everything you needed had to be close enough to reach on foot or by horse. At minimum, there wasn’t an expectation that you could, for example, go to an appointment in the city 100 miles away with two days’ notice.

Our entire society is built around that assumption, and opting out is genuinely difficult.

Every single time. New technology arrives. We absorb the efficiency. The bar raises. And then we wonder why we’re burned out.

Okay, So What Does This Have to Do With AI?

I want to be clear: I am not an AI hater. I use it a lot. It saves me massive amounts of time with this podcast, with my freelance work, with my baking business. I genuinely think it’s an incredible tool.

When I first heard of AI, I thought it was scary but cool… and I thought how nice it would be to have what was essentially a life assistant to help make things easier for me in my life.

Which… I’d guess a lot of people thought.

I thought AI could create leisure for me in my life – as the overworked, single mom working multiple jobs trying to keep the roof over our head that I bought when I was making considerably more money (lol!)

But here’s the part nobody is thinking about.

You’ve probably heard the example that one person using AI can now do the work of five people.

But – in real life, that does NOT mean five people working at 20% capacity and then going home early with the same paycheck.

It means one person doing the work of five, getting paid like one person. And the other four are just… out of luck, I guess.

My previous business, creating digital graphics, was largely taken out by AI. The demand collapsed. I can’t continue working in that industry because of it. So I’m not speaking theoretically here.

AI is here and it is raising the bar in massive, culture-shifting ways we can’t even comprehend yet.

Personally – I choose to look at this as an opportunity and see how I can potentially figure out how to gain from it, instead of lose.

So can you.

Where the Productivity Gain Actually Goes

Let’s talk about the productivity gain here.

I work as a freelance digital content manager, and AI has genuinely transformed how fast I can work. Projects that used to take weeks and cost clients $3,000 to $4,000? I can build one in a couple of days or even hours now with AI’s help.

But I’m not working less. I’m giving my client what she’s paying for (my time!), which is the right thing to do. She’s the one who benefits from the upstream productivity, because she’s the business owner.

That’s the pattern. The efficiency gain flows upward. Always.

Whether it’s a corporation cutting a team of 10 down to 2 because AI filled the gap, or a freelancer producing twice the output in the same hours, the person at the top of the triangle is the one who wins. The CEO. The stockholders. The business owner.

Which… actually? That’s kind of important information for us – read on.

Why Your Food Business Is Actually in a Good Spot

Here’s where I want to give you a second to breathe, because there’s genuinely good news here for cottage bakers, food truck owners, farmstand vendors, and anyone else selling real food to real people in their community.

You win twice – because in your business, YOU are at the top of the triangle, AND your product cannot be replicated by AI. Not anytime soon.

The handmade food, the human hands, the face-to-face conversation at the farmers market, the relationships, the local trust you’ve built, none of that is something a machine can do. And the more digital everything gets, the more people are going to crave exactly what you offer.

So here’s what you do:

Use AI as a tool – absolutely. Use it to brainstorm, to optimize your listings, to help you get found online, to process data and ideas faster. Use it to help you stage product photos by generating ideas you can then recreate yourself. Use it to schedule content and keep your marketing consistent.

Do not use it to create logos, photos, and posts. And I’m not even going to rant about data centers and whatnot because I’d be a hypocrite if I did.

But purely from a business standpoint – don’t do it, and here’s why.

I’m already seeing pushback against obvious AI content. AI-generated logos, AI-written posts, AI graphics.

To the extent I’m going to do an entire podcast episode about it soon, I think.

The funny thing is a year ago people couldn’t spot it as easily. Now? I’ve watched fully AI’d posts from well meaning entrepreneurs get no engagement at all because now people can feel the machine behind it.

That resistance is only going to grow.

As local food businesses, you are going to be on the right side of that shift.

So yes – use AI. Allow it to help you be more efficient and multiply YOU (because it’s one of the best ways, IMO, for us to reclaim our time).

Just don’t use it to replace you. Your voice, your face, your food, that’s what people are actually buying.

So What Do We Do With All This?

I don’t think we’re going to be able to change how society absorbs technology at a big-picture level. People are gonna people. The bar is probably going to keep rising.

But on an individual level? As business owners? As humans?

We actually get to decide.

We get to be the person at the top of the triangle. We get to be the one who benefits from the efficiency instead of being displaced by it.

And we get to choose, at least sometimes, to let the time savings actually be time savings instead of just piling on more output.

(That’s definitely going to be my main choice)

AI could mean a four-hour workday with the same output as eight. Whether that actually happens for you is something you get to have some say in, especially when you’re your own boss.

My homework for you this week isn’t really homework. Just this: notice where the bar was raised in your life without you choosing it. Where did something that was supposed to make things easier just make things more complicated? You don’t have to fix it. Just notice it.

That awareness is where it starts.

And if you want help building a local food business that actually works with your real life, bethanyarcher.com/start is the place to begin building your online presence and get your marketing dialed in so you can scale it up.