being frank

 

Last week, a friend of mine asked the following during a conversation:

Where do you get your ideas for writing?

That was a fair question, and one I’ve been asked before. I told him that it stemmed from my being incessantly curious concerning the world ever since I was a child. I was always looking for patterns or features in nature that either kept reoccurring or were replicated with slight variations throughout.

What I didn’t mention was that this habit, more often than not, was quite distracting. Early on, it happened with such frequency that I had trouble focusing on any one thing. I eventually found a way to cut through the noise in order to keep my mind on topic. That is, until years later during the advent of the digital age.

When I purchased my first computer in 1982, I realized that it would create a quantum shift in how everything would operate going forward. I saw how this machine expanded my reach far beyond the confines of my community. I also discovered that if I wasn’t careful, it could have a detrimental effect on how I approached this vast, visual world.

The thing about curiosity is how it keeps us engaged. It requires an element of time to decipher the source of our curiosity to gather the lessons it has to offer. Leonardo Da Vinci was intensely curious about nature and the world around him. Yet it was his tenacity combined with a meticulous need for documenting everything that provided an outlet for his prodigious creative abilities. In other words: He took the time to think things through.

But in this our 21^st century where many people are stuck in an endless curiosity loop, thinking has apparently taken on the characteristics of a narcotic; if you do too much of it, you’ll be lost. When we spend less time thinking, we have a tendency to react – a lot. Time spent mastering one idea is now diluted across five harried speculations we can barely understand, let alone remember. It’s as if we decided that we gather more value splashing around in a wading pool than swimming in the ocean.

Unlike critical thinking whereby time is spent breaking down the cause of our curiosity in order to understand and learn from it, we switched to a reactive mindset. This mindset goes on the defensive to avoid problems or circumstances that cannot be accurately assessed on-the-fly. Before you know it, we’ve slipped from being a rational individual to a reactionary one by quietly relinquishing the greatest tool our brain possesses: Thinking.

Have we forgotten how to think? Not necessarily. We’ve chosen to think less because time is better spent focusing on profit, power or pleasure – not wisdom or logic. With the advent of AI, thinking is now instinctually relegated to a computer that can purportedly think things through in a faster, more productive and advantageous way. Our reactive mindset, no longer bothered with such trivial details as accuracy, security, and validity, relinquishes all the critical thinking to a machine that is barely five years old. I’m curious: Would you pass on the decision-making in your household to a very bright five-year-old?

I’m not going to explain the growing mountain of scientific evidence that is revealing the damaging effects arising from a loss of critical thinking. I’m also not going to point to the studies or articles that indicate the negative effects that come from using technology irresponsibly. Instead, I’m going to ask that you take a couple of minutes to think. Yes; just think. That means putting your phone on silent mode, turning off the TV and minimizing whatever social media threads you have running in the background. I need you to silence your world for a minute or two and read the following statements:

1. I use my computer to manage my calendar and address book.
2. I like to use Notion^© to create summary reports or review documents.
3. I task AI to write reports at work and then submit the results only after a cursory review.
4. Grammarly^© is my go-to program for generating creative content.
5. I prefer using programs like Jasper AI^© for handling my online posts.
6. I use Claude^© for generating training documents and lesson plans for greater efficiency.
7. Removing human interaction from a decisional process is faster, safer and more secure.
8. Algorithms used by social media save time by providing targeted information and display those things that make work more efficient and leisure time more enjoyable.

If these made you question a possible pattern in your life, you’re not alone. Establishing a premise for greater efficiency is a logical means to an end. But take another moment and ponder this: Just as driving your car faster can get you someplace quicker, outsourcing your intellect may carry detrimental consequences that rise exponentially the more you do it.

 

Final Thoughts

If you agreed with any of those statements I asked you to read earlier, then you may have begun taking steps to relinquish your ability to think. You’ve come to a subliminal understanding that solving problems, exercising critical thinking and expanding your creative mindset is best handled by a machine. Also, accepting any one of those statements sends a clear message that you’ve taken your first steps toward diminishing the ability to conduct in-depth analysis, reducing your attention span and training your mind to favor convenience instead of effort.

In following the logic woven into those statements, you’ve expressed a desire to surrender your mind to cognitive outsourcing and allow for confirmation bias to gather information that aligns only with your existing beliefs.

These actions (or inactions) become the gateway to extremist thoughts, disinformation and social anxiety by minimizing your desire for deep thinking and diminishing the need for a logical approach to the issues and concerns that are part and parcel of your life and community.

Do the research, but don’t restrict yourself to those sources of information that agree with either your point of view or that of the people within your social circles. Cable channels, websites and social media outlets are driven primarily by profit, and the pursuit of profit usually doesn’t rank truth or logical objectivity very high within its business model. Their objective is to lead you toward whatever goals are most profitable instead of aiming for an objective truth. Seek the truth where logic and common sense takes you. And remember that there can be no avenues for change in a one-track mind.