There is a strange thing happening to me, and I am still trying to name it. The more I work with AI, the more I want to read. Not skim. Not scroll. Read.
The kind of reading where you sink into a paragraph and forget the room you are sitting in. The kind where you finish a sentence and have to put the book face-down on your chest because the words have done something to you that you were not ready for.
This is not what I expected. If anything, I expected the opposite. I assumed that once a tool could draft, summarize, restructure, and rephrase for me, my appetite for the slow and the literary would shrink. But what is happening is the reverse. My hunger is louder than it has been in years.
I think I understand why, though I am still feeling my way through it.
When I work with AI, my brain stops doing a particular kind of labor it used to do quietly, all day long. The labor of constructing a sentence from scratch, even a clumsy one. The labor of staring at a blank line and wondering how to begin. The labor of weighing one phrasing against another, of choosing between three imperfect words, of arranging information on a page so that someone else can follow it. The small fumbles. The typos. The retries. The friction.
AI removes the friction. It hands me three good options before I have asked for one. It lays out structure I would have spent thirty minutes figuring out. It catches my errors before I have had the small private satisfaction of making them. And the work moves faster, and the output is cleaner, and I am genuinely grateful, and yet some part of my mind that used to be busy is now quiet.
Quiet, but not asleep. Restless.
That restlessness is what I keep noticing. There is a part of me that wants to do the work of choosing words. That wants to be lost. That wants to puzzle over a sentence. That wants to be confused on the way to being moved. And when I am not doing that work in my own writing, I find myself wanting to climb inside someone else's.
I want to think about being a teenager again, when the future was still a place you arrived at by trying.
I think what I am hungry for is not just stories. It is the experience of someone else having done the work, fully and slowly and without shortcuts, and inviting me into the result. AI gives me efficiency, which is a real gift. Books give me labor that someone else has poured years into so that I can spend a few hours inside it. They are almost opposite gifts.
Daily reading time, U.S. adults
Maybe that is the answer, or part of it. AI is the absence of friction, and reading is the deliberate seeking of it. When my days become smoother, my evenings start asking for texture. When my work asks less of my mind, my mind starts asking more of itself. The brain, it turns out, does not love being optimized. It loves being engaged. It loves being made to wait, made to wonder, made to construct images out of nothing but ink and white space.
There is something almost reassuring in this. I worried, briefly, that working with AI might atrophy something in me. Instead, it seems to be making me reach. Reach for older books. Reach for longer sentences. Reach for the kind of attention that does not pay off in the first paragraph. Reach for the slow.
I do not think this is nostalgia. I do not think I am romanticizing the old days of doing everything the hard way. I like the speed. I like the help. I will not be giving any of it back.
But I am noticing that the more I let a machine do the easy thinking, the more my mind goes looking for the hard kind. And the hardest, most beautiful kind I know is reading a great novel slowly, on a quiet evening, with no agenda and no output and no one to deliver it to.
So that is where I find myself, increasingly. On the couch. With a book. Letting someone who is no longer alive describe the rain.
It turns out the more I work with AI, the more I want to be human in the ways that have nothing to do with productivity. And reading, it seems, is the closest thing I have to a doorway back.