There is a particular kind of restlessness that didn’t exist five years ago. It shows up when you sit down to write something from scratch and your fingers hover over the keyboard, not because you don’t know what to say, but because the act of finding out what you think, slowly, imperfectly, through the friction of your own cognition now feels unbearable. You know there’s a faster way. You’ve used it a hundred times. And every time you used it, the distance between you and your own thinking grew a little wider.
We are living through the fastest compression of the intention-to-outcome loop in human history. A decade ago, if you wanted to build a website, write a business plan, learn a new framework, or structure an argument, you had to sit with the problem. You had to tolerate not knowing. You had to hold multiple threads of thought in your head simultaneously and trust that, given enough time and effort, something coherent would emerge. That process was slow, frustrating, and often lonely. It was also the engine of every meaningful thing you ever built.
Now, the process takes minutes. You describe what you want. An agent returns something polished, structured, and often better than what you would have produced in your first draft. You refine it with a follow-up prompt. You ship it. You move on. And you feel, briefly, like you’ve accomplished something.
The Escape Hatch
Every meaningful skill a person develops is forged in a period of discomfort. Learning to code means staring at error messages for hours. Writing well means producing pages of mediocre content before the good sentences start to surface. Strategic thinking means holding ambiguity in your mind long enough for patterns to emerge that aren’t obvious at first glance. The discomfort isn’t a side effect of the process. It is the process.
What AI has introduced quietly, without anyone formally agreeing to it - is a universal escape hatch from that discomfort. The moment cognitive friction appears, you can offload it. And because the output you get back is competent, even impressive, there’s no immediate signal that anything has been lost. The feedback is entirely positive: faster results, less frustration, more output. Your brain registers this as progress.
But underneath the surface, something else is happening. Every time you take the escape hatch, your tolerance for sustained, unassisted thinking drops. Not dramatically, and not in a way you’d notice on any given day. But compounded over weeks and months, the effect is real. You start to find that you can’t outline your own thoughts without prompting something first. You struggle to hold a multi-step problem in your head. You feel a low-grade anxiety when a task demands thirty minutes of focused, solitary reasoning with no tool to lean on.
This isn’t a metaphor. This is how neural pathways work. The circuits you use get stronger. The circuits you abandon get weaker. And right now, millions of people are systematically abandoning the circuits responsible for deep, structured, independent thought, and strengthening the circuits for delegation, prompt construction, and output evaluation.
The Acceleration Trap
This would be concerning enough in isolation. But it’s happening inside a broader context that makes it significantly worse: the world itself is accelerating, and there is enormous cultural pressure to match that speed.
Look around. Everyone appears to be shipping faster, producing more, building more ambitiously. Your peers are launching side projects in weekends. Startups are compressing twelve-month roadmaps into twelve weeks. Content creators are publishing daily. And because much of this acceleration is powered by the same AI tools you have access to, the implicit message is clear: if you’re not keeping up, you’re falling behind.
So you speed up. You lean harder into the tools. You stop asking whether the task in front of you is one that would benefit from slow, unassisted thinking, because slow thinking feels like a luxury you can’t afford. The result is a treadmill that moves faster every month, where the only way to keep pace is to surrender more cognitive territory to the machine.
This is the acceleration trap: the faster the world moves, the more you offload to keep up, and the more you offload, the less capable you become of doing the work that actually matters when the tools aren’t enough.