Someone wants to build a gym for your brain

A few weeks ago, over dinner, a friend tried to convince the table that someone should build a mental gym.

His logic was clean. Physical gyms only became a thing once life turned sedentary. Our great-grandparents didn’t need treadmills, because their days were already hard on the body. Now that nothing makes us move, we pay to move. The same thing, he said, is about to happen to our minds. Nothing in modern life forces us to think anymore, so soon we’ll pay for places that make us think.

Everyone nodded, including me. We all feel it. My own brain feels duller than it used to. I delete apps and redownload them a week later. I plan a long reading day and feel a small pinch of shame when my attention gives out after ten pages.

So the table began complaining — we can’t sit with a thought, we can’t be bored, we can’t watch anything without a second screen running. And there are the two usual villains associated with all these complaints — social media and now AI — which seem to be making thinking optional. Someone said that it felt like something essential was being lost, and that we were the unlucky ones around to watch it go.

I agreed in the moment. It was only later that something started to nag at me.

Because none of this is new. Every generation has been sure it was losing the ability to think. Only the thing it blames keeps changing.

Socrates, of all people, distrusted writing. He worried that once words could live outside your head, you’d stop bothering to remember anything. What we now say about AI, he said about the alphabet. Later, when the printing press made books cheap, scholars panicked that people would drown in too many of them and start reading carelessly. The novel got the same treatment. Critics were convinced readers were overstimulating their feelings and escaping from real life.

Doomscrolling, it turns out, had a great-great-grandmother who read too many romance novels.

And yet, something does feel different this time, and I don’t think we are entirely imagining our complaints.

What’s changed is the scale. Writing once belonged to philosophers. Books belonged to people who could read. Even television was something you watched, not something that watched you back. AI is not like that. It sits in everyone’s pocket. It shapes how whole populations feel boredom, effort, creativity, all at once. When a change reaches that far, the worry moves away from a dinner-table debate and starts feeling existential.

But the longer I sat with my own anxiety, the more I realised it wasn’t really about losing the ability to think. It was about something smaller and more embarrassing.

I’m not afraid I can’t think. I’m afraid I won’t be special for thinking.

For a long time, being a “thinker” was a kind of scarcity. Not everyone had the time, the quiet, or the training for long reading and careful arguments. Those habits weren’t just habits. They sorted people, and some of us came out looking ‘more intellectual’ than others.

But now that everyone can access ‘thinking’ in their pockets, it’s not a differentiator. Now anyone can ask a machine to summarise a book in five seconds. What feels like the death of thinking might really be the death of thinking as a way to feel a cut above.

And that stings most for people like the ones at that dinner, including me, who built a sense of self around being the thoughtful one in the room.

I’m not saying the worry is fake. What these algorithms are doing to children’s attention and mental health is a real problem, and something genuinely new is happening. But panic is a bad doctor. It confuses the diagnosis. When we mistake ‘I feel less special’ for ‘civilization is collapsing,’ we go looking for the wrong cure. We start designing mental gyms for a problem we may not actually have.

I still don’t know whether attention is disappearing or just rearranging itself. But I’ve stopped trusting the panic, including my own. Because every generation has confused losing its own little privilege with losing thinking itself.

And I’m fairly sure I’m no exception.

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