Lately I have been catching myself in small surrenders which embarrass me a little, and I am a pretty lazy person 🤪. Always have been. But this feels like a new kind of lazy because I will open a model to draft a reply I already know how to write, and most times I ask it what I should eat when my stomach already has an opinion, and I let it summarize something I could have read in ten minutes with a coke. Each saving feels so tiny that I barely notice I have traded anything away.

It keeps pulling me back to the way we stopped walking, which sounds strange until you sit with it for a while, because a hundred and fifty years ago most people had to move their bodies to get anywhere and then trains and cars arrived and offered a smoother way to cover the same ground and we slid into the seats for the convenience, and mile by mile the walking left our days. And I live inside that after-effect now in a world where food never runs out and comfort keeps humming in the background, and the body softened accordingly, which is why diabetes which comes from sitting through long afternoons with endless snacks within reach now sits near the top of our modern miseries.

There is a very small tribe that still chases the burn in gyms at 6am, which I respect because they are holding onto something the rest of us let go of without a funeral, and most of us quietly gave up the physical hard work a long time ago, and our bodies carry that surrender in soft waists and tired afternoons. So far, so human.

What scares me is feeling that same softening move into my head, because thinking is heavy lifting which asks you to hold opposing ideas and turn them over and check your own appetite for being wrong, and I feel that muscle thinning whenever I hand the whole job to a model because the smoothness keeps pulling me back. And I watch the same thinning in friends who live inside Instagram or who left the app while keeping the reflexes, and their opinions arrive pre-chewed and shift with whatever clip the algorithm pushed that morning, and the willingness to pick something apart or to sit quietly with something beautiful until it opens up keeps getting rarer in the way they talk. Surrender to AI, which I wrote about with TikTok, except this time I am doing it to myself with my own hands.

I recognize the reflex because I live with a chatbot open in the next tab, and I tried manufacturing motivation once by pushing liquid cash into assets that are slow to liquify because a low balance hurts enough to move me (I am not sure if it fixed anything). This feels like the opposite experiment where every friction gets removed and I stop moving without noticing, and Baba would call staying with the thought work, and work is worship.

I keep wondering what remains when even the tiny daily decisions get handed over, like deciding dinner or softening a message to a friend who is hurting or figuring out which small joy is worth chasing today, and who is left doing the wanting underneath all that helpfulness, because a body which never walks forgets the walk without noticing and that forgetting spreads into the mind which stops wrestling until we become a tended species, comfortable and dimmed, which feels like a drowsy way for Homo sapiens to fade. Do we need models for this part of being alive? I don’t think so!

I find myself wanting the ache which comes from staying with a thought until it gives way, and I want to keep tripping over my own stubborn questions for a while longer.

What did you chew on last until it gave way? Let me know what you think, I am @troysk704.