The Age of Intention: Why AI Will Make Us More Exhausted
A short essay on the fatigue of the frictionless life
I am becoming increasingly suspicious of claims that new technologies will make our lives easier. I don’t deny that they can make certain tasks easier. But recent history shows that many of us will attempt, in our own time, to make up for what our machines propose to do for us during the day.
We’ve all heard about the dangers of cognitive offloading in the context of generative AI. (Yes, I’m sorry, this is an article about AI.) I contend that what is offloaded will eventually need to be reloaded if we are to have any sense of meaning in our lives.
Many people, I’m sure, will embrace AI with few questions. If the now-famous MIT study is anything to go by, their cognitive capacities will decline. Others — the ones, for better or worse, hell-bent on not letting this technology destroy their minds, their sense of personhood — will need to carve out additional time in their already packed schedules in order to rewrite what AI is threatening to overwrite.
I heard this idea some months ago on Cal Newport’s podcast. People who wish to safeguard their cognitive capacities under the onslaught of AI, Newport says, will have to get highly intentional about using their brains in other settings. Reading, writing, Sudoku — any activity that requires sitting down to take your brain seriously. He compares this to the way many of us now spend our mornings or evenings in the gym to combat days spent at the desk.
It is a classically Newportian thing to say and may get some of us fired up and ready to train our brains. But we need to put this in context. Any cognitive re-loading we plan out for ourselves will need to be added to the exhausting list of to-dos already weighing down our lives, which are there largely to counteract the things technology has made easier for us.
In this context, AI is not the first but rather the latest step in a series of innovations that would seem to make things easier for us, but end up asking much more of us if we are determined to live a meaningful life. Like the Red Queen, we will have to run faster and faster simply to stay in place. Try harder and harder to offset the corrosive effects of the technologies we have willingly or unwillingly introduced in our lives.
The modern world, for better and worse, invites us to offload. Once, we ploughed fields and melted widgets in furnaces, and now machines do it. Once, we made our own bread and butter and vegetable soup, and now companies like Nestlé make our food for us. We’ve seen what this combination has led to. Fighting with a food system designed to exploit our basic biology, many of us now set some kinds of rules around what we eat, count the components, tally up the protein. Where our grandparents may have eaten what was available simply because it was available, many of us now eat with intention. Similarly, now that many of us put our brains to work rather than our bodies, we carve out time in the schedule for cardio, strength training, mobility, you name it. We have workout schedules and personal trainers and 12-week goals for improving on this or that.
And now, the rise of AI, at home but especially in the workplace, means that, if things play out the way Sam Altman and his buddies want them to, we will no longer be using our brains at work, either. Those who say, “well, just don’t use it”, have either not experienced the reality of working for a corporation in 2026, where AI usage itself has become a KPI, or considered AI in the context of other addictive technologies like social media, where “just don’t use it” is a daily battle.
Lest I be taken for another delusional millennial, let me be clear. There is no era I would rather live in. I am beyond grateful for my computer job, my instant oats, my effortless access to antibiotics. The painting at the top of this essay is called Monday Morning; I saw it recently in a gallery and was breathless with gratitude that my Monday mornings look nothing like it.
So I am not claiming that we should reject all technology and innovation, Yesteryear-style. What I am hoping to do through this essay is not to complain but to explain; to put resisting the effects of cognitive offloading in its context. To give a voice to the feeling that many of us feel guilty for having: our lives have been made so much easier for us, so much better, and yet somehow we are more exhausted than ever.
Not everything in the past was better, but not everything new technology promises is necessarily an improvement. Amid the LinkedIn-bro hype of what we stand to gain, it is worth understanding what we may lose when we adopt a new technology. That is, if we wish to move forward with any sense of sanity, or, rather, humanity.
What has so far gone unacknowledged in the discussions of ‘brain gyms’ and ‘exercises for the mind’ is that having to bring intention to everything we do in life — to have to schedule friend hangouts, block out time for the gym, track or our protein intake, carve out activities to keep our brains active — is nothing short of exhausting. It is not the effort itself that is so tiring (though it is, of course), but the intention behind it. To have to think so much and so constantly about all the ways in which our daily lives make us deficient and to schedule time and pluck energy from somewhere to attempt to fortify what is being eroded by powers beyond our control. Eve Rodsky claims that a task is not just its execution but also its conception and planning — two largely invisible elements, often shouldered by women in domestic settings, with very real consequences. The age of intention adds another layer to conception and planning: a sense of having to harness dwindling willpower to work on something that feels like it shouldn’t be this hard.
Yes, there is a fatigue that comes from work that requires physical labour, social interaction, or cognitive demand; but there is perhaps an even greater fatigue in clicking around for eight hours at a time while the technology executes our to-do list, in order to rush home at the end of the day to squeeze back in all the capacities the technology has taken from us.
Perhaps some of us really don’t mind automating our brains at work. Perhaps we felt close to an automaton already, and the introduction of AI has somehow made it easier and more bearable. Perhaps there is a fraction of people who really won’t mind automating their work brains and tuning up their cognitive abilities in their own time with things that interest them. But I sense that, for most of us, the art of engaging intellectually with our work is often the only thing that makes it bearable. (This is a subject for another essay.)
To take us back to the start: I admire Newport’s thinking on the subject. I think he’s technically correct that combatting AI-driven cognitive erosion would require significant skill-building or skill-maintaining in our off-time. I think it’s probably the best advice we can give when so many people now have no choice but to use AI at work. And I know that Newport would prefer knowledge workers not to use AI, or at least not to use it in such a way that outsources their thinking and eventually melts their mental capacities. But I want to put this concept of intentionally training your brain to offset AI’s effects into the broader context of our already busy, tiring, highly intentional lives.
Do we really need another destructive social technology whose corrosive effects, we are told, will require personal responsibility and intention to combat?
Whatever productivity gains AI might offer at a global level, we must think hard about whether, as individuals, the benefits of removing something that must then, later that day or week or lifetime, be added back.