The Art Of Discovering Is Dying

After a while, I read something that made me pause and think. What is happening? What am I doing? What is everyone doing? And where is the world heading as a whole? Before we go further, let me share what I read. This was a tweet from one of my favorite scientists—just like you might quote Kohli or Shah Rukh, I like to quote philosophers and scientists. Well, it is a tweet, not a quote:

GenAI isn't just a technology; it's an informational pollutant—a pervasive cognitive smog that touches and corrupts every aspect of the Internet. It's not just a productivity tool; it's a kind of digital acid rain, silently eroding the value of all information.

Every image is no longer a glimpse of reality, but a potential vector for synthetic deception. Every article is no longer a unique voice, but a soulless permutation of data, a hollow echo in the digital chamber. This isn't just content creation; it's the flattening of the entire vibrant ecosystem of human expression, transforming a rich tapestry of ideas into a uniform, gray slurry of derivative, algorithmically optimized outputs.

This isn't just innovation; it's the systematic contamination of our data streams, a semantic sludge that clogs the channels of genuine communication and cheapens the value of human thought—leaving us to sift through a digital landfill for a single original idea.

Now, I know this is quite a technical thing he is speaking about, but his words are profound and apply to every one of us. Let me simplify what he is talking about here. He is saying that people have started using AI in every part of their lives. It has become so integral that reality and deception are getting harder and harder to discern. A lot of people, after reading this, started commenting that this is written by an AI, and yes, it does look like a post that an AI might write. And that is precisely the point he was making. How would we know what is real and what isn't? Some humans definitely wrote like this, and AI copied their style. But think from the perspective of those humans—they lost their discovery to a machine.

I know a lot of you are wondering, what's the big deal in this? So what if AI copied my writing style? If you think like this, then sorry to say, you missed the point. Creative endeavors are the core identity of humans; without art, we are barely humans. Ask yourself, how many of you can write like the above tweet? We as a species are losing more and more autonomy by the day. Every cognitive task is getting offloaded to the AI.

The thing that made us different from each other is our ability to pursue different things and revel in the joy of learning that skill. But with AI stretching into every part of our lives, human creativity is just getting drowned in AI. Everyone is now in the gray; no one seems to be unique anymore. This is not good for humans as a race. The purpose of most of our lives is not getting material comfort, but finding the purpose to live for something bigger than ourselves.

Information overload is killing us; everything seems like a blur, no one is unique, and everyone is boring. I don't enjoy movies anymore as I used to. Forget that, I don't even remember most of the series I have watched in the last few years. You know what? Netflix took that joy away. It killed the experience of discovering new movies through the internet or hearing about obscure movies from a film buff friend of yours. It used to be a thing to be proud of, that you watched the movie before anyone else in your group. This died with the rise of Netflix. Netflix took away the process of discovery, the very thing that made that activity fun in the first place.

And Netflix is just one example. I'm sure you remember all your crashes when you were learning to ride your bike, but if everything is autonomous, why would you even bother learning it? See, there is nothing as such important for humans, apart from basic survival needs. There is no inherent value to anything, to be honest. It is I committing time to something—that's what makes that thing important and worthwhile, and that is the essence of humans: discovering your own path. AI is taking that away. We are slowly and steadily becoming mere consumers, not discoverers. A life full of boredom, unhappiness, and lingering sadness. I watched movies earlier because I wanted to watch them. Now I watch them because I don't have anything to do.

With more and more things getting autonomous, I wonder what humans would do with their time. We all need goals and purpose to craft our unique identities—this is what makes life fun. But overexposure to information and constant entertainment has desensitized us. We have way too much entertainment in the world, and with AI rising, it will become even worse. Humans need to spend time in solitude, ponder deeply about their life journeys, discover their stories, and other things. But it has to be discovered, not served on a platter in the form of a reel.

That's why I'm a builder. Mere entertainment is boring for me, and if you think deeply, you will also likely reach the same conclusion. There is an inherent dissatisfaction with life. You know, we are as stressed as a soldier in WW2—think about this deeply. Why? Why are people stressed to that level for no apparent problems? Most of their problems are self-inflicted and can easily be fixed by cutting the noise in their lives, aka social media.

I'm sure every one of you has felt life drifting away, not knowing who you are anymore. Not constantly, but at least in parts. Running away to a mountain is not going to solve this, nor will distracting yourself with something else. Maybe they might work for a while, but let's be honest with ourselves—this is not a long-term thing. To make my point further, I want to talk about Buddhism. In Buddhism, there is a clear separation between happiness and contentment. All the entertainment is short-lived happiness, a sudden spike in dopamine, but contentment comes from the grounding of individuals' identity. And Buddha is not the last one to talk about this. Even Nietzsche talks about this and calls it individuation. The process of turning inwards and facing your own mind and thoughts.

In no way are modern humans (general public) smarter than our ancestors; it's just that our biases are different now. Jung wrote an entire book about it, "Man's Search for Meaning." It is arrogance that keeps us chasing after material comfort while we suffer in grounding ourselves in rock-solid identities. Modern humans are suffering an identity crisis, and we don't know anymore where to look forward to. Take some time off the internet, sit, read, and think for a few days. Just relax, get back your identity. Feel again what it means to be human.

In the end, nothing really matters, but in the present, feeling alive should be something everyone should seek.