When AI comes into the life of someone naturally curious, with a restless mind and a hunger for knowledge of all kinds, it strikes like a miracle — until it becomes a curse. I'm the type of person who can spend hours reading about history, biology, psychology, business, or some completely random topic that caught my attention for five seconds.
At first, AI felt like unlimited access to knowledge — every question had an answer, every rabbit hole had an entrance. Oh, it was such a thrill. Any information that came to my mind could be answered in a second, and the number of questions I had just grew every day, until suddenly — I knew nothing.
The more answers I received, the less I experienced the process of finding them. Sadness came in place of the initial thrill, as all the bitter-sweet moments of research were lost. I missed spending hours looking for a specific book in a library. I missed reading ten research papers just to find one sentence I needed and accidentally learning twenty other things along the way. As someone with a master's degree in molecular biology, some of my most valuable lessons came from the search itself, not the answer. And once technology removes friction, it's surprisingly difficult to put it back.
But the biggest surprise was actually about myself. At some point, I realized I wasn't using AI to learn anymore — I was using it to listen to myself think. Learning about things grew into learning about myself, like some weird narcissistic ritual where I seek applause rather than information. It's a dangerous game I played.
These days, I'm trying to trust my own thinking a little more and stop seeking external validation. After all, I learned plenty of difficult things long before AI existed — I taught myself Python in two months, I completed a master's degree, I've solved hard problems before.
Maybe the lesson isn't that AI makes us think less. Maybe it's that it makes us feel seen and valuable in completely the wrong place. Maybe it's that we have to remember who we were before AI — and that our abilities existed before the answers became instant.