there is a small moment that happens many times a day now, and i have started to notice it. i am writing something, or deciding something, and a suggestion appears, already formed, good enough, right there. and i take it. not because it is what i would have said, but because it is there, and saying my own thing would have cost me something.
the cost is the part worth looking at, and it is easy to get wrong, because at first it sounds like the old complaint about convenience. the calculator did our arithmetic, the map app holds our sense of direction, spellcheck took the spelling. each of those handed off a means, a small mechanical step on the way to something, and nobody seriously thinks they cost us a piece of ourselves, because doing long division by hand was never how a person became who they are.
this is different, and the difference is the whole point. a calculator automates a step inside your thinking. a system that finishes your sentences automates the thinking. it does not take a sub-task off the path to the choice, it takes the choosing, the forming of the judgment and the putting of it into words, and that is not a means to anything. it is the thing itself.
kierkegaard is useful here precisely because his subject was that thing. anxiety, he wrote, is the dizziness of freedom, the vertigo you feel standing in front of your own possibility, knowing the next move is yours and could be anything. he did not think the vertigo was a problem to solve. he thought it was the texture of having a self. in the sickness unto death he describes the self as a relation that relates itself to itself, which is a hard sentence that says something plain. you are not handed a self. you make one, continuously, out of the choices you keep having to make. the dizziness is what the making feels like from the inside.
so when the thing handed off is the choosing itself, the old reassurance does not hold. this is closer to the center than arithmetic ever was. and the erosion, if there is one, would not arrive as a single dramatic loss. it would be slow, the way a habit forms, each small deferral a little easier than the last, none of them a moment you could point to. kierkegaard thought the worst despair was the kind that does not feel like anything, that registers as ease rather than absence. that is the shape to watch for. not a thing that hurts. a thing that feels like relief, repeated until it is the default.
none of this is the machine's fault. the suggestion is neutral. the deferral is mine, and some version of it was always available. what is new is only that it now covers the part that used to be unavoidable, and that it is frictionless, and frictionless things happen without ever being decided. which means the small vertigo of choosing your own next word is no longer forced on me by the work. it is something i either reach for or quietly stop doing.
so i have started leaving the suggestion sitting there sometimes, on purpose, and writing the slower thing, just to feel the choosing happen. a small act, and mine. that is most of what i wanted from it.