After watching my mum hit chatbots (Meta AI inside WhatsApp) for the most mundane calculations and tasks, my hot take is that we're rapidly entering the default sedentary era of intellectual fitness. And seeing it written out, I realize it's a convenient excuse. It's not just my mum's overreliance on AI that sparked this thought; it's mine, and it's certainly not specific to coding tools.
Last week, I needed to charge my electric car, which requires a short sequence of small arithmetic calculations: current state of charge deducted from my target, usually 80%, which then needs to be converted into an absolute kWh number by calculating it as a percentage of my total battery size, and finally multiplied by the per kWh rate to give me the final cost to load into the charging app's wallet. Simple enough, right? Yet last week I found myself getting Codex to build a tiny tool to do this for me instead.
By itself, it isn't really a big deal. As they say: death, taxes, and automation. But it's the fact that lately I've been trying to automate everything I physically could just to reduce my future cognitive workload. Tragic really, coming from someone who used to enjoy calculating the total in their head before the cashier finished ringing everything up.
How Sweating Became a Hobby
Whether it happened when we stopped being hunter gatherers or with steam power during the industrial revolution, physical fitness hasn't been happening naturally for most of us for quite a while. Thankfully, society has been able to identify the risks of a sedentary lifestyle and invented exercise as a habit.
Exercise is the exact same kind of boring upkeep as changing a car's oil and replacing worn brake pads. We gotta do it because ignoring it guarantees the machine breaks down way before it should. Whether we make it fun or thoroughly routine is entirely up to us. The brain, like any machine or muscle, needs resistance and friction to maintain the status quo, let alone get stronger. And without this deliberate training, AI is going to do to our minds what machines did to our bodies.
Thinking Less
Way before LLMs were writing and summarizing our emails and blog posts, we were happily offloading our cognitive work to whatever piece of technology was made available. AI is simply the latest entry in a long line of convenient tools coaxing our brains to take it easy. The force multiplier effect AI has had is definitely something to think about though. I'm sure each step felt like common sense, if not amazing progress, at the time, just like how obvious it feels now. Nobody woke up and decided “hey, this is a good day to let my brain go soft”.
The funny bit is that people have been complaining about the mind wearing away for quite literally centuries. Plato says in Phaedrus, “For this invention (writing) will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory.“
Different Splits for Different Brains
It's important to remember fitness, physical or mental, means different things for different people. Personally, I'm happy just being able to lift and play with my children and niblings as long as they want me to while yours might be a three plate bench or being able to run, and finish, a marathon. Unless your paycheck specifically depends on you being an outlier in one specific area, focusing on one and ignoring everything else leaves blind spots.
I imagine your mental fitness goals are probably going to be equally varied and a healthy mix of memory, pattern recognition, mental stamina, reaction time, and simply being able to brute force through a chunky piece of text.
I'm Currently Training
To keep my own gears from rusting over, here are some things I've been doing, or trying to:
- My wife, a neuropsychologist, tells me, simply switching to your non-dominant for everyday tasks allegedly boosts brain function. Brushing, throwing, using the mouse, reaching for things, all of it counts.
- Still a patzer but playing bullet chess ensures I have to rely on raw pattern recognition before I get flagged. Rapid games on the other hand need me to sit still and play more positionally without having to rely on hope chess.
- I have been memorizing random lists of things I find interesting, like the fourteen 8K peaks or the essential amino acids. The more outside your core domains the lists are, the better!
- The simple act of trying to put something on paper gives you a deeper understanding of what you thought you knew and forces you to focus. Not everything has to be published and not everyone has to like what you write. Do it just for you.
- While I still have my tools, I'm almost always calculating things in my head these days.
I don't want to end on too pessimistic a note with too much doomerism. Convenience is easy to love and what powers efficiency and progress, but try to introduce friction to keep you sharp. We just have to realize when our brain is on extended autopilot and deliberately take control back.
If you've reached this far, thank you for reading! :)
I thought retiring early in my mid 30s after a few exits would be fun but I've just been bored and a bit undersocialized without morning Slacks and emails to wake up to. If you're building something interesting and could use an extra set of hands to ship, or just want to say hi, feel free to reach out. My inbox is open.