Show me your house, your flat, your garage and the inside of your fridge. One look tells me whether your head’s sorted too.
Massive chaos around you? Your thoughts are probably just as scattered. Everything in its place? Better odds your mind’s organised. But not guaranteed.
I know plenty of people brilliant at tidying, cleaning, sorting, organising. Yet their heads? Complete mayhem. They’re trying to compensate for inner chaos with outer order. If I can’t sort the thoughts, worries and fears bouncing around my skull, at least I can keep everything else pristine. Maybe it’ll look like I’ve got it together inside too.
Of course some people are tidy both ways. You just have to find them first.
Perfect on the surface - a trap?
I’m fascinated by people who look like they stepped out of a magazine. Perfect clothes, flawless face, hair that knows its place. Those of us with curly hair can’t compete here - though I hear the straight-haired crowd secretly wants wild curls.
But that’s beside the point.
Stereotypically, people surrounded by mess probably don’t keep much order upstairs either. Not that they can’t. It’s just not important to them. Until the parents visit or new friends drop by - then it’s turbo-cleaning time. Everything spotless for a brief moment before nature reclaims the territory.
Like my beard. Every so often I shave it off, let it grow until it gets too scratchy or stops looking decent. Then off it comes again, surrendering to natural impulses.
AI and organised thinking
Can we apply this to thinking? Could artificial intelligence turn confused minds into sorted super-thinkers?
AI doesn’t need much order - it navigates messy spaces just fine. Sure, it can’t clean your kitchen yet. But for knowledge, sorting content, evaluating information? AI’s already helping there.
You could dump everything from the web, YouTube, social media into something like Obsidian, then set AI loose to generate something new from the chaos. Or have AI write an article on topic X, prompting it to select the most relevant bits from your collected notes and clippings. Sounds brilliant, right?
The dependency trap
Problem is, we stop engaging deeply with content. We hand everything to AI.
At least in this scenario we’ve gathered the sources ourselves before letting AI loose. But it also means you’ll never tidy up again - AI does it all for you. Careful what you unlearn here.
Imagine never cleaning up after yourself each day. Not in the kitchen, living room, bedroom. Not the next day either. Or the day after that. Until there are no clean pots, plates, glasses or cutlery left. Everything’s lying around waiting for Friday’s cleaner while you slump on the sofa, watching TV, ordering everything online because you’ve become too lazy and lethargic to move.
That’s exactly what happens to your brain when we outsource everything to AI.
Thinking and experience - our human edge
How do we escape this trap?
AI’s an excellent colleague and support tool. We mustn’t underestimate it - quite the opposite, we should challenge it properly. But we must keep reclaiming our own thinking. Even if we’re not as fast or powerful, we should celebrate being human with all our inadequacies. Don’t forget what makes us human.
Now more than ever: we should keep having creative thoughts about things that interest us, thoughts machines would never have. Because our thoughts are intertwined with our experiences and upbringing. That’s what makes us human - the experience, everything that’s happened to us and how it stuck.
Compared to AI, it’s a tiny cone of knowledge. But it only becomes valuable when we place it on our personal bowling lane of experience.
Practice makes imperfect
What does this mean practically? I won’t give up thinking for myself. Quite the opposite - I want to stubbornly expand, improve and deepen it.
Less is better. Less is enough.
So I’m trying to consume less digital rubbish, instead working longer and deeper on topics to properly understand them and create something from that knowledge.
But why the effort? I could just run AI over my half-baked thoughts and notes, prompting: “Summarise this and explain it like you would to a five-year-old.” But that’s exactly what I don’t want. I try to understand topics not just with my head but grasp them with my heart.
That often takes much longer than expected. For some topics, a lifetime probably isn’t enough.
Better to think yourself
What’s interesting is everyone sits on their own puzzle. Maybe you’ve been wrestling with something for years that I’d solve in five seconds. “Don’t know what your problem is - it’s totally obvious.” Conversely, my struggles might seem trivial from your perspective.
But we rarely get that far because our heads contain this untidy fridge we keep stuffing fuller, too scared to reach the back where things have grown arms and legs.
AI can answer all our questions. But we have to make something of those answers. We should stick with topics that matter to us and work on them consistently. The old rule applies: we overestimate what we can do in a day or week, but underestimate what we can achieve in a year or longer.
Despite clear, logical answers, AI won’t wash and clean our minds - it’ll create more disorder if we let it. The big challenge is not getting constantly distracted by all the brilliant possibilities, but staying relentlessly on the right path. Look at things piece by piece, tidy up, throw away, finally get and keep clarity inside and out.
Start now - go clean the kitchen. AI can wait.
From reinergaertner.de, est. 1997. Translated with the help of an AI that speaks better English than I do. Which isn’t saying much, after 25 years of Denglish.