When’s the last time you finished a homework assignment with ChatGPT? The last time you DoorDashed your dinner? The last time you shopped online? A quarter into the 21st century, I’m willing to bet that every single person in America around my age has done one of the aforementioned in the last week. 

I use technology just as frequently as every other teenager. I’m by no means offline, so my observations come more from personal experience than anything else. And my observation is the following: though certain modern technologies have advantages, we’re overconveniencing ourselves into stupidity and isolation.

Take ChatGPT, for instance. People will wax poetic about how kids can use it as a study tool, or a brainstorming tool or a jumping-off point. The reality that most teachers don’t want to face is that most high-schoolers copy their assignments, paste them into ChatGPT, and call it a night. Kids are exhausted from sports and other homework and work, of course, but when you use generative artificial intelligence to completely replace your thinking rather than enrich it, you’re doing yourself a lot more harm than you would be by staying up an extra thirty minutes.

Constant access to information without having to make any sort of attempt at retrieval is incredibly detrimental to our mental capabilities, especially as adolescents. Our critical thinking skills begin to atrophy if every single question we stumble across can be answered in a matter of seconds by an app. Studying is a nuisance, as any student can tell you, but part of the beauty of learning is to struggle. It’s rewarding to finally understand a concept after you’ve worked hard to do so.  

The technological advances that are affecting our brainpower aren’t limited to artificial intelligence and social media, however. Every task that you feel is too menial for your day-to-day can be done by someone else. You can pay someone to go grocery shopping for you, Waymo can drive you around instead of a human person, and TikTok Shop flashes a million sales at you so you can shop from the comfort of your couch.

I’m not arguing against the utility of these things. For working and fatigued people, it’s probably an enormous relief that you can get groceries delivered to your door with just a few taps on your cell phone. However, there’s something to be said about the way these innovations reduce human interaction and the overall human experience. 

My sentiment can be explained by one of my all-time favorite quotes, which is Kurt Vonnegut on buying an envelope, even though his wife says he can get them online: “And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And see some great-looking babies. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And I’ll ask a woman what kind of dog that is [..] The moral of the story is – we’re here on Earth to fart around.”

We’re reaching a point where people are forgetting that the whole pleasure of life is partaking in it, even the most monotonous parts of it, not watching other people’s through short-form videos. Yes, it’s easy to DoorDash dinner. Yes, it’s a bother to have to go grocery shopping to buy ingredients for a meal and take the time to prepare it yourself. But the same way that learning a new concept and struggling through it is rewarding, trying something new and figuring it out is rewarding. 

So instead of DoorDashing so that you can spend forty minutes unwinding on TikTok instead of in the kitchen, try to learn a new recipe. Go out to eat with a friend. Or even just drive to go get the food for yourself. Attempting to free ourselves from the habit of being too reliant on these technologies doesn’t have to mean doing the most difficult, time-consuming alternative. It just means attempting to remind yourself of the beauty of mundane, everyday experiences and conversations that technology tends to leach out of our lives. In a time where artificial intelligence is taking over and robots running the world seems increasingly probable, it’s important to create moments of connection with other human beings, no matter how insignificant the interaction.