Choose your hard (Part 3): Staying Human in the Age of AI
We are living through a massive, uncontrolled experiment in human biology. We have taken a nervous system evolved for scarcity, movement, and silence, and dropped it into an environment of personalised algorithms which keep us scrolling and stop us thinking.
By thinking, I mean being able to reflect and then act on living a meaningful life.
My thesis here is that poor mental and physical health is the inevitable end point of our technological life. And unless we actively act against this we will get worse.
I’m also sure we don’t need new prophets. Instead we need to listen to three old ones who never saw a smartphone, yet described our current health crisis with terrifying accuracy: Henry David Thoreau, Neil Postman, and Aldous Huxley.
The Prophetic Trio
These three thinkers offer a combined diagnosis for the modern condition.
Thoreau (19th century) identified the distraction. In Walden, he didn’t just hate the telegraph and other 19th century inventions; he hated the “improved means to reach unimproved ends.” He saw that when we invent “pretty toys,” we tend to prioritise the novelty of the tool over the quality of the life lived with it.
Postman (1980s) identified the fragmentation. In the context of 1980s television, he argued that the medium shapes the mind. He observed the emergence eof Sesame Street (education), TV clip politics, and TV evangelist religion. A culture dominated by 15-second clips and scrolling feeds doesn’t just lose its patience; it loses its coherence. We lose the ability to hold context, replaced by a “Now… This” rhythm where tragedy is immediately followed by a recipe for sourdough.
Huxley (1920s) identified the sedation. While Orwell feared we would be ruled by totalitarianism, Huxley feared we would be ruled by pleasure. He foresaw a world where we learn to love our servitude because the cage is comfortable, filled with distractions and chemical (or digital) soma that keeps us from asking difficult questions.
In 2026, these three forces have converged. We are distracted by Thoreau’s toys, our attention is fragmented by Postman’s medium (now the scroll and it’s algorithm, not TV), and we are sedated by Huxley’s pleasure.
But the result isn’t just a philosophical problem. It’s a medical one.
The Dopamine Trap and the Atrophy of Will
The modern digital environment is an engine for removing friction.
Hungry? UberEats. Bored? TikTok. Lonely? AI companion. Uncertain? Generative AI.
This feels like progress, but to a biologist, it looks like a trap. The human animal is designed to function within feedback loops of effort and reward. When you short-circuit that loop, delivering the reward (dopamine) without the effort, you don’t create freedom. You create dependency.
This is the “frictionless” trap. Metabolic health requires the friction of movement and dietary restraint. Cognitive health requires the friction of confusion, boredom, and sustained focus.
When we remove friction from our days, we experience atrophy.
Metabolic Atrophy: We see the rise of metabolic disorders not just because food is abundant, but because the environment is engineered to override satiety signals.
Cognitive Atrophy: This is the newer, quieter crisis. Thinking is not just intelligence; it is a muscle. It is the ability to sustain attention, tolerate ambiguity, and structure a complex argument.
Generative AI acts as a cognitive solvent. When an agent drafts your emails, summarises your reading, and plans your week, you are not just saving time. You are skipping the “gym” of the mind. If you repeatedly outsource the early stages of thinking, defining the problem, generating options, struggling with structure then you may remain capable, but you become less fluent. Thinking begins to feel like avoidable manual labour.
A and the algorithms will never be dumber than they are now. We can expect decades of more personalised algorithms and more personalised assistance in thinking. When the same conscious AI is our car, phone, and robot assistant then we move to a whole new level.
I don;t know how that will end for health, but I doubt it’s good.
The Automated Soma
Huxley’s dystopian future has evolved. In Brave New World, everyone took the same soma (pleasure drug). In 2026, the soma is personalised.
Algorithms function as a behavioural thermostat. They detect when your engagement drops, when your mood shifts, or when your resolve weakens, and they serve up exactly what will soothe you. A funny video. A validation. A product.
This is where the mental health crisis intersects with the medium. Anxiety thrives in a fragmented mind. Doomscrolling, the repeated consumption of short form video, is a maladaptive attempt to soothe the nervous system that ends up frying it. We are trading autonomy for a predictable, low-grade dopamine hit.
Huxley lamented in his 1923 essay Pleasures: “Countless audiences soak passively in the tepid bath of nonsense. No mental effort is demanded of them, no participation; they need only sit and keep their eyes open”. He was lamenting silent movies and that at weddings and funerals a philosophical or theological debate was no longer customary.
He never imagined the degree of sophistication and personalisation of modern entertainment – the scroll.
We are in an era where systems are not designed to harm us, but to optimise us in some way. And unfortunately, “optimised for engagement” usually looks a lot like “addicted.”
A Modern Walden: Engineering, Not Escape
Thoreau’s solution was to walk into a cabin in the woods, into seclusion. That is no longer a scalable strategy. The town is no longer a place you can leave; it lives in your pocket, on your wrist, and in the cloud.
We cannot retreat. We must redesign.
A modern Walden isn’t a cabin; it’s an attentional architecture. It is the deliberate reintroduction of friction into our lives to protect our autonomy.
This is not luddism. It is recognising that because our environment is adversarial to our health, we must build defenses.
Friction in Tech: It means choosing tools that serve us (calculators, drafts) rather than replace us (agents that decide for us). It means setting hard boundaries where the digital world cannot follow – the bedroom, the dinner table, the waking hour.
Friction in Body: It means treating sleep, movement, and real food not as moralistic lifestyle choices, but as medical non-negotiables required to keep the brain functioning in a high-dopamine world.
Friction in Mind: It means reclaiming the right and necessity of being bored. It means protecting the capacity to think slowly, to struggle with a problem before asking an AI to solve it.
There is a profound difference between a calculator and a chauffeur. A calculator supports your agency; a chauffeur steals your navigation skills. We must use AI to magnify our intent, not to outsource our purpose.
The Radical Act of Staying Human
The danger is not that AI will become sentient and destroy us. The danger is mundane and far more likely: that humans will forget that thinking is a biological act, inseparable from the struggle of doing it.
We will betray our species with a willingness to choose pleasure over hard.
We are living through a trade that is rarely spoken aloud: autonomy for convenience.
To resist this trade, we don’t need to smash the machines. We need to remember what the machines are for.
In a world dedicated to the frictionless, the easy, and the immediate, the most radical act you can take is to choose the difficult path on purpose. To choose the friction of cooking, the friction of learning, the friction of silence, and the friction of thinking your own thoughts.
That is what Thoreau sought in the woods. That is the antidote to Postman’s fragmented world. That is how we wake up from Huxley’s pleasant dream.
Choose your hard. Every path has difficulties. I choose friction up front because we must remain human on purpose.
