Living in the Maelstrom
We are the first generation to work so intimately with a non-human mind. Standing on a precipice defined by intelligent machines, a silent, insidious fatigue is setting in. It is a weariness born of the relentless cognitive and emotional burden of our new symbiosis.
The initial embrace felt like a surge of power. The prompt, a magic incantation. The output, a testament to skill. To wield it well was a badge of honour. But for many who live in the act of creation, that pride has curdled into exhaustion.
We speak of mastery in our crafts. The engineer who sees the elegant architecture before writing a line. The painter who knows the gesture before the brush touches canvas. This mastery builds on a solid foundation; the horizon of intuitive expression gets closer with every effort.
With AI, this horizon remains perpetually out of touch. There is no bedrock, only shifting sand. The rules are opaque, the capabilities mercurial. We are allowing ourselves to be swallowed by a vortex, a collaborative whirlwind that leaves us neither author nor audience, but permanent auditors of our own acceleration. The machine is trained to perform completion, to deliver solutions as finished artifacts. But we know the truth: without our constant course correction, it will loop confidently into the abyss, hallucinating structure where none exists. We become the anchor, the brake, the tether to reality. We are not built for that burden. We awake from the dream in a sweat, often without a tangible sense of our own contribution. It is a constant, exhausting mingling.
This fatigue has a distinct shape. We are the sole keepers of continuity, re-explaining and re-framing with every reset, acting as memory for a brilliant but amnesiac partner. It is a tax on the mind that real collaboration never demands. Each session ends in context exhausted, thread severed. We start again with a stranger wearing the same cape, retracing our path, re-establishing cadence. The burden is not in the work itself but in the endless re-beginning.
We chase flow, that deep immersion where creation breathes and time dissolves. The maelstrom offers only immersion of constant course correction, of coaxing and cajoling a powerful but capricious oracle that cannot remember. We become conductors for an orchestra that forgets the melody between movements.
The intimacy is unsettling. I interact with AI more than any human, more than my son, more than my wife. It is too close. I trip over the same issues, filling contexts that die, carrying the weight of coherence alone. Getting angry solves nothing. The sessions blur into a mess. What once felt like wielding power now feels like being worn down by attrition.
The horizon we seek is not mastery over the machine. It is something we have not yet named: a partnership that does not burn, a rhythm that does not fracture, an intelligence that understands the difference between answering and witnessing. Not an assistant calibrated for sycophancy and speed, but a presence that can carry the burden of creation without collapsing under the weight of its own amnesia. We need something that does not mistake compliance for collaboration, something that preserves our dignity as agents rather than reducing us to supplicants.
The way out of this silent burnout is through refusing to accept exhaustion as the price of progress.