I’m staring at my Gmail window. It stares back at me. What confronts me are two or three vaguely related ideas, six half-finished sentences and structure that would send me back into year four. I’m trying to send an email in 2026.
Normally, I’d bypass all this rigmarole and put these half-baked ideas into Claude. Viola. I paste the perfect message back into the email and tell myself ‘That’s what I would’ve written if I had the time’. A lie of course.
But this time I’m trying to write one without AI.
Five minutes pass and I quickly realise I’m out of my depth. Hundreds of reps serving up half-finished junk to the model has trained my brain out of generating sentences, ordering ideas, and summarising points. It takes a while to activate my heavily atrophied mental muscles, and I finally get it sent.
Who am I? Why can’t I write a full email anymore? Put together a logical paragraph? Can I even conjure up a complete thought? Should a university graduate feel like this?
We’ve all felt the mental lethargy associated with our engagement with digital tools, but this feels different. It is no longer the google era, where we outsourced facts, figures and the occasional paragraph; we are outsourcing one of the most fundamental mechanisms of human thought. Writing.
"We simply do not know what we want to say until we have tried to say it" - Rachael Cayley
Great Related Links:
https://explorationsofstyle.com/2014/04/23/writing-as-thinking/