It’s an epidemic: 2nd-hand thinking is a big problem. It’s getting worse.

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]There is an epidemic of people being unable to figure it out. Now, you could probably psychoanalyze my childhood and figure out why I feel so strongly about this, but that's not the point of this video, okay? So, don't do it.

[00:00:12]Um figuring things out is like a life skill that like I don't know where it got lost. I don't know if this has always been a problem and I'm just noticing it now. Whatever it is, I I hate to I don't like to be a like this generation person cuz I think a lot of problems have been an issue for generations, they just show up differently now.

[00:00:29]Um but whatever it is, the inability to just figure [ __ ] out pisses me off, especially with this access that we have to Google and like YouTube tutorials, wikiHow, TikToks.

[00:00:42]Just like figuring things out is so crucial and I swear to God people are like, "I don't know how to do that." One that really bothers me, I think I've already made a TikTok about this, but whatever, I'm already talking now, um is like I saw someone make a comment and they're like, "Oh, can you send me the link for this?" And then they copy it and they put it in the TikTok comment section and they're like, "I can't click on it in a comment." No, you can't click on it in a comment, but you know what you can do?

[00:01:04]You can copy and [ __ ] paste it and delete the username that comes up automatically and it'll work. It'll take you maybe 5 seconds more than just tapping a link, but you can figure it out. Like it's not that [ __ ] hard. Oh my god. Oh, I have so I have so many thoughts. So many thoughts on this subject. First off, just let me say I do think it is worse, right? And I'm not just saying that because I'm a Zennial, like the youngest Gen X. I'm not like, "Oh, the youth today, they're incapable, they're lazy and that's not what I'm saying." I I do think it is worse though and I think AI is exac- is exacerbating it and is going to exacerbate it significantly. But I also think I know what's going on here and what we what we can do about it. So, in the before times, I made a lot of content around the fact that our family are unschoolers. My kids are now 23, 21, almost 18, and 14. Unschooling is a niche educational philosophy and it really focuses on harnessing a a natural love of learning, their natural inquisitiveness, which I think is missing is missing in our society quite a bit, right? Um I think that children, I believe that children are naturally incredibly curious and are incredibly capable. We are so intent on infantilizing children and um squashing squashing their natural capability to explore and to um pursue knowledge on their own, to gain understanding and skills on their own.

[00:02:24]And part of that squashing, crushing of a child's natural inquisitiveness and love of learning comes from the fact that the the vast overwhelming majority of kids in the US are educated under the industrial school model that we have here. It is the Prussian military model.

[00:02:38]It was crafted to create compliant workers for the assembly line in the Industrial Revolution. Free thinking and innovation was not the goal. The goal was to have workers who do whatever you want, whenever you want. They are passive recipients of information. They are automatons who follow orders. After all, in public school, right? You can't go to the bath You can't take care of your own basic bodily functions without permission from an adult and a hall pass. You don't eat until the bell rings, right? You don't get up out of your seat unless a teacher tells you that you can or unless the bell rings.

[00:03:09]It's priming all Americans to be compliant workers. Not to take the initiative, not to be proactive, not to be independent thinkers, but to wait for orders, to be passive, compliant workers. I do think that this has been a problem for a while. It's not just confined to Gen Z and that's because we have 150 years of people in this country being educated and indoctrinated under the industrial school model. Um and I know I know there's going to be people in my comments cuz every time I talk about the fact that unschoolers really emphasize raising kids who are autodidacts, raising kids who can chase down information, who are in charge of their own education, who understand how to learn, right? It's not just keeping kids um um retaining children's natural love of learning. It's also empowering them to be proactive independent learners. But every time I talk about this, I get folks in my comments who are like, "Oh, well, what about executive dysfunction, right? Yeah, sure, for you, Angela, you have high executive functioning. It's really easy for you to take the initiative or do the things like the creator's talking about in the in the beginning of this video to just like go go find out [ __ ] Go look [ __ ] up." And then if you have executive dysfunction, you might you might not know how to do that. Okay, I think that's fair, but also the majority of people don't have executive dysfunction.

[00:04:26]And those who do should be supported with accommodations and adaptations so that they are still able to engage in um being creative and adaptive and taking charge of their own lives and finding out information. I'm sure it doesn't surprise you to know that I'm largely anti-generative large language model AI. And And part of that is definitely because of the environmental impacts. It's definitely because of the exploited worker impacts.

[00:04:51]It's definitely uh because it is stealing other people's intellectual property off of the internet without attribution or compensation. Now, my kids, two two Gen Z, and I think the younger two are technically Gen Alpha, they're very, very anti-AI. If they get a college assignment that requires them to use AI, they will write to the professor and say, "I request an alternative assignment. I'm not I'm not going to do this." And that combined with an unschooling background with non-authoritarian parents and um and an education that really encouraged my kids to to freely chase their interests down the rabbit hole, to be responsible, to take ownership over their own education, I think my kids are slightly at an advantage. And maybe for for other kids in our culture, they have been more dependent on generative AI.

[00:05:37]But it's not just it's not just kids. I don't think that this is just a problem for Gen Z. It is a problem of our times, but not specifically just for younger generations. As somebody born in 1979, [clears throat] the youngest Gen X, I see the use of Chat GPT and Claude and whatever to be a really big problem for for Gen X. I see Gen X using it very heavily and also millennials as well. This is this is a cross-generational problem and I think maybe some of the issues are actually exacerbated for older folks.

[00:06:10]I don't want Gen X to be like, "You young whippersnappers, back in our day we had to memorize everybody's phone numbers. We had to memorize all kinds of things that you can just look up now." I mean, yeah, that's true, but y'all are using Chat GPT as much if not more than the youth. The term y'all are looking for for what generative AI does to harm our inquisitiveness and our memories is cognitive offloading. The ways we used to have to retain facts and information, the ways we used to have to flex our brain muscles, the ways that we used to have to keep those pathways open to to be able to go get the information on our own, to be to be go-getters and acquire what we needed to function in society, we're now we're now offloading all of that labor and all of that effort onto Chat GPT and it's it's weakening our muscles. It's also, I would argue, weakening our natural curiosity, our natural inquisitiveness. It's increasing our learned helplessness. We just we just want Chat to do it for us. We just want Claude to do it for us. When before we had to expend the effort of chasing it down. And I'm not just spitballing.

[00:07:16]There's a bunch of research out now that talks about the significant memory impacts when it comes to Chat GPT, but I also think it really reduces our own belief in our capability, right? Yeah, humans are wired to take the path of least resistance, to do the thing that saves us labor, right? So we don't have to expend as much energy and effort.

[00:07:35]That's a a natural evolutionary desire to want to increase our efficiency and reduce our output and that makes Chat GPT so tempting, right? Cognitive offloading means you are expending less energy. Now, all of this energy, all of these resources are being expended on your behalf behind the scenes, right?

[00:07:54]The impacts to the environment, to the electrical grid, it's the stealing of other people's intellectual property.

[00:08:00]You don't see that in front of your screen, so you think like this is the easy way out. You are You are pushing the costs onto other people. You are offloading not only your own cognitive effort, but also also the expenses of having a program do that effort for you.

[00:08:15]When it comes to our overuse, and one could argue dependence on AI right now, I think there's actually a better term even than cognitive offloading. My kid calls it second-hand thinking. You can tell when people use it in their writing, you can tell when they use it in the scripts that they read for their social media videos. You can tell when someone is is really prone to second-hand thinking. They can't put together their own thought They can't construct an argument. They can't answer any question without having to consult Chat GPT, without having to have a program spit out an answer for them.

[00:08:52]It's a It's a terrible, terrible thing, I think, that we're experiencing. It's infantilizing all of us. It's making us feel and be less capable. It's creating a totally false and unnecessary dependence, right? That that reduces our ability to strategize. It reduces our ability to have ownership in our own lives and control what what happens to us. It's making us passive, soft, dependent. I don't know about you, but I don't ever want to be a second-hand thinker, right? We want We want to raise children. We want to be, as a society, free and independent thinkers, strong-willed, capable, curious people who are able to be inventive, creative, adaptive. That's That's who we have been as Americans. That's who we are capable of being going into the future. If we decide that we're not going to fall prey to cognitive offloading, second-hand thinking, the kind of the kind of um the kind of learned helplessness and needless expensive dependence on that AI wants us to engage in, right? We can we can do better than this. What does it look like to have a society where we are all free thinkers again?