Cognitive Hygiene: Why You Need to Make Thinking Hard Again | Westenberg 

• Favorite quote:

  Michael Polanyi called this tacit knowledge — things we know but cannot explain. But what happens when that category gets replaced by a second kind: things we claim to know but never really did? It looks the same on the outside — in both cases we sound confident, in both cases we feel informed — but only one of them survives challenge.

• The practical takeaway for me was to deliberately build friction back in to our lives (in particular, how we consume content and how we make plans):

  And this means building friction back in. Not everywhere, but somewhere. Use the auto summarizer. Sure, but write the closing paragraph yourself. Let the calendar schedule your day, but decide what matters before you look. Ask the chatbot, but argue with yourself afterward. Restore dialogue. Make your knowledge traceable. Keep a commonplace book. Read sources in full. Ask where that number came from. Practice epistemic hygiene.

The YouTube description is really good writing (as if the video essay were not concise enough):

Everyone's talking about how AI is changing work.

Not enough people are talking about how it's changing thought.

At first, the shift looked like efficiency. Fewer hours lost to emails. More leverage in content creation. A personal assistant with perfect recall, infinite patience, and no salary expectations.

But when you zoom out, the gains start to blur.

Because we aren't just offloading tasks. We're offloading cognition.

Writing used to be a process of structuring memory. Now it’s a process of prompting a black box to simulate it.

Reading used to involve parsing meaning, following threads of logic, struggling with implication. Now it's summarized into bullet points and spoon-fed by copilots who don't care whether you understand, only whether you feel informed.

We're fragmenting knowledge into atomized units: highlights, summaries, cheat sheets, 90-second TikToks explaining Aristotle, one-sentence takeaways from 400-page books.

The result is a weird simulation of fluency. We sound like we know things. We feel like we know things. But there's no mental furniture being arranged. Nothing gets interiorized. Nothing sinks in.

The tragedy is not that we're becoming dumber. The tragedy is that we're becoming fluent in simulated intelligence while starving our own.

Reflection takes time. Synthesis requires slowness. Identity is downstream of memory, and memory is built from friction.

If you want to preserve something real in your cognition, reintroduce friction deliberately.

Write longform by hand. Follow an argument past the summary. Read the book, not the notes. Resist the urge to outsource your thinking to a machine that doesn’t think.

You might lose some speed. But you'll gain something else:

A mind that still knows how to think.