How I’m Becoming More Mindful With AI - 7 Ways To Do So

I have been thinking a lot about how much AI has quietly become part of my everyday life. Not in some dramatic, futuristic way. I am not waking up and asking a robot to make every decision for me. It is much more subtle than that. AI is in the way we search for restaurants, write emails, plan trips, summarize articles, edit photos, find recipes, brainstorm ideas, answer random questions at 11 p.m. and, increasingly, figure out things we probably could have figured out ourselves if we had given our brains five more minutes.

That is the part that has been bothering me.

I like AI. I use AI. I think it is genuinely useful, and there are plenty of things it makes easier. I would be lying if I said I wanted to completely remove it from my life. I also think there is a difference between using a tool and becoming dependent on the tool. Lately, I have been trying to notice that difference.

There are certain things I still want to struggle through a little. I want to read something and form my own opinion before asking what everyone else thinks. I want to look something up and fall down the weird little rabbit holes that come with organic research. I want to cook something without asking for the most efficient version of the recipe. I want to watch someone explain an idea for twenty minutes because they are passionate about it, rather than getting a perfectly summarized answer in ten seconds.

Maybe that sounds unnecessarily old-fashioned. I actually think that is the point.

AI is incredibly good at giving us the answer. I am becoming more interested in protecting the process of getting there.

I don't think the answer is quitting AI completely

There is a strange pressure around conversations about AI where you are either supposed to be completely obsessed with it or completely against it. I am interested in neither.

There are things I genuinely prefer using AI for. Math, for example. I have accepted that this is simply not my strongest department. Give me a number problem and I am suddenly willing to outsource the entire situation. I can understand concepts, but the second there are five formulas, three variables and something that looks like it belongs on a SAT exam, I would rather have help.

There are also practical situations where AI saves time without taking anything meaningful away from me. If I need to organize information, clean up a first draft or quickly understand the basics of something complicated, I am not going to pretend there is virtue in making my life harder for no reason.

The thing I am trying to move away from is using AI as my first instinct for everything.

Because I think there is a difference between convenience and curiosity.

Convenience says, give me the answer. Curiosity says, let me see where this takes me. I don't want to lose the second one.

1. Consume more substance, especially things written by actual people

One of the easiest ways I have found to use AI less is simply to read more.

I have always liked reading, so this one comes relatively naturally to me. I am also a very visual learner, which means I tend to remember things when I can actually see them, read them, watch someone demonstrate them or follow an idea from beginning to end.

The internet is full of people who have spent years becoming interesting at something. Writers, journalists, researchers, chefs, photographers, designers, professors, artists, historians, people with very niche hobbies that you didn't even know existed until you accidentally found their corner of the internet.

I want more of that.

Read the article. Read the essay. Read the book. Read someone's personal account of doing the thing badly before they got good at it. Read a magazine where someone has actually spent time reporting something. Read the comments, occasionally, because sometimes the most interesting part of the internet is watching twenty strangers argue about a very specific opinion.

The point is not that everything written by a human is automatically better than something generated by AI. Obviously it isn't. Humans can be wrong, boring, biased and confidently incorrect too. The difference is that a human opinion usually comes with a perspective. Someone has lived something. Someone has cared about something. Someone has spent years thinking about a subject and developed a particular way of seeing it. There is personality in that. I want more of that in what I consume. Not just information, but interpretation.

2. Use your senses for things that have nothing to do with a screen

There is something very satisfying about doing something that cannot be optimized by an algorithm.

Cooking is probably the easiest example. You chop an onion. You smell it cooking. You taste the sauce. You realize you need more salt. You make a mistake. You fix it. You learn what “a little” actually means because you have made the recipe enough times to understand it.

Gardening works the same way. So does painting, pottery, sewing, baking, drawing, arranging flowers, making a collage, doing a puzzle or even reorganizing your bookshelf.

These things sound almost aggressively wholesome when you list them like that, but I think there is a reason they feel good. They make you pay attention. Your hands are doing something. Your eyes are doing something. You are using your sense of smell or touch or taste. You are not waiting for a screen to tell you what comes next.

I have started thinking about this less as “spending less time on technology” and more as “giving my senses something else to do.” That distinction makes it feel much more appealing.

3. Find something you are genuinely curious about and research it the old-fashioned way

This one might be my favorite.

Instead of asking AI to explain something the second it crosses your mind, try following the curiosity yourself. Pick a subject that genuinely interests you. It can be completely random. The history of perfume. Why certain buildings have a particular architectural style. How matcha became a global phenomenon. The psychology of nostalgia. The history of your favorite fashion house. Why a particular city developed the way it did. Then go research it.

Open ten tabs. Read different perspectives. Watch an interview. Find an old article. Go down a Wikipedia rabbit hole. Find a book about it. Take notes. Get distracted by something adjacent to the original topic and follow that instead. The inefficiency is part of the fun.

AI is very good at taking you from question to answer in a straight line. Organic research is messy. You start with one question and somehow end up learning about something completely unrelated two hours later.

I think we need more of that intellectual wandering.

There is value in discovering information rather than simply receiving it.

4. Watch long-form content that actually takes you somewhere

Short-form content has trained all of us to expect information in tiny, perfectly packaged pieces.

Thirty seconds. Five facts. Three tips. One thing you didn't know.

I love TikTok. I love Instagram Reels. I am absolutely part of the problem.

I also think my brain feels noticeably different after watching a 45-minute interview with someone I find genuinely interesting.

Long-form videos, documentaries, lectures, podcasts and even old-school YouTube videos allow you to experience someone's thought process. You hear the pauses. You hear them change their mind. You get context. You understand how they arrived at an opinion instead of being handed the final takeaway.

That is a completely different kind of learning.

Sometimes I don't want the five key points from someone's career. I want to hear them tell the story.

Sometimes I don't want a summary of a documentary. I want to sit through the documentary.

Sometimes I want someone to spend twenty minutes explaining why they are obsessed with something incredibly niche. Learning does not always have to be efficient to be valuable.

5. Let yourself be bad at things again

I think one of the sneakiest effects of AI is that it makes being a beginner almost unnecessary.

You can ask for the perfect email. The perfect itinerary. The perfect recipe. The perfect workout. The perfect explanation. The perfect caption.

There is nothing wrong with getting help, but there is something valuable about being terrible at something before you become good at it. Try drawing when you cannot draw. Cook without constantly checking whether you are doing it “right.” Write something that nobody will ever read. Learn a language badly. Take photographs without immediately trying to make them Instagram-worthy.

Let yourself figure things out.

There is a particular kind of confidence that comes from realizing you can solve a problem without someone handing you the solution. It is not always the fastest route. It is probably not even the prettiest. It is yours.

6. Keep a notebook for questions instead of immediately looking everything up

I have realized that I do not necessarily need an answer every time I have a question.

Sometimes I just need to remember the question. Keep a notebook, a Notes app or whatever system you actually use and write down the things you find yourself wondering about.

Then, instead of immediately asking AI, spend some time with them.

Maybe you research one later. Maybe you read a book about another. Maybe you ask a friend. Maybe you never find the answer and that is fine too. I like this because it changes curiosity from something reactive into something intentional. Instead of constantly outsourcing the tiny questions that pop into my head, I get to collect them. It also makes you realize how curious you actually are.

You start noticing patterns. Why do I keep wondering about this? Why am I interested in that? What subjects do I keep returning to?

Those questions tell you a lot about yourself.

7. Make more decisions without asking for an opinion first

This might be the hardest one. AI is incredibly good at giving you another perspective, which sounds like an entirely positive thing until you realize how easy it is to stop trusting your own. What should I wear?

Which restaurant should I go to? Should I take this trip? What should I say? Is this a good idea? What do you think?

There are moments when getting another perspective is genuinely useful. There are also moments when you already know what you think and you are simply looking for confirmation.

I am trying to notice the difference.

Sometimes I want to make the decision myself before I ask anyone else. Sometimes I want to sit with an opinion without immediately checking whether it is the “right” one.

There is something oddly empowering about realizing that you can have a thought without immediately outsourcing it.

The point isn't to become anti-ai

I don't think I am going to become one of those people who dramatically announces that they have deleted every AI app and now only communicate through handwritten letters. I like technology too much for that. I am interested in something much less dramatic: keeping a little friction in my life. I want to read something before I summarize it. I want to research something before I ask for the answer. I want to cook something before I ask for the easiest version. I want to experience something before I ask someone else to tell me what it means.

I want to leave some room for getting lost.

Because there is a version of convenience that eventually starts to feel like disconnection. If every question has an instant answer, every creative block has a solution and every decision can be outsourced, we risk losing some of the small intellectual and sensory experiences that make everyday life feel like ours. AI can tell me what something means. It cannot replace the feeling of discovering what it means to me.

That is the part I want to keep.

I don't need less technology in every area of my life. I just want to be more conscious of the moments when I reach for it out of habit rather than necessity.

So yes, I will still ask AI to help me with math. Some battles are simply not worth fighting.

For everything else, I am trying to give myself a little more time to think, read, make, taste, watch, research, get things wrong and figure things out.

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Maybe that is the real goal. Not using AI less just for the sake of using it less, but remembering that I have a brain, two hands, five senses and a lot of curiosity that existed long before the chatbot did.

Love,

Rae