What feels effortless to you is often the hardest thing to explain. Letter recognition. Face recognition. Navigating a room without bumping into things. You do these without thinking… and that’s the problem. Effortless skills hide their structure. Because when something feels trivial, we stop asking how it works. We mistake speed for simplicity. But ease is often the result of layered representations quietly cooperating under the hood. When a task feels “obvious,” that’s your cue to slow down. Obviousness is not transparency. It’s compression. And compressed systems are hard to reverse-engineer. This is why building machines that “just see” or “just understand” took so long. Not because the tasks are complex… but because their complexity is invisible to the person doing them. If you want insight, don’t study what feels hard. Study what feels automatic. Try this: pick one thing you do instantly and ask, “What would have to be represented for this to work?” The answer is rarely simple.
