The Mental Gym Is Coming

Modern work gave us a strange invention: the gym.

For most of human history, daily life required physical effort. It also came with plenty of suffering, but strength, exhaustion, sleep, and food were tightly connected to surviving the day.

Then we moved indoors, sat down, and stopped asking much of our bodies. We got safer and more comfortable. We also got weaker. So now we manufacture resistance: gyms, supplements, nutrition plans. Imagine explaining three sets of twelve to a great-grandparent who built strength by showing up to work.

I think we may be repeating the pattern with our brains.

LLMs make life easier and let us do more with less effort. That is the point. But if every hard thought becomes a prompt, what happens to the mental resistance that helps us form judgment, connections, and original questions?

Maybe a few years from now we will join mental gyms: groups that discuss a problem before anyone asks a model. A whole business may emerge around keeping our minds exercised because ordinary work no longer does.

Not on my watch, at least in my own brain. Sorry, LLMs.