AI is eroding human capacities – effort, attention, judgment, agency – often in ways we mistake for progress.

The losses are subtle, and that’s what makes them dangerous.

Small, deliberate acts can reverse the drift before it becomes permanent.

AI is making life easier, faster, and more convenient. And much of that is genuine progress. But quietly, almost imperceptibly, some important things are disappearing from our lives – things we didn’t realize we depended on until they started to fade away. Over the past year, I’ve been exploring these losses in this column, and a pattern has emerged. The things we’re losing aren’t dramatic. They’re subtle. They’re the kind of things you don’t miss until one day you reach for them and find they’re gone.

Here are six of the things we’re losing, and six steps you can take to get them back.

1. The Illusion of Ease

We tend to think of ease as an unqualified good. But this framing hides something important: some forms of difficulty aren’t obstacles to the life we want. They’re part of how that life gets built.

When I was growing up in Bangladesh, getting hold of a Simon and Garfunkel cassette required real effort. That effort made the music matter to me in a way it wouldn’t have if I’d simply asked Siri to play it. The investment created the attachment. This principle applies far beyond music. Effort is how we turn information into knowledge, how we turn events into the experiences that shape us.

AI is removing friction from our lives at an extraordinary rate, and much of that removal is welcome. But we should ask of any type of friction whether there is something we need to preserve there. When friction is purely procedural, eliminate it gladly. But when it’s the kind that teaches you to notice, to remember, to care, then removing it doesn’t save you effort. It costs you growth.

Before reaching for the easiest path, pause. Ask whether the struggle you’re about to bypass is the kind that builds something in you. If it is, it’s not a cost. It’s the whole point.

2. The Collapse of Attention

As the world speeds up, something precious is collapsing: our ability to be fully present. We race through days packed with competing demands, multitasking our way through meetings and meals, telling ourselves we’re being productive. But the research is clear: multitasking makes us worse at everything we’re trying to do.

The deeper loss, though, isn’t cognitive – it’s human. When we hurry through life, we stop being present to ourselves and to the people we care about. We live reactively rather than intentionally, letting the world dictate its pace instead of choosing our own.

This week, try single-tasking: choose one thing and give it your complete attention. Mute the notifications. Protect a window of time that belongs to you and not to your inbox. The world will keep accelerating. But you get to choose the speed at which you move through it.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live, as Joan Didion wrote. We make sense of our experiences by shaping them into narratives. In doing so, we don’t just describe our lives. We create them. The struggle to find the right word for what we feel is part of how we come to understand what we feel.

Increasingly, we’re handing that work to AI. We ask it to draft our emails, polish our reflections, sharpen our descriptions of things that matter to us. The AI-written version may read better by any conventional standard. But it’s not the record of a particular person making sense of a particular life. Storytelling is more than communication – it’s self-creation. When AI shapes our stories, we don’t just lose words. We lose the process through which we become ourselves.

Not everything you write is identity work. A status update to your team is a task, so use whatever tools help. But when you’re writing about your relationships, your struggles, or to someone you love, that’s a story. Write the messy draft first. Your narrative is too precious to hand over to a machine.

We knew social media was damaging our children. We knew algorithms were feeding us rage because rage keeps us scrolling. We knew, and yet we did almost nothing. By the time we finally acted, the damage ran deep and the fixes came too late.

This is what happens when we confuse tolerance with acceptance. Tolerance feels like patience. But too often it’s just avoidance wearing a respectable mask. True acceptance means looking at reality unflinchingly and engaging with it, even when what you see is something you’d rather not deal with.

We are repeating this pattern with AI. We see the risks and scroll past the headlines, assuming someone smarter is handling it. But acceptance need not give way to resignation. Viewed properly, accepting how things really are gives us more agency, not less. Ask yourself: What am I hoping will just go away? Once you’ve named it, it becomes much harder to keep pretending you don’t see it.

5. The Crisis of Judgment

AI can draft your emails, analyze your data, and schedule your meetings. It promises liberation from the management burden of daily life – and that promise is real. But as AI takes over more of the doing, it increases the burden of deciding. After all, someone still has to choose what’s worth doing in the first place.

Peter Drucker drew a useful distinction here: efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things. AI makes us dramatically more efficient. But effectiveness – knowing what matters, what to prioritize, where your uniquely human insight is needed – remains stubbornly in our hands. And when you can do ten times as much, the cost of doing the wrong things multiplies accordingly.

The danger is that we stop trusting ourselves to make these calls. We defer to the tool, or we simply let the pace of output substitute for the harder work of reflection. Start building the muscle instead: at the end of each day, ask yourself what you chose to do, what you delegated, and why. The goal isn’t to reject AI’s help. It’s to make sure you’re leading yourself, not just keeping up.

Perhaps the deepest loss of all is the erosion of our capacity to act. When everything is uncertain – when AI is reshaping work, when the ground keeps shifting – it’s natural to freeze. The sheer volume of change can make us feel powerless, and powerlessness breeds passivity.

But agency doesn’t require certainty. It requires grounding. And one of the most powerful ways to rebuild that ground is to return to the things that have sustained us before – the songs, the books, the practices, the people who gave us strength in the past. Return isn’t regression. It’s bringing who you’ve become to what you thought you knew, and discovering that it can still give you what you need.

Recently, I listened to “The Boxer” by Simon and Garfunkel. It was one of my favorite songs growing up, and I’ve heard it thousands of times. But listening in my fifties, I heard something new – a tenderness for the young man I once was, and in that tenderness, a source of strength. The song hadn’t changed. I had. And it gave me exactly what I needed for the present moment.

When the world feels paralyzing, don’t only look forward. Look back. Return to one song, one book, one practice that marked a turning point. The resources you need to face what’s ahead may already be part of your story.

These six losses share a common thread: none of them announce themselves. They arrive silently, disguised as progress. And that is precisely what makes them dangerous. By the time you notice what’s gone, the habits that once sustained you have already started to fade.

But the reverse is also true. Each of these losses can be reversed through small, deliberate acts: writing in your own voice, slowing down for one hour, asking yourself what you're tolerating that deserves a real response. You don’t have to take all six steps at once. Pick one. Start there.

AI will keep advancing. The world will keep accelerating. But the most important question of this era isn’t what machines can do for us. It is “What are we willing to keep doing for ourselves?”

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