I was observing Brad as he hunched over his computer, trying to teach it to be smarter with less, another project in his endless collection of optimization attempts, when I decided to ask him a question that would help him realize he might be teaching machines to make the same silly mistakes he was making with his own beautiful, inefficient heart.
"Look at this, Finny," Brad said, pointing to his laptop screen where colorful charts danced across the display. "I'm trying to teach this computer to be smarter with less. Making it lean, efficient, elegant. Or trying to, anyway. I'm better at organizing code than organizing my life."
I regarded the screen with that particular stillness that bears possess when they're about to reveal something important.
"Tell me about teaching," I said.
"Teaching?"
"When you learned to walk, did you start with the most efficient walking technique?"
Brad laughed. "No, I stumbled around, fell down constantly, took the longest possible routes between two points."
"And if someone had tried to optimize your walking from the beginning?"
"I probably never would have learned. The falling down was part of learning. The wandering was part of discovering."
"And yet now you walk beautifully without thinking about it."
"True. But what does this have to do with..."
"Tell me about the wisest people you know," I interrupted gently. "Are they efficient learners?"
Brad considered this. "Actually, no. My grandmother, my favorite teacher, they were all... meandering learners. They read everything, explored ideas that seemed unrelated, had vast, seemingly wasteful knowledge."
"And the computer you're trying to make smarter: are you letting it be a wandering learner, or are you making it walk in straight lines?"
I watched something dawn in Brad's eyes.
"I'm... I'm trying to teach it to walk in straight lines. Efficiently. Without all the stumbling around that real learning requires."
"And how is that working?"
"It's not. The ones that work best are the ones that learn... messily. Broadly. With what looks like beautiful waste."
Brad leaned back, looking at me with new appreciation. "They're teaching us that bigger isn't necessarily less efficient. It might be more efficient at what actually matters."
"Kind of like how you're inefficient at productivity systems but efficient at connecting with people?"
"I... what?"
"You fail at every scheduling system, but you never forget a friend's birthday. You can't maintain a morning routine, but you can debug code for hours in flow state. Maybe you're not inefficient. Maybe you're just efficient at different things."
I watched something loosen in Brad's chest. "You mean I might not be broken?"
"Tell me about attention," I said, shifting the conversation as bears do.
"Attention?"
"When you're really listening to someone, where is your focus?"
Brad thought about this. "When I'm truly present with someone? My attention isn't just on their words. I'm hearing their tone, watching their body language, feeling the space between what they're saying and what they mean. I'm somehow attending to everything at once."
"That sounds inefficient."
"It is, in a focused sense. Instead of just processing the literal words, I'm taking in everything in relation to everything else. It's expensive, energy-wise, but..."
"And?"
"And that's when real understanding happens. When I listen that way, I hear what they're actually saying, not just their words."
"What does that tell you?"
Brad was quiet for a moment, looking at his screen where his "efficient" learning program struggled while remembering all the times he'd learned something important through wandering, seemingly wasteful conversations.
"It tells me that understanding might require inefficiency. That wisdom might emerge from having vast spaces of possibility, not from having streamlined, focused pathways."
"Like having room for stuffing?" I suggested.
Brad laughed, but it was the laugh of recognition, not dismissal. "Exactly like having room for stuffing. The space between the thoughts might be as important as the thoughts themselves."
"Tell me about naps."
"Naps?" Brad paused, suddenly seeing something. "When I let my mind wander, when I stop trying so hard, when I introduce what looks like... random rest into my day..."
"And what happens?"
"I learn better. Much better. The 'inefficiency' prevents me from getting stuck, forces new connections, creates flexibility."
"So wasting time makes you smarter?"
"The waste isn't waste. It's... it's like my failed productivity systems. Each failure teaches me something about what doesn't work for my particular nature."
"Like having sixteen other bears on the shelf?"
"Yes! Exactly. The redundancy isn't inefficient. It's resilient. It's flexible. It allows for different responses to different situations. We're like different containers for comfort, each one holding something unique."
I shifted slightly, my button eyes catching the light in a way that might have seemed like satisfaction.
"Brad, what if intelligence, both artificial and natural, requires a certain amount of beautiful waste? What if the space between thoughts is as important as the thoughts themselves?"
Brad looked around the room at us seventeen bears, each unique, each redundant from a pure efficiency standpoint, each contributing something irreplaceable to the whole.
"You're saying that AI systems work because they're more like ecosystems than like machines?"
"I'm saying that the most successful AI systems seem to understand something that humans have forgotten: that intelligence emerges from abundance, not scarcity. From having too much, not just enough."
"Having abundance as a gift, not a flaw."
"Like your tendency to start seventeen projects and finish three?"
Brad winced. "That's different..."
"Is it? What if your heart is abundant with curiosity? What if you need to start seventeen things to discover the three that truly matter?"
Brad had never thought of it that way. "You mean my scattered attention might be... wise?"
"Tell me about a tree."
Brad looked confused. "A tree?"
"Does a tree focus all its energy on producing one perfect leaf, or does it grow thousands of leaves, knowing most will fall?"
"Thousands. The abundance lets it photosynthesize more, weather storms, adapt to changing seasons..."
"Which kind of person are you trying to be?"
The question hit him like a physical force. "I... I've been trying to be like a machine. Focused on productivity, optimized for efficiency, specialized in getting things done."
"And how's that working?"
"Terribly. I'm awful at it. I keep getting distracted by interesting problems, random conversations, new ideas. I can't maintain focus on one thing because seventeen other things seem equally fascinating."
"Maybe that's not a flaw, Brad. Maybe that's how you're designed."
"What would it mean to be more like a tree?"
"It would mean having space for things that don't directly serve your productivity goals. Reading poetry when you should be working. Having long conversations about life with a teddy bear. Maintaining friendships that don't have immediate purpose."
"Sounds inefficient."
"Sounds like being truly present with your whole life, not just the next item on your to-do list."
Brad looked at his computer screen again, seeing it now as a mirror for his own growth. The focused, efficient approach was reaching its limits quickly. The broader, more "wasteful" approaches kept growing, discovering new patterns, making unexpected connections.
"Even the smartest computers are trying to teach us something, aren't they?"
"They're showing us that real wisdom requires space, room to breathe, beautiful inefficiency. That understanding comes from having more heart than you strictly need."
"Like having seventeen bears when one would technically suffice for comfort?"
"Like having seventeen bears because the abundance itself creates magic that efficiency would squeeze out."
Brad closed his laptop, abandoning his quest to make everything smaller and tighter.
"Finny, what if the efficiency trap isn't just about my psychology? What if it's about misunderstanding how life actually works?"
"What do you mean?"
"What if we've been trying to optimize everything, our lives, our relationships, our days, like they're machines, when they actually work more like gardens? Things that need space, rest, wandering, even some beautiful chaos to stay healthy?"
"Things that need to fail sometimes to grow?"
"Yes. Like how I fail at productivity systems but succeed at... at being curious, at connecting with people, at finding meaning in unexpected places."
"Maybe the smartest systems are teaching us to be more human, not more mechanical?"
"They're showing us that wisdom comes from abundance, not scarcity. From having extra room in your heart, not from optimizing every moment."
I looked around the room again, seeing us seventeen bears not as redundancy, but as a symphony, each one offering a different note in the song of comfort and understanding.
"Perhaps," I said softly, "the future of wisdom lies not in becoming more efficient, but in learning how to love abundantly."
"Like how I 'waste' time talking to you instead of being productive?"
"Is it waste if it helps you understand what being human actually means?"
That night, I watched Brad approach his computer differently. Instead of trying to squeeze everything smaller and tighter, he gave his programs room to breathe and grow. As he watched them learn more than his previous attempts, I could see him witnessing something beautiful.
The smartest systems were teaching us that wisdom isn't about doing more with less. It's about having enough space to discover patterns we never could have forced: enough curiosity, enough connections, enough room for failure.
They were teaching us that abundance might be the foundation of intelligence.
And that efficiency, pursued too desperately, might be the enemy of understanding itself.
Maybe that's why Brad is so terrible at efficiency: his heart is designed for something else entirely. Something messier, more generous, more beautifully abundant.
Something more wise.
From my bear's perspective, I've always known this. We bears have extra room for love. It's what makes us helpful.