Working in healthcare venture capital is somewhat of a paradox: an industry that’s often behind the curve (healthcare, where we’re still using fax) in a sector that’s barreling ahead (venture capital, where they’re cutting $100 million checks to AI founders).
I’m fortunate to work at a firm and with startups that resist the “growth at all costs” mindset common in the latter side of my world. That discipline is rare — and necessary — in a moment when technological advances are outpacing our ability to govern them (see: AI therapy chatbots).
Bringing these two sides together, one pattern I’m noticing across work, creative industries, and even my personal life is the steady creep of the Jevons Paradox.
In the 19th century, economist William Stanley Jevons observed that as steam engines became more efficient, coal consumption didn’t go down. Instead, it went up. Lowering the cost and effort of using coal simply encouraged more of it. (And since my toddler is having a Thomas the Tank Engine moment, please enjoy the accompanying visual.)
The same thing is happening now. In healthcare, a physician who can streamline appointments with AI won’t see their workload shrink: with shortages, that time is quickly filled with more patients. In tech, cheaper, more efficient AI often drives demand for more products, more features, and more scale.
In other words, the Jevons Paradox shows us that better tools don’t necessarily mean less work. They create room for more.
In terms of how this affects us as individuals, writer and investor
captures the tension well:“This is the paradox of our time: the very tools designed to free us from labor are trapping us in an endless cycle of escalating work. As our productivity increases, our standards and expectations rise even faster, creating a psychological Jevons Paradox that threatens to consume our humanity in the pursuit of ever-greater output. We become victims of our own efficiency.”
This is unfolding at an interesting moment in the cultural narrative around work. We’re past the Girlboss era (although some are attempting a comeback) and trying to find a squishy, comfortable place between quiet quitting and the relentless hustle culture that defines Silicon Valley.
It’s not easy: even in work cultures that claim to value balance, every gain in efficiency risks resetting the baseline for what’s considered “enough” (with a new spin on the resulting burnout: “quiet cracking.”)
We’ve reached a point where the question is no longer how to get more efficient, but what to do with the efficiency once we have it. Without a deliberate choice, it will be spent for us: by market forces, competitive pressure, or our own compulsive reflex to fill every gap.
For founders, the moment we can ship a product in half the time, we start building a second one. When we cut the cost of customer acquisition, we push onward, instead of focusing on nurturing the customers we already have.
At home, my Skylight calendar has streamlined family scheduling. But the minutes I “save” don’t just sit there—they’re instantly claimed by something else.
“On some level, I absorbed the message that it must be my fault that I carry the mental load for our household because I’m just so efficient and overbearing and exacting about taking care of everything that there’s no room for my husband to step up.”
This type of labor works a lot like what I learned in high school physics: particles expand to fill the space they’re given. I struggled with that concept then, and today, I often struggle with the mom guilt and ennui of time that goes unaccounted for. Because, in the end, efficiency doesn’t reduce the load. It often just changes its shape.
What space is your time filling today? (And, thank you for including this Substack in that precious allotment!)
100% I had no idea what the Jevons paradox was until this year and it’s come up a lot, including in my world re: energy efficiency and a resulting increase in consumption.