Up until 2 years ago, okay maybe 5 years ago, "thinking" meant the slow work of putting an answer together yourself, out of what you had already lived. The work could take days, sometimes years. People wrote the work down in books or documents or blogs with their names on them.
Now, in 2026, "thinking" is mostly the small thing that happens between you asking a question and an answer coming back from somewhere else. The work has been moved from you to an app. Most of us haven’t really stopped to notice that the word ‘thinking’ now means something different from what it meant when we first learned it.
Almost everything we see around us on social media, at work, etc. feels off because we're not picking those new skills up at the "natural" pace. The new 10 things we've learned in the last 3 months feels off because we haven't had the time to actually live with any of them for long enough. These new things sit on top of us. They have not really gone in our minds.
This year, 2026, is the year the line started showing. And so dramatically!
I think in the next five years, we are going to split into two kinds of people. The first kind will continue to think alone. They'll get bored on a Sunday afternoon and will not bother checking social media much. They'd be the ones sitting on a chair for an hour, absorbing the surroundings, in silence. The second kind will completely lose these individualistic experiences or lose it enough to not acknowledge or miss them to begin with.
The difference between the two kinds of people is really about whether you're willing to do a small amount of slow, unfashionable, mostly-invisible work, every day, for the rest of your life, to keep being a person in the strict sense. The difference is not becoming a complete human prompt-generator.
Maybe sit alone for an hour or walk to the sabjiwala without listening to the latest episode of a podcast. Maybe you don't connect Claude to WhatsApp for sending generated messages in the family or work WhatsApp groups.
By 2028, "boredom tolerance" will be a measured trait, the way grit in start-ups became a measured trait around 2010. The people who score in the top ten percent will be hired into roles the rest cannot occupy.
By 2029, the divorce rate in urban India will rise sharply. The most-named cause in private therapy notes will be a sentence shaped like I felt closer to the AI-model than to my husband. This is already happening. Nobody is talking about it out loud yet.
By 2030, the average reading span of a college graduate in India will fall below the average reading span of a 1995 high schooler.
By 2031, a small movement will start, the way these things always start, quietly, in pockets, of people who have deliberately chosen to not do just AI-assisted work. They will look strange and eccentric to their friends. They will appear to be slower and naturally, will produce less in the visible sense and more in a sense that does not yet have a name.
By 2032, you will know which kind you became.
I'll admit that I cannot read the way I could in 2022. I tried, last week, to sit with a Jason Fried essay I have read twenty times before, and I checked something on my phone seven minutes in (bloody GMail and Slack notifications), and then again two minutes after that, and then again four minutes after that. I have been edited gradually for sure. Not all the way. Enough that I can feel it.
If you have read this far, you are probably the second kind of person who is about to become the first kind. You already half-suspect what I am going to spend the rest of upcoming blog posts on. They are stories and experiences I'll share with myself as I figure out the means, the manual, in pieces, in the form of small instructions I can do one of today.
At least in my head, these next steps are not dramatic and they don't require leaving your job, deleting your phone apps, or moving to a village. Here is the first one.
This week, before next Sunday, do one thing nobody can see or witness. Walk somewhere in or around your locality. Make something with your hands, even if it's food or a clay model. Just sit in the balcony and do not tell anyone by sharing a photograph of the sky on Instagram - you have a great view? awesome; keep it to yourself. Don't even mention it to a friend later in the evening. Watch what happens to the action when nobody will ever know it happened. Notice if you feel different.
The work of becoming the first kind of person, this week, is the recovery of the unwitnessed life.