It started, as most interesting conversations do, over eggs and coffee.
A group of us, women at various stages of our twenties and thirties, sitting around a table that had seen better tablecloths, talking about nothing and everything. Somewhere between the hollandaise and a second round of lattes, someone said it: we don’t know how to sit with discomfort anymore.
The table went quiet in that particular way it does when someone names something you’ve been feeling but couldn’t put a sentence around.
We’ve spent the last few years engineering discomfort out of daily life, and the bill for that doesn’t stay contained to one place. It starts small, with the last time something worried you and you reached for your phone instead of your own patience. But it doesn’t end there. It moves through how a person learns, what creativity needs in order to exist at all, what we’re actually handing over when we call something personalization, and finally, what we have left to give another person when they need us to just stay in the room with them.
stage one: the habit
Think about the last time something worried you. Not an emergency, just a low hum of concern. A symptom you couldn’t place. A relationship tension you couldn’t quite read. A decision you kept circling back to.
What did you do with it?
If you’re honest, you probably didn’t sit with it. You reached for your phone. You typed it in, and instead of ten blue links and a forum post from 2009, you got a tailored, conversational answer in seconds, one that asked clarifying questions and felt, in some strange way, like being heard.
People have been outsourcing memory since the first grocery list, so I want to be precise about what’s actually new here: not the outsourcing, the completeness of it. In 2011, the psychologist Betsy Sparrow ran a study that’s since become known, a little unfairly, as the Google effect. People who knew information would stay available online were measurably worse at remembering the information itself and measurably better at remembering where to find it. We didn’t used to have an outsource for the discomfort of not knowing something about our own bodies or our own relationships. Now we do, and it’s instant, and it’s kind, and it never once makes us sit there not knowing.
stage two: what it does further down the line
There’s a lot of noise right now about what AI is doing to students. Rightly so, though it’s subtler than the too-polished essay teachers keep flagging. It’s the student who can no longer tolerate the gap between question and answer. Who reaches, almost reflexively, for the tool before the thought has had a chance to form.
In June 2025, researchers at the MIT Media Lab ran an EEG study on people writing essays under three conditions: using ChatGPT, using a search engine, or using nothing but their own head. The brain-only group showed the widest, most connected neural activity while writing and remembered their own work best afterward. The ChatGPT group showed the weakest engagement and, in follow-up interviews, struggled to accurately quote sentences they’d written twenty minutes earlier. To be fair; it’s a preprint, the sample was small, and it hasn’t been peer reviewed. If it were the only data point I had, I wouldn’t build an argument on it. It isn’t. It’s one measurement, using equipment most teachers don’t have, of something a lot of them are already describing without any EEG cap involved: original thought is slow and a little uncomfortable, and a generation that’s very good at prompting is not the same as a generation that knows what to do when the prompt returns nothing useful.
stage three: what disappears with the discomfort
Boredom is generative. Not the performative kind where you scroll for twenty minutes and declare yourself under stimulated. Real boredom, the kind that lives in a long train ride with no signal, or a summer afternoon with no plan.
The psychologist Sandi Mann tested this directly. In one of her experiments, she had participants copy numbers out of a phone book for twenty minutes, about as unglamorous a task as exists, and then asked them to invent uses for a paper cup. They came up with more ideas, and stranger ones, than a control group who’d skipped the boring part. Her explanation is straightforward: when there’s no external stimulation to reach for, the brain goes looking for it internally, and daydreaming is what that search looks like from the inside. We’ve built a world with almost no external gap left to reach past. Every idle ninety seconds now has a feed in it, and the ideas that used to show up in the gap have nowhere left to arrive.
stage four: what we’re actually trading
This is where I want to go somewhere harder, because I think the real cost isn’t attention. It’s authorship.
There’s an old idea in philosophy of mind called the extended mind, the argument that a notebook isn’t separate from your cognition, it’s part of it. Researchers studying cognitive offloading use that idea constantly, mostly to describe something benign; a calendar app extends your memory the same way a notebook always did. But an app that remembers your appointments and a system that learns your preferences, drafts your responses, and anticipates your next question are not doing the same job. One extends memory. The other starts making the calls memory used to make on your behalf, quietly, under the name of convenience. We are asked, constantly, to feed it: our preferences, our anxieties, our half-formed decisions, so it can serve us more precisely. The exchange is always framed as this is working for you. I think it’s closer to this is working, and you are the input.
stage five: what’s left for other people
Which is where it finally lands on other people, because you cannot give someone your full, unrehearsed attention if part of you is still the input; still half-scanning for the next resolution.
Can we still be present? Not the phone-face-down-at-dinner kind. The kind where your attention doesn’t drift, because there’s nowhere left in you that it’s used to drifting to. I wonder sometimes if we’re becoming constitutionally incapable of it, not because we’re worse people, but because we’ve spent four stages rewiring ourselves for elsewhere.
And I think some of it is a quiet kind of selfishness; not the cartoonish kind, the small kind, the one that would rather have the answer than sit through someone else’s complexity. The kind that has confused comfort with care.
now what?
The one thing I’ve actually kept from all this thinking: when something makes me uncomfortable now, an unread message I don’t know how to answer, a symptom I can’t place, I try to give it twenty minutes before doing anything about it. Not because twenty minutes fixes anything. Because I want to stay the kind of person who can.
by subiksha 
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