‘Unlike the washing up, which I’m perfectly happy to delegate to a machine… I don’t WANT to delegate my writing, because that’s how I think.’
Technology is great at making life easier. But sometimes, easy isn’t what we really need.
It’s hard to resist the siren call of AI as you stare at a blank document: ‘Let me write that email/post/book, I can do it really quick and it’ll sound super professional.’ Or, as it’s more likely to put it: ‘It’s not cheating. It’s optimizing for efficiency.’
In this episode, I make the case for engaging with the mental heavy lifting of writing in a world determined to lift it for us. Doing the hard things builds capacity and it also, weirdly, makes us happier.
Resistance is NOT futile. But it’s going to take a bit of work.
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Transcript:
Today I’m taking the liberty of talking out loud rather than interviewing a guest for a change – I’ve spent most of this weekend, in between planting herbs and cooking the world’s biggest paella, thinking and writing about something that’s become increasingly urgent for me, and developing a metaphor that I think tell us something important about what we pay attention to and how we design our lives in an age of smartphones and AI: Resistance.
We’ve understood that Resistance training is valuable – especially for a woman of a certain age. Lifting heavy things is hard, and that’s why it works – at a physical level you challenge your nerves and muscles and over time and with the right rest in between sessions they respond by become more effective and stronger. What’s interesting is that the benefits go way beyond the physical. This is from the abstract a pubmed article by Wayne Westcott in 2012: ‘’Benefits of resistance training include improved physical performance, movement control, walking speed, functional independence, cognitive abilities, and self-esteem.’ It seems like doing hard things doesn’t just make us fitter, it makes us happier.
Which is interesting, because we’ve spent the last couple of hundred years making life easier for ourselves. We have domestic appliances that cut the drudgery of housework, processed food that saves us cooking, cars that help us get from A to B faster and without the legwork, computers and devices to do, well, pretty much everything. And now we have AI, which offers, in fact pretty much insists, on doing our writing and our thinking for us.
I have no issue with much of this. The dishwasher and the washing machine are two of my best friends. This is what I want technology to do for me – I want IT to do the dull stuff to free ME up to do the life-enhancing stuff. But you can’t help but notice that many of these advances have turned out to have dark sides at pretty much every level – individual, societal, planetary.
There’s more than one podcast’s worth here, obviously, but the resistance I want to talk about today is very specific, it’s with AI and it’s specifically with that insistent, seductive, ever-present offer to do our writing for us. You can’t start an email or a LinkedIn post without it popping up – let me do that. I can do it faster, you can get on with something else. But that’s my point: unlike the washing, which I’m perfectly happy to delegate, you won’t find me resisting that, I don’t WANT to delegate my writing, because that’s how I think, and it’s how I transmit those thoughts to others. This IS the life-enhancing stuff: this is NOT the stuff to delegate to free me up to do something more interesting instead.
It’s like if I were to set out on my run each morning and a tiny offroad taxi cab pulled up alongside me as soon as I laced my trainers shouting ‘Get in, I can get you wherever it is you’re going, you focus on something else.’ Mate, you’re missing the point. I don’t run to get somewhere – there are many faster more efficient ways of moving myself over the face of the earth – but because running makes my heart and musculoskeletal structure stronger, it makes me feel good, it kicks in the endorphins. I very often don’t want to go for a run but I do because I know it challenges me and makes me fitter and does my mind and body good and makes me the person I want to be. And I do it every day because if I stop doing it, I stop getting that benefit. Gradually, over a few weeks, my fitness and my strength reduce and – so my family tell me – I become a more difficult person to be around.
Or maybe this is a better analogy, and more linked to the idea of resistance, which is where we began: it’s like someone taking a hydraulic robot arm down the gym so they can rep double their body weight on the bench press – yes, the weight will move, you can go home and tell everyone you benched 200kg, but you’re not going to have got any benefit out of it.
It’s a functional argument on one level: I run so I can run away from trouble or make a train if I need to. I lift heavy things at the gym so I can lift heavy things in real life. It’s handy, being fit and strong.
So those examples are obviously nuts, but I honestly don’t think the AI writing tools are so very different. They make it so easy to have written without actually having written, and that’s the functional argument – when you stop writing, in terms of wrestling with ideas and how to structure and communicate them, you start losing the strength and the stamina to wrestle with ideas and structure them and communicate them.
But the demands of our world aren’t just physical: they’re cognitive and emotional and relational. Almost every waking minute of every day the world – in the form of your partner or your colleagues or your children or your friends or the person driving on the same stretch of road as you or sharing this crazy beautiful troubled planet with you – demands a response from you.
And much of the time if we’re honest we don’t so much offer a response as a reaction. And the lower our capacity for reflection and sustained thinking, the more reactive we’re likely to be. So we need to build that capacity. Writing gives us time and space to turn the raw material of life into stuff we can work with.
It’s not easy: full disclosure, I found writing this hard. It took me hours. I didn’t use AI, obviously, how hypocritical would that have been, but even though I was in the middle of grappling with an argument about why grappling with an argument is such a valuable process, there was a tiny voice in my head saying that AI could help with this. And what that voice is really saying is: ‘you can’t do this’, or ‘you can’t do this well, you’re not good enough.’ And that’s disempowering.
I do realise that it would have been much faster to write this with the use of AI. It would probably have put in some flourishes that would have sounded impressive, and almost certainly found some references and arguments I’ve not used. I could probably have written 10 essays in the time it took to write this one if I’d used AI to help. Does that mean I’ve used my time inefficiently? I guess some people would say so.
When everyone around you at the gym is using hydraulic robot arms to lift crazy weights effortlessly, you might feel like a mug for struggling unaided with a bar that looks tiny in comparison. But those reps will be shaping you, they’ll be making you stronger, and that’s why you’re there.
Sometimes hydraulic robot arms are exactly what’s needed. Sometimes you need to get in a car and drive somewhere. I guess you could argue that AI tools and even AI writing is exactly what’s needed in some situations, although I think we still don’t fully understand the health and safety implications and the environmental impact and the need for governance around them as we do with hydraulic robot arms and cars. But we need to recognise that when we use those tools, we might get a job done, but there’s no benefit to us from that output.
And if we use a hydraulic robot arm every time there’s something heavy in front of us, or if we get in a car for every journey, no matter how small, actually we’re killing ourselves. Our bodies will atrophy. If we use AI for every email, every LinkedIn post, every book, then the same will happen to our minds. You know that there are folks posting every day on LinkedIn or churning out books in a weekend with the help of AI tools. It’s easy to think you’re a mug for sweating over a piece yourself, coming up with a genuine, hard-fought-for, authentic point of view. You’re not. You’re a freakin warrior. You’re part of the resistance.
I want to be strong and fit for as long as I can be, I want to be able to respond to whatever demands life throws at me, so I lift things and run. And guess what? I get a kick out of those things too. They make me happy. I want to be able to focus, to wrestle with ideas, to string strong, original sentences together, to have a point of view that’s mine, not rehashed from everyone else’s, so I write – and I read, too. And guess what? It makes me happy. Because although it sounds counter-intuitive, people are happiest not when they’re lying by a pool doing nothing – tempting thought that sounds – but when they’re engaged in something effortful and meaningful.
When I was researching the science behind this I came across a great quote from Theodore Roosevelt, who said in 1916: ‘Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing—even in our leisure.’
Big tech is actively trying to take that best prize from us at every turn – so doing your own writing, and therefore your own thinking, is an act of personal resistance.
But this isn’t just a personal issue: James Marriott, who has a superb Substack called Cultural Capital, argues that the spread of literacy in the 18th century was the foundation for democracy, it put the currency of ideas into the hands of any person prepared to take the time to learn to read, and if they also learned how to write, it gave them an opportunity to share their own ideas. He goes on to argue that we’re now living in the counter-revolution: reading is collapsing, literacy rates are stagnating or even falling in all developed countries, and for the first time in recorded history, IQ levels are falling in most developed nations. The inflection point was the mainstream adoption of the smartphone.
Here’s how James puts it on his Substack: ‘If the reading revolution represented the greatest transfer of knowledge to ordinary men and women in history, the screen revolution represents the greatest theft of knowledge from ordinary people in history.’
The problem is simple: reading is harder than watching a video, and most people most of the time do what’s easier if there’s a choice. So choosing to do the harder thing, rejecting the pull of the algorithm and the effortless entertainment, that is a conscious act of resistance.
I’ve argued that it’s worth doing because it’s good for you as an individual, that it will make you happier and keep your brain working more effectively for longer. But it’s also a social choice, because we need to see people engaging in this, your kids if you have them need to see you engaged in reading and writing if they’re to see that there are alternatives to spending most of their waking hours scrolling TikTok. You can’t tell them to get off their screen if they see you welded to yours all day.
It’s also a political and economic choice because tech is increasingly set up in ways that are counter to human happiness: you know how advertising works, it’s deliberately designed to create a sense of lacking so that you feel the need to buy something. If you don’t feel less than, they can’t sell it to you to make you enough. It manufactures demand, and in doing so it manufactures dissatisfaction. And behind that there’s the engagement imperative – the platforms are optimised to keep us scrolling so that we can see more and more advertisements.
As more people swap reading long-form fiction and nonfiction for shortform video and soundbites, they become more vulnerable to emotional rather than rational argument, and more intolerant of complexity and nuance. They get shoutier, and angrier, and find it not just harder to understand others’ points of view, but less worth their while. Feeling like you’re right feels great. Feeling like part of a tribe gives you a massive endorphin boost. Leaning into uncertainty or acknowledging that you might be wrong? They don’t feel so great, so most people don’t spend much time there.
This sucks, and we could talk for a long time about how we got here and the careless people who must be held to account. But pragmatically right now the best thing you can do is opt out regularly and thoughtfully, to stop being the product and start being the producer, to stop consuming and start creating. This really matters, and it won’t happen unless you put some effort in. You won’t get stronger unless you go down the gym. You won’t get better at thinking and communicating your thoughts unless you pick up a pen and start writing.
I know that I’m preaching to the converted here. You wouldn’t be listening to this if you weren’t into books. But I hope you’ve taken from this some encouragement at least that your instinct that books matter is solid, and if you’re finding yourself tempted to use AI more and more, I hope that I’ve given you new resolve to use it more thoughtfully and perhaps more sparingly. And this needs resolve. Nobody ever found themselves out for a run or down the gym by accident – many of us have found ourselves sitting on the sofa having just spent an hour scrolling without ever making the conscious choice to do that. If you’re going to write, you’re going to have to carve out the time and space for it and commit to it. Resistance is active, it’s the opposite of going with the flow, but it is never – whatever the borg tries to tell you – futile.
In the face of the bottomless pockets and political influence of the tech giants, not to mention our own predisposition to do whatever’s easiest, it can feel that way. But quite frankly resistance is all we’ve got, so let’s resist sloppy thinking and kneejerk reactions and soundbites and oversimplification and tribalism and dumbing down and instead let’s make time and space to write to work out our brains, just like we make time to work out our bodies, because now we don’t actually need to do it, we need it more than ever.
I hope that gave you some food for thought – I hope it’s inspired you to pick up a pen and write into your day, or think about how you can make time to do it more consistently, and I’d love to hear your thoughts.
