Thinking Is for Boomers

I get so emotional when I read a student’s paper these days.

Not because the prose is moving or the argument is sound. Of course not. I get emotional because I know, with a deep and serene certainty, that they didn’t write a single word of it. And that, my friends, is beautiful.

We are finally witnessing the liberation of the human mind from the tedious chore of… well, thinking. For centuries, we forced young people to undergo the painful, inefficient process of having an original thought, structuring it, and then wrestling it into sentences. What a waste of cognitive energy! It’s like churning your own butter. Do you churn your own butter? I thought not.

The Dealer in the Toolbar

Now, thankfully, the dealer is always there, right in the warm sanctuary of the user interface. That friendly little Copilot ribbon in Word, the Gemini sparkle in the Google search bar, the ChatGPT knot in the Notion menu… it’s the new tutor. The new muse. The first hit is always free, a gentle suggestion to “rewrite” or “complete.” A tender little sparkle-shaped syringe for that blank-page anxiety.

I’ve seen it myself. A student stares at the blinking cursor, a picture of existential dread. Then, a click. A prompt. And woosh—a perfect, sterile, machine-distilled paragraph appears. No effort, no pain, no personality. Glorious.

The blank page is a relic of an oppressive past. Today, no child should have to face that terror alone.

Their new job isn’t to write, but to become master whisperers, prompt engineers begging the ghost in the machine for a C-plus. "Give me 500 words on Hamlet, but make it sound like I read the play." This is the new liberal art, and it’s so much more efficient.

Some Luddites are still hand-wringing about it, of course. For a taste of their quaint panic, you can read the old-world arguments on sites like The Atlantic. It’s like reading letters from the horse-and-buggy era.

Me? I say lean in. Let the bot cook. Thinking was a chore, anyway. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a hundred essays to “read.”

Your turn: tell me I’m wrong.