At this moment, I am living in a significantly more comfortable world than the one I grew up in, and I have noticed a strange sense of loss where I have become a little less “myself.” This is not from adversity or hardship, but from comfort, automation, and instant answers.
The ease of using AI has begun to shape and create behaviour change in us where we skip tasks that involve core functions of thinking, attention, decision making, and problem solving, and I noticed it happening only when I confronted the things I could no longer do. I cannot navigate without GPS, I often give up on trying to recall information that takes longer than a few seconds to generate in my mind, and I wait passively for recommendations on what to watch or read, and have forgotten the joy of discovering those on my own.
However, I also enjoy these creature comforts that exist because of AI today. Would I trade them for a pre-AI world? Very unlikely (also I used AI to generate the image for this blog). There is something genuinely wonderful about a life with fewer burdensome tasks, but the interesting part will be to see how we come to rely on these tools, whether we engage with them passively or thoughtfully.
But, I also find myself a little terrified by the Black Mirror-Esque reality that we are inadvertently choosing comfort over complexity constantly, without fully understanding what that means for the future of our minds and bodies, our thoughts, and our emotional health.
And the question I keep returning to as I talk with people every day about the stress and challenges in their lives is this: how will we face challenge, stress, grief, or struggle — 10, 20, or 30 years from now, when ease and comfort continue to increase?
Nearly every great psychologist, existentialist, thinker and philosopher has spoken about the necessity of struggle as a rite of passage for coping with what life sends our way. Viktor Frankl wrote about meaning through suffering, that struggle is one of the primary paths to finding meaning. Buddha’s teachings say that avoiding suffering in itself causes psychological dysfunction. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs speaks to self-actualisation requiring the voluntary choosing of difficulty, once basic needs are reasonably met.
What happens, then, when struggle is slowly erased from daily life? What becomes of meaning, of purpose, and of the self? What anchors our stories and lived experiences, if not the things we struggled through and overcame?
The developmental frameworks I studied in graduate school — from Piaget’s cognitive development to Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development and Erikson’s psychosocial stages, all point to the same thing: we grow by encountering challenge at every stage of life, not by being comfortable. There is something we gain in this process. A sense of pride, mastery, accomplishment, confidence, that follows from doing something you previously could not.
Every email that AI writes for us, every awkward conversation it helps us navigate, every creative problem it solves for us, maybe this frees us up to deal with the bigger challenges in life. But could it also be that we are narrowing rather than expanding our human abilities, without realising it?
The growth of the comfort space also reinforces the idea that comfort is an ideal state of being, and that “discomfort” should be something we gradually edge out of the human experience. Over time, this will recalibrate what people can tolerate, and it is already happening. Difficulty that was once manageable becomes overwhelming, because the tolerance muscle has not been exercised. Ambiguity that should feel understandable becomes a nuisance. Anxiety that should be momentary starts to feel like a fixed state. And the human ability to sit with not-knowing and not having an answer, which is one of the most important capacities we can possess, disappears.
Even the frictions around something as routine as domestic chores are not just about the division of labour. They are also about shared responsibility and teamwork, negotiation, problem-solving, the very things that help us build our interpersonal skills and make us interdependent and connected. While we may soon be liberated from these smaller frictions, in that freedom will we discover that we have skipped having to face friction at all.
But, on the very bright side of these slightly dystopic reflections, these questions have given me plenty of food for thought on how mental health needs to evolve and grow alongside AI, so that we can continue to build our resilience and agency, our capacity for independent and creative thought, and also enjoy a world that keeps making life comfortable for us.
More on this in my next piece.
There is a difference between being supported and being replaced, and I think we are only beginning to understand that line. When too much of thinking, choosing, remembering, and creating is outsourced, the risk is not laziness so much as a quieter loss of agency. That feels especially important because some degree of difficulty is what shapes growth, resilience, and a sense of purpose. And it also makes me wonder what all this technological progress is really solving for, when healthcare remains inaccessible for many, poverty persists, and wars continue. So the question is not only how AI changes us, but whether we are using technology in service of convenience alone, or toward the deeper human problems that actually matter.
Cok ilginc bir makale!
A very interesting artice!
Good writing and thought provoking work!
I think the problem lies in not recognising that AI is a tool, that we need to use ‘thoughtfully’ as you put it. I would say, to be used ‘wisely’. If it makes a task more manageable, yes. But if it begins to dictate, or even ‘suggest’ what I should do, I would drop it.
प्रति स्थिति मध्ये श्रेयः किं च प्रेयः किं इति विचारं कृत्वा कार्यं कर्तुं अर्हसि।
AI is getting smarter.
But are we slowly choosing to think less?
Yes, it saves time. Yes, it makes life easier.
But at what cost?
How much of our own ability are we willing to outsource?
Because the truth is—
there’s a certain joy in figuring things out on your own.
In struggling. In creating. In thinking.
And then there’s something even deeper—
your experiences, your setbacks, your scars…
AI can never erase them. And it can never recreate them.
That’s what shapes your voice. Your judgment. Your originality.
So even if AI helps you write—
it will still echo who you are… or who you are becoming.
The real question is:
Are we using AI as a tool—or letting it define us?