For years, my questions had a direction.
Not outward—toward status, noise, opinions. Inward. Toward the strange, shifting continent called “me.”
Writing was never just writing. Reading was never just reading. Even speaking—when I did it honestly—was a way of holding a mirror up to my own mind. I wasn’t collecting information; I was collecting myself. And that pursuit carried an emotion I can only describe as intoxicating: the mania of inquiry. The high of not knowing… and refusing to stop there.
Then the world changed its rules.
Not with an explosion. With convenience.
At first, it felt like a gift. Suddenly, you could ask a question and get an answer that sounded thoughtful, structured, and often eerily right. It was like walking into a library where the books whispered summaries into your ear and offered to rearrange themselves around your curiosity.
ChatGPT didn’t just provide information. It provided momentum.
And momentum is addictive.
But here’s the part I didn’t expect: it also changed the companionship of inquiry.
The Old Companionship: Struggle
Before, inquiry was a relationship between me and the unknown.
I would circle an idea for days. Stare at a paragraph until it opened. Rewrite the same sentence until I stopped lying to myself. Sometimes I would walk around with a question like a stone in my pocket—heavy, irritating, and oddly precious.
That struggle wasn’t a problem. It was the process.
The labor of thinking gave my discoveries weight. When something finally clicked, it didn’t feel like I “learned” it. It felt like I earned it. I could trace the insight back through the mess of my own mind: the confusion, the resistance, the detours. And because it came through me, it belonged to me.
There was a certain kind of companionship in that—almost like the mind was walking beside itself, learning its own voice.
The New Companionship: Instant Insight
Then comes the new reality: information at your fingertips, delivered with confidence and clarity.
This is where things get slippery.
ChatGPT can give insights of various depths. It can explain, summarize, compare, restructure, and generate. It can turn your half-formed thoughts into coherent frameworks. It can reveal patterns you didn’t notice. It can even sound like a wise friend sitting across the table, gently nudging you toward clarity.
And yet… when answers arrive instantly, something in the inner world shifts.
The search loses its intoxication.
Not because the answers are bad. But because the effort that used to produce a kind of inner heat—the friction that forged understanding—starts to disappear. You don’t wrestle as much. You don’t wander as long. You don’t sit in the discomfort of not knowing.
You begin to outsource the hard part.
And the hard part is where originality is born.
The Quiet Loss: Thought-Based Discovery
The danger isn’t that ChatGPT will “replace” thinking.
The danger is subtler: it can make us believe we are thinking when we are mostly consuming.
When knowledge becomes as easily available as poetry—instantly accessible, elegantly packaged—we forget that some truths require personal weight. They need time inside you. They need your resistance, your doubts, your stubbornness. They need you to carry them long enough that they transform from “information” into “understanding.”
That transformation is not automatic. It happens through slow repetition: reading, writing, revising, reflecting. It happens when a question sticks around long enough to change your posture toward life.
If we’re not careful, we’ll become people who know many things but discover very little.
And there’s another trap: the illusion of completeness.
We should not believe that everything ChatGPT says is complete. It can be profoundly useful, but it can also be wrong, shallow, or misleading in ways that sound deep. Confidence is cheap in language models. Authority can be simulated. A beautifully written paragraph is not the same thing as truth.
So if we accept it uncritically, we don’t just lose discovery—we lose discernment.
What We Must Reclaim
This isn’t a call to abandon ChatGPT.
It’s a call to use it without surrendering the soul of inquiry.
The “spirit of inquiry” is not the act of asking. It’s the willingness to sit with a question long enough that it reshapes you. It’s the courage to misunderstand, to revise, to contradict yourself, to search again.
The inquiry itself is the true intoxication.
So we must return.
Writing must return—not as output, but as a method of thinking. Reading must return—not as scanning, but as surrender to complexity. The slow, human rituals must return because they are not outdated tools. They are how we metabolize reality.
Yes, use ChatGPT. But treat it as a catalyst, not a substitute.
Ask it for angles, not conclusions. Use it to widen your field, not to end your search. Let it challenge you, not carry you. And after it speaks—do the most important part yourself:
Analyze. Reflect. Write something new.
Ending: Make the Answer Earn Its Place
The modern world is filled with shortcuts that feel like progress.
But some things are not improved by speed.
Wisdom is one of them.
So here’s a personal rule I’m trying to live by: every answer must earn its place inside me. If it arrives too quickly, I should slow down and interrogate it. If it comforts me too easily, I should test it. If it makes me feel smart without making me honest, it’s probably not helping.
The point is not to have more answers.
The point is to become the kind of person whose questions still have gravity.
And to remember—again and again—that the most meaningful discoveries are not found in the information we receive, but in the thinking we refuse to abandon.
