The Mind You Are Giving Away While Borrowing…

Chapter 1: The Habit Was Magnified

We have always borrowed thinking. Long before algorithms, chatbots, ChatGPT, search engines, smartphones, AI, AI agents, MCP Servers (“you get the idea, the list goes on”) people were handing their problems to someone else and waiting for the answers to come back. You would walk to a colleague’s desk, call a relative, ask a friend who seemed to know more, ask someone who had been there before, someone who sounded confident enough to trust.

There is nothing wrong with all that. Asking is human (“We all have asked someone at some point”). Collaboration is human. There is always a line (“Even in life, things shouldn’t be done in excess”) and most people cross it without even noticing ,between asking someone to think with you and someone to think for you. ("Whaaaaaaat, I hope you are still with me, I am cooking").

When you think with someone, you leave with more capabilities than you arrived with (“I am trying to say , information gets turned into knowledge, knowledge turns into understanding, and then you reach the peak, which is understanding turning into wisdom. In a nutshell, you become wise”). The latter is true. “I am also surprised as you are — I cooked.”

The distinction matters more than most people realise.

When someone thinks for you, you leave with an answer, but you are no stronger than before. (“In the Bible, those were the fools it referenced”)

For a long time the scale of this was limited (“At least if someone didn’t find someone, he was forced to think for themselves”). You had only so many colleagues, only so many relatives willing to help. The circle of people you could borrow thinking from was small, and that smallness was an accidental protection (“The bad of something is also the good of the other”). At some point the well ran dry and you had to figure things out yourself (“Sometimes we wouldn’t want to help you”). The struggle found you whether you wanted it or not (“The struggle was real”).

That natural limit is gone now.

What was once a personal habit, passed quietly between people in offices, Church, kitchens and phone calls, has become something far larger. The scale has changed. And when the scale of a habit changes this dramatically, the habit itself becomes a different thing entirely (“When it becomes a habit, it’s now a problem on its own. Habits are hard to change — I am not a therapist, I didn’t cook this, I have seen people say it a lot of times”).

This is not a story that starts with artificial intelligence, LLMs, AI Agents (“Umm, I don’t have anything to say at this point, I am just humming”). It is a story that AI walked into already in progress and accelerated beyond anything we were prepared for.