I’m sitting in my living room, riding the high of a late-night content bender, when a quieter fear cuts through the glow of my new laptop: What is constant AI usage doing to our actual capacity for deep thought? In Boston, I could feel my brain again—alone in a hotel lobby, no tools, just me and a blog post, ideas arriving unhurried and whole. Back home, surrounded by three screens and three LLMs, my thinking has grown jumpy and outsourced. In Google Ads, I can now skip days of rigorous analysis with a single prompt—but every time I do, I wonder what I’m trading away: not just time, but the critical thinking that used to live inside the math.