The Dependency You're Building
The Slow, Shameful Slide into Mental Redundancy
We’ve talked about the big, glamorous bits of digital rot - the homogenous LinkedIn posts and the automated summaries that stop you from having a single unique thought. But that’s only half the horror.
The real tragedy is the small stuff. It’s the creeping dependency that takes hold not with a bang, but with a series of tiny, daily, utterly shameful shrugs.
It’s not for the things you don’t know. It’s for the quick decisions. The mundane choices. The tiny moments where you used to apply a bit of low-grade cognitive friction, and now you just prompt.
“What’s the best route to the supermarket on a Tuesday?” “How should I structure this email about stationery?” “Is 18 degrees warm or cold?” These are the questions we outsource, not because we can’t answer them, but because it’s marginally easier to ask the AI than to trust the damp sponge in your own skull.
Dependency isn’t a binary switch. It’s gradual, like the structural collapse of a badly maintained municipal car park.
You don’t lose the ability to navigate overnight. You just stop using your internal map. You stop paying attention to the sun or the bus routes or the big, obvious landmark that used to confirm you weren’t going to drive into a hedge. You use the GPS, then you trust the GPS less, then you trust yourself less, until one day the phone battery dies and you’re standing on a suburban roundabout weeping because you genuinely can’t remember the way to your own house.
It’s muscle atrophy, isn’t it? We are letting the tiny, necessary muscles that govern intuition and low-level confidence simply shrivel away.
And this is the grim irony: the tool that is meant to liberate us is the one we must fight hardest. Stay independent. Trust your own brain, even if it feels like a badly decorated skip full of old biscuits.
Even when the tool is right there, glowing with helpful, digital obedience, resist it. Especially when the tool is right there. Because that’s the precise moment you risk becoming nothing more than a meat puppet, awaiting its next prompt. It’s profoundly pathetic.