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.
There is a particular kind of restlessness that didn’t exist five years ago. It shows up when you sit down to write or code something from scratch and your fingers stutter over the keyboard, not because you have zero idea, but because the “art” 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 many 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 an app idea, 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 sometimes confusing thoughts in your head simultaneously and trust that, given enough time and effort, something coherent would emerge. That process was slow, frustrating, and often lonely but the satisfaction that come from it was always super blissful.
Now, the process takes minutes. You describe what you want and the AI almost instantenously 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 major skill a person develops is forged in a period of lock-in that comes with quite a number of sacrifices, sometimes. Learning to code would send you in a busy brain loop you can’t snap out of even while sleeping. 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, at least in the meantime, 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 just works, 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 lost and anxious when a task demands thirty minutes of focused, solitary reasoning with ChatGPT down.
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. You see other people launching new projects and startups every weekend. Content creators are coming up with a tonne load more content. And because much of this speed is enabled by the same AI tools you have access to, you start to feel behind and the constant need to level up.
You accelerate. You double down on the tools. You stop questioning whether the work in front of you actually calls for slow, independent thought, because slowing down feels unaffordable. Gradually, more of the thinking itself is transferred to the machine just to maintain momentum.
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.