We can now outsource thinking.
For those who have never thought a single thought in their whole lives, this means they finally have access to convenient, hassle-free thinking. But even if thinking is now commodified (or made absolutely free), it’s safe to assume that a significant percentage of people will still not make use of it. Whether it’s an organic mind or an artificial one, it doesn’t matter because they intend to use neither. For these individuals, thinking is like a tool forgotten in a toolbox forgotten on a dusty shelf in the garage. It’s enough for them to know that it’s there somewhere if they ever need it, (but as long as nothing is broken, no fixing will be done). These individuals were never meant to produce thoughts, and (honestly) (by the end of the day) that’s absolutely fine. We were not all born to become theoretical physicists or philosophers. Why pretend? Nevertheless, there’s a problematic category of idiots we do need to talk about (albeit briefly) before we tackle the more substantive matters. This category of [self-made?] idiots includes the ones enjoying their newfound access to thinking, and we see them producing and sharing generic thoughts they are proud of on every online platform imaginable. What they’re sharing, however, is thought pollution, aka AI slop. And although there isn’t much we can do about it, this type of (tasteless) (public) “thinking” isn’t fine at all. These garbage producers have filled the digital universe with platitudes. Because of them, going online has become like being sucked into an intellectually sterile black hole, from which nothing escapes, not even [thoughts?]. And as a fisherman of exotic thoughts, I am bothered by this very deeply. It has become excruciatingly hard to find thinking creatures that produce original thoughts.
“In an information-rich world, most of the cost of information is the cost incurred by the recipient. It is not enough to know how much it costs to produce and transmit information; we must also know how much it costs, in terms of scarce attention, to receive it.”1 In other words, as the readers (or the consumers of content), we are the ones paying the real price. We have limited attention-credits. And as the number of formulaic and hackneyed posts on the internet increases exponentially, our precious (and finite) attention is wasted on addictive, trite, platitudinous garbage. Of course, we know there are still original posts out there somewhere (and sometimes we really want to find them), but our optimism of actually finding them keeps dying a little more every day. For instance, is it worth reading hours of empty prose until we find one good essay, story, or article? (Is infinite scrolling anything more than “attention gambling” where we gamble our attention until we come across something really worth our attention? Let us remember, fellow gamblers, that the house always wins. Life is too short to have an average screen time that exceeds two hours a day.) “Hence,” as we can see and feel, “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information that might consume it.”2 Ideally, a considerate algorithm would filter the garbage and give us the gold; however, the reality is disappointing: what the algorithm thinks is gold is the garbage, and what the algorithm thinks is unworthy of our attention is more likely to be gold than what it thinks is gold. Our best option, therefore, is to limit our time online, but doing that may slowly phase us out of what Adorno and Horkheimer called the culture industry. So, it’s a catch-22.
In Schopenhauer’s time, a big but disordered library was not as useful as a small but well-arranged one because “only through ordering what you know by comparing every truth with every other truth can you take complete possession of your knowledge and get it into your power.”3 Today’s world, however, is a little different. All of us have access to the biggest (and also well-arranged) library. Like a knowledge genie who lives in your pocket, an LLM can give you whatever answer you desire (as long as you prompt it properly). At the workplace, for example, your “organic” knowledge no longer has real value; what is valuable is your knowledge-retrieving skills. If you have the skills that allow you to retrieve the right information at the right time or prompt the right action at the right time, then you are, for the time being, in a really good place. Nonetheless, Schopenhauer is not only speaking about the organization of books (aka knowledge), but about how we engage with knowledge itself. The act of thinking breaks down, stress-tests, undermines, translates, and, most importantly, records its traces in your mind, so that by the time you’re done learning, the knowledge stays with you (not as mere information, but also as a tool, which means you can now use it outside the field it was born in). Conversely, if you are merely retrieving thoughts (or information) and copy-pasting them elsewhere, the thinking process, and therefore the spirit of thought, is not being recorded in your mind. What you have, then, is a simulation of thought. “Thinking has to be kindled, as a fire is by a draught, and kept going by some kind of interest in its object, which may be an objective interest or merely a subjective one.”4 Thinking is a subject that is held in the mind and constantly revisited (until it is consumed and transformed). To outsource thinking is to give up exactly this “process”. You cease being a thinking entity and turn into an entity that merely retrieves, receives, and transmits information. Simply put, you become a body through which information passes and nothing more. At best, the information that passes through you prompts you to take certain actions and rewards you when you complete those actions. Traditionally, we used to call this mind control.
[1] Herbert A. Simon, “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World,” in Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest, ed. Martin Greenberger (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971), 41.
[2] Ibid. 40-41.
[3] Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Suffering of the World, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 68
[4] Ibid. 68.
This piece was first published on my Substack on March 23, 2026.
Bored Absurdist 