Proximity to Thought

The luxury of thinking for yourself

I've been thinking a lot about what happens to human judgment when answers become practically free.

We're entering a period where you can ask a machine almost anything and receive a reasonably sophisticated answer in seconds. You can ask it to explain a concept, evaluate an argument, summarize a book, make a decision, or even tell you what you should think about something. And the technology is remarkable. I use it myself, extensively. I'm not interested in arguing that we should somehow return to a world without it.

What interests me is what happens to the person using it. For most of human history, arriving at an answer required some combination of observation, experience, reading, conversation, experimentation, and thought. You had to spend time with a question. Sometimes you had to live with it for years. The process could be frustrating, but something was happening during that process that I think we're beginning to overlook: you were developing judgment.

I suspect we're going to become increasingly good at obtaining answers while becoming less practiced at producing our own. Having access to an intelligent explanation doesn't necessarily mean you've developed the discernment to evaluate it. Being able to repeat a convincing argument doesn't mean you've examined the assumptions underneath it. You can accumulate an extraordinary amount of information without becoming particularly good at thinking.

This is what concerns me about the possibility of cognitive atrophy. Not that technology automatically makes us less intelligent, but that we might gradually stop exercising some of the abilities that made intelligence useful in the first place. The ability to encounter something unfamiliar and make sense of it yourself, to distinguish what you know from what you've merely accepted, and to arrive at a conclusion you can explain. As answers become abundant, that discernment may become a kind of luxury—not because it should be reserved for a few, but because it requires something we seem increasingly reluctant to spend: our own attention.

An experiment that began nearly 450 years ago

In the 16th century, the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne began writing about himself, his observations, his experiences, and the questions he couldn't quite resolve. He called these writings Essais, a word that means attempts or trials. His first collection was published in 1580, and he continued revising and expanding it afterward. I find that appropriate for a project concerned with examining a mind that never stops changing.

I've found myself developing a similar practice, although I didn't begin with Montaigne in mind. I take an idea, a question, or something I've observed that doesn't quite make sense to me, and I begin writing. I try not to look for the answer first. I want to see what I can discover with what I already know, what I've experienced, and what I'm capable of reasoning through. Sometimes I write several pages before I understand what I'm trying to ask. Other times I begin with a conviction and end up realizing it was built on an assumption I had never examined.

The value isn't always in the conclusion. It's in what happens to my ability to think while I'm trying to reach one. The more I do this, the more I trust my ability to navigate uncertainty. At some point I wondered what would happen if I did it with other people—not by giving them my conclusions and asking whether they agreed, but by inviting them into the same investigation. That's where Les Essais comes from.

A private correspondence

Every 30 days, I send a printed essay to your home. It arrives in an envelope, on paper, designed to be read slowly, marked up, returned to, and kept. These essays aren't published anywhere else. There is no online edition, no PDF archive, and no version repurposed into a newsletter. The writing exists exclusively within this private correspondence.

Almost everything we produce today seems destined to become content, distributed as widely and quickly as possible, measured by how many people see it, and eventually buried underneath whatever appears next. I understand the usefulness of that system, but I don't think everything we write needs to participate in it. Some ideas deserve a different relationship with the reader.

Each issue is three-hole-punched so you can keep it in a binder and gradually build your own collection. You can write in the margins, underline something you disagree with, add pages of your own thinking, or revisit an argument six months later and discover that you no longer believe what you believed when you first read it. After a year, you'll have twelve pieces of correspondence and perhaps dozens of pages of your own writing: a physical record of your developing judgment.

The analog format is deliberate. When you sit down with paper and a pen, you remove a number of conveniences that are useful elsewhere but can interfere with this exercise. There is no autocomplete suggesting your next sentence, no search engine waiting to resolve your uncertainty, and no machine offering to improve your argument before you've had the opportunity to develop it. You have to do the work yourself. That is precisely the point.

The thirty-day experiment

Every issue ends with a question that becomes the subject of our next investigation. It might concern identity, morality, relationships, ambition, happiness, human behavior, or something seemingly ordinary that becomes much less obvious once you begin examining it. The important thing is that we're not beginning with an answer.

For the following 30 days, we each live with the same question. We observe how it appears in our lives, pay attention to situations that challenge our assumptions, and write about what we discover. You might become increasingly confident in an opinion. You might change your mind entirely. You might discover that the original question was poorly framed and that something more interesting sits underneath it. I'm doing the same work alongside you, without a predetermined conclusion that you're supposed to discover.

This is where co-authorship becomes interesting to me. We're investigating the same subject from different positions, with different experiences and ways of interpreting the world. What each of us discovers can expand the investigation beyond what any one person could have developed independently. At the end of the month, we have the opportunity to bring our thinking together, and what emerges can help shape the following issue.

The Symposium — a society of independent thinkers

There's a private group for people participating in Les Essais. I call it The Symposium. It's where we can share what we've written, discuss our conclusions, challenge one another's arguments, and continue developing the ideas. I imagine something resembling a small philosophical society, perhaps even a slightly secret one: people who enjoy examining ideas seriously without needing every conversation to become a debate somebody has to win.

I think there's something valuable in being surrounded by people who are willing to say, 'I don't know yet,' and then actually spend time trying to find out. Someone may notice something you missed entirely. Another person may disagree with your entire conclusion. The idea becomes larger through that exchange, and the next correspondence can carry some of what we discovered together.

But you're never obligated to share your writing. You might spend the month developing an argument and keep it entirely to yourself. You might share a paragraph, publish an essay somewhere else, or let the writing change a decision in your own life. All of those outcomes are valid. The writing belongs to you. The Symposium exists to enlarge the thinking, not to create another obligation to produce something for other people.

I also think the order matters. We do the individual work first. Then we encounter other people's interpretations. Otherwise it's too easy to adopt the most articulate person's opinion before we've had the opportunity to develop our own. I'd rather have ten people arrive with ten carefully considered but imperfect arguments than ten people repeating the same sophisticated answer they found online. There's much more to discover in the first situation.

The point of the practice

Independent thought doesn't mean refusing to learn from other people. Much of what I know comes from books, conversations, and people who lived before me. The distinction is whether we're actively participating in the formation of our own judgment or merely collecting conclusions produced by others.

That's why I don't see Les Essais as a rejection of artificial intelligence. I intend to keep using it. But I think we should become more conscious of which parts of our thinking we're willing to delegate. There is a difference between using a tool to extend your intelligence and allowing it to replace the exercise of your judgment.

The objective isn't consensus, and it isn't to build a collection of people who share my worldview. It's to become better at forming our own: to develop the patience to examine something before deciding what it means, to recognize the difference between having an opinion and having thought something through, and to become increasingly capable of making decisions amid more information and more apparently convincing answers than any previous generation.

So this is my invitation. Every month I'll send you an essay. At the end there will be a question. I'll spend the following month thinking and writing about it, and I invite you to do the same. If you want, we'll compare what we've discovered, challenge each other, and see whether we can take the idea somewhere neither of us could have reached alone. The next essay hasn't been written yet. We're going to discover what we think by doing the work.