A few days back, my son Sid was stuck on a school assignment, and before I could even open my mouth to explain it, he had already typed the question into ChatGPT and had a full answer staring back at him. It made me pause for a second — when was the last time I actually worked through something myself, instead of just asking a chatbot?
That one small moment took me down a rabbit hole. Because if you think about it, this is not a new problem. We have been doing this to ourselves since the Stone Age.
A few weeks back, over drinks with friends in Sydney, I was sitting back, holding a cold beer in my hand.
Ravan leaned over, grabbed another chilled bottle from the bucket, and offered it across the table. “Shivam, Have a beer with us.”
Shivam waved his hand dismissively, swirling the ice in his glass. “No way, yaar. Why would I switch to a light beer when I’m already drinking whiskey? Whiskey, vodka, brandy—that’s the real stuff. Beer won’t even hit the spot.”
Everyone around the table nodded in agreement. And on paper, they weren’t wrong. Beer typically sits around 4% to 5% alcohol, while whiskey sits way up at 40% to 42.8%.
Case closed, right?
I looked down at the bottle in my hand, turned to Shivam, and said, “Wait a minute. Let’s not close the case yet.”
The Question Nobody Was Asking
Everyone was comparing the percentage. Nobody was comparing the quantity.
Think about it. When you drink whiskey, how much do you actually pour? A peg is usually 30ml, sometimes 60ml if you’re generous. But when you drink beer, you are not sipping 30ml from a shot glass. You are opening a full bottle — 330ml, 500ml, sometimes 650ml.
So the real question is not “which drink has more alcohol in it.” The real question is “which drink puts more alcohol in you.”
And that, my friends, is where the data tells a completely different story.
For years, I had a very specific, high-stakes ritual every time I finished writing a blog post about Azure. But I was bit lazy to do proof reading few times to correct it and make a good flow.
So, like any loving husband, I did what felt natural: I handed it over to my wife.
Now, you have to understand—my wife works in a completely different domain. Cloud architecture to her might as well have been ancient Greek. But bless her heart, she never hesitated. She’d sit there for hours, squinting at complex technical terms, patiently fixing my clunky sentences, and trying to make my Azure ramblings actually read like human English.
Did those technical blogs make any sense to her? Absolutely not. But she was a total team player.
The silver lining for her back then? I rarely wrote blogs. So her “unpaid proofreading side-hustle” didn’t completely ruin her work-life balance.
