The Cognitive Conundrum

Hello Guys! Where to Start? A Question would be apt.

When was the last time you held on to something profound, something that truly elated you, an achievement, an adventure, or an experience that genuinely made you happy and, most of all, stayed with you for some time? PAUSE your reading and think for a second. If I am right, you can't recollect many such memories, or perhaps only a handful. Now go and ask the same question to your parents or grandparents; they'd have a plethora of such memories, and our grandparents, even with their weak memory power, have their stories on the tip of their tongue, ready to narrate.

Before addressing the issue here, let us travel a few years back in time - the 1980s & 1990s. What did people our age do back then? Play, listen to the radio, play, read books, play. Now the 2000s & 2010 the priorities changed. Well, the playtime got reduced, but people were watching TV more, and in this era, we saw the inception of smartphones and, apparently, social media. However, the time spent on them was reasonably low.

Now jump into the Time Machine and come BACK TO THE FUTURE -- the 2020s. Our time is filled with tons of time being wasted on social media, that too on Brainrot stuff. Social media has a lot of great content, but even greater amounts of shitty content. 40,000 years of cognitive revolution was reduced to rubble by the radical development of social media and AI. We reached the pinnacle of cognition to the point that we altogether stopped the need for thinking and developed tools that do it for us.

In hindsight, this is a truly remarkable achievement, but... if you look closely, the success is attributed to the creators. What about the consumers, i.e., us? The algorithms have us chasing validations and goals of others, moreover the lives of others. But what about our life, our goals, and our individuality?

The great irony here is that people are turning out to be generic while AIs are turning into specific. Earlier, when AI was out of our reach, people were ranting about the ill effects of AI, panicking about robots taking over. But once we got our hands on AI, the whole world turned upside down, and people welcomed it with open arms. Nothing changed from the past; AI is as dangerous as it was back then. In fact, it has become more lethal—walking with us, sleeping with us, and most of all, keeping track of our activities. The funniest part of all this is that everyone acknowledges this and yet stays reticent.

I am not against AI for sure. In fact, I use different AI tools myself. Every question I have is answered by ChatGPT, every task is managed by Claude, and every image is enhanced by Gemini. But what makes the distinction here is a simple question - "TO WHAT EXTENT?" Everyone should uphold some boundaries regarding the usage of AI & social media. Let AI do the work you hate to do; let AI do the work that eats your time. But for the love of God, stop using AI to make reels, write scripts, create art, or make music. Everything that you love to do, do it yourself. AI can be creative, but it can never be soulful, and that soul is attributed to the human mind itself.

To get out of this illusion, I follow one simple thing: Sometimes modern problems require primitive solutions. To gain our cognition back, go and do what the earlier generation did—play a game, read a book, watch a movie, listen to music (seriously guys, there is plenty of good music out there), or travel and explore nature.

Looking at this scenario, I remember a quote by George Orwell: "Reality exists in the human mind and nowhere else." Keep your mind free from the shackles of social media and AI. Don't lose your reality. Remember, your mind is your last sanctuary.