I muted "Clawdbot" on Twitter last week because the automation flood felt overwhelming.

I was scrolling through my timeline and came across a transcript from Hackers Incorporated. Ben was talking about how he'd spent $600 in just a few weeks on AI automation credits. He was describing all the things he was building agents to do: make doctor appointments, call restaurants for reservations, convert news articles to podcasts so he could listen instead of read.

I kept reading. He was excited. He was building tools to manage every aspect of his life. And I kept having this thought: Wait, people actually DO all these things?

That was the moment I realized how simple my life is compared to what I was seeing.

I don't have a calendar full of appointments to automate. I don't make restaurant reservations worth outsourcing to an AI. I don't need news converted to podcasts because I don't consume enough news to care about optimizing it. The things people were desperate to automate, I don't even do them in the first place.

My life looks pretty different.

I'm a freelancer working remote from home. I aim for almost no possessions. I already paid off my home with savings, so there's less financial pressure. No debt at all. Minimal personal consumption - just the basics, but still a plentiful life.

My calendar is mostly empty. I have a good routine for work in the mornings. Most of my day I spend on personal projects, experimenting with ideas. That's it.

I don't do phone calls. I don't have to make appointments with anyone. The ones I do need to make are so rare that I don't even think about automating them.

Looking at what Ben was describing, including his $2500 per month AI habit, his agents making phone calls, and his complex workflows, I realized something. I'm not even in the game he's optimizing.

It wasn't a feeling of superiority. It was genuine surprise at the difference. Like seeing someone build an elaborate system for a problem you've never encountered.

This life didn't start as a plan for minimalism.

The only actual plan was: be free of debt. Everything else evolved naturally from that focus. As I paid things off, as I simplified my finances, as I reduced my possessions, I found I needed less. And when I needed less, I automated less.

The surprise was that simplicity wasn't the objective. It was the byproduct.

But that's when the insight hit me: What if instead of building tools to manage complexity, I just removed the complexity? What if the best automation is removing the need for it?

The automation paradox is this: We create complexity, then we build tools to manage it.

Listening to that podcast, hearing developers obsess over automating tasks I don't have - it crystallized something I'd been feeling. There's an entire industry built around managing lives that have become too complex to manage directly.

Now, I'll be honest about why this works for me. I have a hypothesis: this level of minimalism works because I have savings, a paid-off house, and no kids. That's genuine privilege. Not everyone can just decide to simplify their life to this degree.

But the principle remains regardless of where you start: Simplify first, automate only what's left.

The less you have, the less you need to manage. The less you manage, the less you need to optimize. The less you optimize, the more freedom you have.

With a more minimal life, the less you need to automate.

I'm not saying this is the right way for everyone. I'm just sharing what works for me.

But if you're a developer feeling like Ben - spending hundreds on AI agents, building complex automation flows, optimizing every aspect of your life - maybe ask yourself a question:

What could you eliminate instead of automate?

Start small. Audit your life. What are you doing that you don't need to do at all? What complexity have you created that you're now trying to automate?

A life that doesn't need optimizing is the ultimate optimization.