I Don’t Google Anymore, and I’m Paying Attention to What That Changes
I’ve noticed something about myself recently.
I don’t Google things the way I used to.
When I have a question, I don’t open a browser and wander. I don’t skim ten links or click my way into something unexpected. I ask an AI tool like ChatGPT or Perplexity to help me. I get an answer in a neatly packaged overview of the world. And then I get on with my day.
No more venturing down rabbit holes that caught my attention in the sidebar. Somewhere along the way, I traded wandering the internet for asking a very polite machine to do the wandering for me.
It’s efficient and useful. And it’s a real shift.
I’m not embarrassed to admit this, and I’m not particularly proud of it either. I’m just paying attention to the change as it’s happening in real time, in my own habits. This is how most big shifts enter our lives now: not with announcements, or confetti falling from the ceiling, but through convenience.
I remember a time when the internet felt… goofier. Less predictable. And a lot more fun.
That was the era of cat videos that had no point whatsoever, except that in 2008 (!!!) Robert Benfer thought it would be funny to write a song and then make a video about cat videos on the internet. The era of “Charlie the Unicorn” wandering into Candy Mountain for absolutely no productive reason at all is also a personal nostalgic favorite. That era when clicking a link didn’t necessarily promise value—it promised surprise.
You might also remember when the internet didn’t always feel like a tool. It felt like a place. Messy. Weird. Occasionally profound. Often pointless. You didn’t just find what you were looking for. You bumped into things you weren’t.
And it was awesome.
That’s changing faster now than the roller coaster price of crypto.
More and more, the web is being read by machines first and summarized for us afterward. The internet is becoming less of a place we visit and more of a vast pit of content resources that systems ingest, compress, and hand back to us as finished answers but without any wrapping paper or element of what might this be?
On the surface, this looks like progress, and in many ways, it is. I’m certainly benefiting from it. I use these tools daily. They save me a ton of time on tasks that used to take me, well, a ton of time. I’m not waving a protest sign. I’m holding a receipt.
But it also changes something subtle about how thinking happens.
What we gain is speed. What we lose is friction.
And friction—uncomfortable as it can be—used to be where a lot of learning, judgment, creativity, and silly songs about cat videos on the internet lived. Apparently, mild confusion has fallen out of fashion.
When answers arrive fully formed, there’s less wandering. Less opportunity to get lost. Less time spent deciding what matters, because something else has already decided what’s most likely to satisfy the question you asked.
It turns out thinking is much easier when someone else does the awkward middle part for you.
I don’t say this from the sidelines. I’m squarely inside the shift. In certain contexts, I ask machines to summarize the world for me now. Just the other day I used Perplexity to guide me through the convoluted maze of caregiving scenarios for my mom. What would have taken me days, possibly weeks, to arrive at the information I needed pre-AI came to me clearly and neatly, all in a manner of a few minutes thanks to the power of a large language model.
And that’s exactly why I’m paying closer attention to what happens to my thinking when I do.
The real cost of this moment isn’t bad information. It’s something quieter.
Over time, when environments do more deciding, we practice deciding less. People become busy, informed, efficient, and oddly disconnected from their own sense of direction. Not because they’re doing anything wrong, but because the environment has changed around them.
I was reminded of this recently in a very ordinary, very human way.
At my last chiropractic appointment, my chiropractor mentioned that he’d signed up for an AI class being offered through a program in his gated community.
“Your book showed me I need to stay up with the changes,” he said, as he aligned my neck back into place, which felt like an unusually on-the-nose metaphor.
He’s not trying to become a tech guy. He treats bodies for a living. His work is hands-on and deeply human. And yet even there, he feels the ground shifting.
“I just don’t want to get left behind,” he added.
What stayed with me wasn’t the class. It was the instinct. He didn’t sound panicked or dazzled. He sounded awake. Curious enough to orient himself before deciding what mattered to him and what didn’t.
That’s where most people actually are right now.
They don’t want to reject technology. They also don’t want to hand their lives over to it by default. They want enough understanding to remain self-directed inside systems that are changing quickly and quietly.
That instinct—to orient before optimizing—matters more than any platform, tool, or trend.
The irony is that I didn’t tell him what to learn. I didn’t recommend software or strategies. I just wrote honestly in my book about what I was noticing, and that was enough to spark his own thinking. Awareness still moves person to person, even in a world optimized for machines.
The internet becoming more efficient isn’t a crisis in itself. But it does change how choices get made—by systems, for us, unless we interrupt that process with attention.
I make it crystal clear that I am not anti-tech. Nor am I anti-AI. I am anti-autopilot, which is why this post and others like it isn’t a call to log off, detox, or uninstall anything. It’s an invitation to notice what’s being decided for you automatically and what you might want to decide again from your own brainpower.
Because when fewer choices are visible, fewer moments are intentional.
Staying human right now doesn’t require rejecting the future. It requires staying awake inside it. Keeping some room for wandering, wondering, and the occasional pointless joy of clicking a link that leads absolutely nowhere might just be the most important work we can be doing now.
We don’t need to master the online ecosystem. We need to remain awake within it. And for the love of all things weird, we absolutely one hundred percent need more cat videos on the internet — and links to see them.
