I still remember the exact moment I realized I was losing my mind.
It was a Tuesday afternoon in 2023. I had just hit “publish” on a 2,000-word article that took me less than thirty minutes to create. The traffic numbers were beautiful. The engagement was off the charts. And yet I felt… nothing. Actually, worse than nothing. I felt hollow. Because 90% of those words weren’t mine. They were stitched together by a machine that had never lived a day in its life.
That was the day I quietly swore off AI writing tools for good. Not because they don’t work; they work too well. But because every time I used them, a tiny piece of me died.
The Steroids of the Mind
Let’s be brutally honest for a second.
AI writing isn’t a tool. It’s a performance-enhancing drug for the intellect. And just like steroids in sports, the signs are becoming impossible to hide.
You’ve seen them. We all have.
That LinkedIn post that repeats “This isn’t just X; it’s Y” three times in six sentences. The newsletter that somehow uses perfect grammar yet zero personality. The thought leader who suddenly sounds exactly like every other thought leader because they’re all prompting the same model with the same tired templates.
It’s not that these people became bad writers overnight. It’s that they stopped writing at all.
And the scariest part? Even the people warning us about AI are using it.
I recently read a long, passionate piece from an academic about how his students have completely outsourced their brains to large language models. He was furious. Devastated. He called it “the death of education as we know it.”
Then I ran his text through a detector. 98% AI-generated.
You can’t make this stuff up.
The Telltale Patterns Nobody Can Hide
If you’ve been online long enough, you know exactly what AI writing looks like. It has fingerprints:
- Overuse of parallel structure (“It’s not this, it’s that”)
- Three-item lists with em-dashes like they’re going out of style
- Sentences that sound profound but evaporate when you try to remember them five minutes later
- Perfect transitions that somehow feel… wrong
- That weird robotic rhythm where every paragraph is almost exactly the same length
I’m not judging anyone for using these tools. God knows I did. But let’s call it what it is: intellectual outsourcing.
And once you start outsourcing your thinking, stopping is incredibly hard.
My Own Descent (and Escape)
Here’s the dirty truth nobody talks about: AI writing works.
In early 2023 I built an entire content engine around it. I’d spend ten minutes prompting, five minutes editing, and boom; another 2,500-word SEO monster ready to harvest Google traffic. My charts went hockey-stick. My email list exploded.
For about three months I felt like a genius.
Then I started noticing something terrifying.
I couldn’t write without it anymore.
Sit me down with a blank page and my brain would just… stall. The ideas were there, but the muscle memory of turning thoughts into sentences had atrophied. I’d catch myself thinking, “How would the AI say this?” instead of “How do I want to say this?”
It was like watching my own creativity die in real time.
So I did the only thing I could: I went cold turkey. Deleted the bookmarks. Blocked the sites. Forced myself to write 1,000 terrible, human, painful words every morning before I was allowed to touch the internet.
The first month was hell. The second month was merely awful. By month four, something magical happened: I remembered who I was as a writer.
Traffic dropped. Earnings dipped. And I’ve never been happier.
We’re Already Seeing the Cognitive Collapse
This isn’t just about writers getting lazy.
We’re watching an entire generation trade their critical thinking for convenience, and the results are showing up in places nobody expected.
At one top-tier American university, the number of incoming students testing below middle-school math level has increased thirtyfold in just a few years. We’re talking students who literally cannot solve 7 + 2 = ☐ + 6.
Let that sink in. These are kids who got A’s in high school. They’re not stupid. They just never had to think.
Why struggle with a math problem when your phone can solve it in 0.3 seconds? Why wrestle with writing an essay when a bot can give you an A- paper while you scroll TikTok?
The tools are so good now that the penalty for thinking has become higher than the penalty for not thinking.
And it’s not just students.
Programmers who rely on AI code assistants are finding they can no longer debug without them. Marketers can’t write a headline without “asking the bot first.” Even therapists are using AI to draft session notes.
We are becoming a civilization of middlemen between machines and reality.
The Real Danger Isn’t AI Getting Smarter
Everyone’s worried about super-intelligent AI taking over the world.
I’m worried about the opposite: humans becoming so dependent on AI that we turn into pets.
“The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.”
; Sydney J. Harris (slightly paraphrased because even quotes get AI-washed these days)
He said that in the 1960s. Imagine what he’d say now.
The machines don’t need to become sentient to win. They just need us to stop using the parts of our brains that make us dangerous, original, human.
Thinking Is the Ultimate Unfair Advantage
Here’s the part nobody wants to hear.
In a world where everyone can generate a perfect strategy deck in ten minutes, the people who can still think from first principles will be worth their weight in gold.
When every investor has access to the same AI-powered research tools, the ones who can separate signal from noise without digital crutches will compound at obscene rates.
When every creator can flood the internet with competent content, the ones whose voice still sounds unmistakably human will build cults.
Thinking isn’t going to become obsolete.
It’s going to become the rarest, most valuable skill on Earth.
The Latin phrase “in regione caecorum rex est luscus” never felt more relevant: In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
Most people are voluntarily blinding themselves right now.
How to Protect Your Mind in the Age of AI
If you’re still reading this, congratulations, you’re already ahead of 99% of people. Here’s how to stay that way:
- Impose deliberate friction. Make it harder to use AI, not easier. Delete the apps. Use dumb phones on weekends. Force yourself to struggle.
- Protect your morning brain. The first two hours after waking are sacred. Don’t feed them to algorithms.
- Write longhand sometimes. Yes, with a pen. The slower feedback loop rebuilds neural pathways fast.
- Read dead trees books. No highlights, no search function, no AI summaries. Force your brain to do the work.
- Have conversations without fact-checking in real time. Learn to live with “I don’t know, hellip; but here’s what I think.”
- Regularly do things you suck at. The discomfort is the point.
It’s not sexy. It’s not efficient. It’s not going to make your charts go up and to the right next quarter.
But it will make you antifragile in a world that’s becoming increasingly fragile.
Ten years from now, the people who kept their ability to think clearly, deeply, and originally won’t just be successful.
They’ll be superhuman.
And the rest? They’ll be perfectly optimized, perfectly mediocre, and perfectly dependent on whatever the machines decide to give them next.
Choose your future.
I know which one I’m picking.
