Is Convenience Our Crutch? A Human’s Weapon against the Machine Mind.
Reclaiming our ability to think
“Why is my writing getting worse?” I groaned as I stared at a blank Google Document.
Well, it wasn’t blank. Not two minutes before. I had written out a messy outline, deleted it, rewrote it, reworded it, hated it, and you probably know how the rest went. I ended up with a completely blank Google Document, an unplanned essay, and no direction for my writing whatsoever. I have always prided myself in my ability to not only write, but write well, so what was happening? Why was I grasping at straws, unsure how to formulate any opinion on the prompt that I was given, and generally stuck?
When I started this new school year with harder classes, teachers, assignments…harder everything, writing essays had become less about writing and more about fulfilling a certain standard that the teacher wanted me to follow. The topic needed to add to the discussion, not be something that was easily found by just searching it up on the internet. It needed to use complex language. It needed to argue well. It needed to use different sentence structures. Show not tell, but also use the specific writing term if necessary. No writing “logos,” “pathos,” or “ethos”. Abandon those five-paragraph essay structures. On and on, these guidelines that were supposed to make my writing more personal, more stylistic, more me, became burdensome restrictions that made me scared to write.
Or, at least, that is what I wanted myself to think. As a perfectionist, I criticized myself for my inability to write well when, in reality, I just couldn’t write well instantly. I had spent two hours writing a draft and, to my astonishment, it did not sound like a revolutionary, never-heard-before opinion essay about the Crucible. Crazy, I know! So, I became reliant on the resources around me, things that will give me instant answers to whatever I was writing about. Looking up what other people have said about what I was arguing became looking up what to say about the topic I need to write about. And from that, using AI technologies for writing became more and more tempting.
I found a loophole in my own thinking, where I realized that I didn’t have to really use the AI to write my essays for me. I could keep my moral high-ground by just writing most of it by myself, and asking them to “improve” my writing. Grammarly or whatever platform would then provide me a mediocre regurgitation of my ideas, and I truly thought that I had accomplished something. I didn’t use it to write my whole essay, necessarily. Technically, I was still writing my own essay. It was just improving the ideas I already had. Right?
The danger of modern technology isn't just the sheer amount of distraction it creates—though that is a factor—but also our growing dependence on it. This dependence is not surprising at all. The internet is a wealth of knowledge and all the tools on there are just so reliable, so quickly accessible. Don’t know something? Just google it. Can’t find where something is inside a store? Just order it online. Don’t remember how to say “can I have a can of apple cider” in Spanish? Just translate it.
But, this convenience comes at a cost, and I have felt this cost personally. I have become so consumed by needing to be good, and good right away, that this dependence emerged easily. I found myself so insistent on getting a beautiful masterpiece of an outline right away that I did not even think to put in the time to think and reflect. I could easily have taken a few minutes, or even a few days, to ponder about the prompt, to think. Not just with essays, but with everything else in life as well. Do I think about the material I read, or do I just search up an explanation for the things I don’t know? Do I try to solve a problem, even when I have gotten it wrong a million times before, or do I just give and search for the answer? Do I check if the AI generated answer at the top of the search results is accurate, or do I just trust what it says because I’m too tired to bother looking through the tens of other articles about the stuff I search? But no, I wanted the beautiful essay right away, those answers right away, that elegance and eloquence and the careful mincing of words right away. And the internet provided me with just that: elegance and eloquence, and a whole lot of nothing.
Then I find myself asking, on those days of self-reflection and rare lucidness, whether or not I actually know anything at all. And, perhaps, this question applies to you as well. When we learn something, do we truly internalize it, or do we prioritize convenience, knowing we can always look it up later? Not just look it up, but access it instantly, effortlessly. Our habits have shifted toward "googling" everything, which is remarkable, but what does this instant access to information do to our critical thinking, memorization, and willingness to deeply learn? And why do we resort to these options in the first place?
I think the answer is the cultural norm of wanting everything quickly. Efficiency, productivity; this culture has pushed everything to be as quick as possible, the most product with the least amount of time and effort. I’m not saying productivity is bad; rather I believe that this mindset has permeated into other aspects of life as well. We lose our patience when reading a book because the information isn’t presented to us right away. We grow frustrated at the recipe when it starts with a sob story about some guy’s grandma. We become irritated when the perfect essay idea or writing does not emerge right away.
I’m not totally clear what this impact is, at least not in terms of statistics, numbers, or experiments. But, one thing is for sure: we have to keep thinking. No matter what topic it’s about, try not to rely on “searching it up” as the first resort. When writing an essay, maybe don’t search for topics right away, or even have generative technology refine what you write. At least not right away. Try to think about the topic yourself, ponder about it. In writing this post, I spent a lot of time thinking and reflecting. I wrote many drafts, deleted several paragraphs, and ignored this document completely for several weeks.
Refine the art of taking your time to think. If you took the time to read through this insanity-style block of text, I applaud you for taking this first step. Thinking will be your sword, and patience your shield. Unlike what society (or our brain) tells us, not everything has to be instant. Knowledge, understanding, outcomes do not have to be instant, even if some of them can be. Think, wonder, ponder. Abandon searching up the answer right away. Think, wonder, ponder. This, I found, is our weapon against technological dependence.
