The Slow Fading Reality

I began thinking slowly. Not the Daniel Kahneman kind of slow.

Actual slow. Toned down how I think these days.

Now, don’t assume this is because I’ve been using more AI and my cognitive capacity quietly drifted into the dark depths of Mordor. That’s an easy answer, sure. And quite possible you’re a Lord of the Rings Maniac. But that’s not what happened here.

If anything, with AI around, I’ve started thinking more slowly on purpose.

AI is tricky!

It gives you hyper-quick responses. Information at light speed. You punch in a prompt, two seconds later there’s an answer.

As you keep up the pace, after a couple of months, a hundred-odd prompts later, you start accepting the results the same way we used to accept search results in the past. We all know those are not the best results. No pause. No blink. Unless your prompt is long and it’s going deep, you don’t even get a second to let your own mind check in.

This time though we take it for granted as it has been marketed.

When you read through the result, and it’s almost acceptable. Feels close enough to how a human would respond. And that’s the trap.. because language hits a familiar nerve. Makes it easy to forget that the thing answering (AI, LLM, Whatever the Fuck it is) isn’t thinking.

After a while, we all slip into Mordor. I mean the darkness. We forget or maybe already forgot we had the cognitive capacity that created this AI. We start believing we still hold the power, but deep down? Whenever we just accept whatever shows up, we all know it’s becoming the source of our creativity, and our thought process.

Some people fight it and push back hard. But that’s not a solution.

Engage in that quiet intellectual battle. The first response AI gives is usually close enough to what you asked for, but there’s this reflex now to not even check.

And if you pause and think for a while, nobody’s really talking about prompt engineering these days which was “the thing“ until a couple of days back.

What happened to it? Is it dead? I don’t know.

Feels like even composing a proper prompt is something we’ve offloaded to the AI. It’s hard to resist the idea that the machine can do it better, cleaner, faster.

What a proud, prideful race we’ve become, paradoxically simultaneously enslaving our own intelligence to machine intelligence. The same machines we created, trained, and now defer to.

Where am I going with this not-so-intelligent drift?

I’m trying to confront you with the slow fading reality. The fading of how we think.

How we act. How we work. How we use or don’t use our own cognitive ability.

So why am I thinking slowly?

Because I use AI, but now I pause before hitting send. I sit with the prompt/question. I don’t just shoot it off to the machine. I hold my brain in that moment. Give it room to rethink, change my earlier choice of words, reshape the intent and what exactly am I expecting. Constraining the scope of the response and making the AI work harder like it is supposed to.

Constraining is an art form. Even art is constrained in a canvas. I’m sure even the universe is constrained, it’s just that we couldn’t find it’s borders yet.

And when the answer comes back, I don’t just skim and move. I read it like I’m reviewing the work of AI. Because I’m the master here.

And a master needs to be wise. Thoughtful. Slow when necessary. Responsible for the student, for the machine, for the choices that shape what happens next.

That’s the posture I’m choosing with AI, to be the master over machine, not slave to it. And that’s why I’ve built my own slow thinking model.

It brings me to a real question though:

Why do we constantly nudge ourselves out of awareness?

Why do we keep slumbering on the sidelines when our own machinery, our own minds, are right there?

The answer sits deeper than just tech. Over years, the continuous technology evolution made most of us quietly checked out. Scared to keep up with the rush, the pace, and the chaos.

Look at blockchain for example. It rose erractically, everyone came with their own coins and same made fortunes while the rest hunted like anti-witcher. The death curve was slow and confusing. Half of us couldn’t even comprehend it, so we just shrugged and moved on. Too much effort. And then, out of nowhere, AI showed up and said:

this is your new reality now!

That’s the shift. And it makes sense why, these days, our thoughts don’t linger in profoundness. We don’t sit with complexity well. We swipe for instant gratification, just like those Instagram reels we scroll mindlessly. Same loop.

But my message isn’t anti-AI. It isn’t anti-speed either. It’s this:

Vibe… but with Vitality!

That’s the difference. Stay alive in the process. Stay present. Stay awake. Slow down…not to resist the future, but to master it.