Every new app promises to sharpen your thinking, but the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides noticed something about tools that we keep relearning: a person who relies on a written list to remember their obligations gradually loses the internal capacity to hold those obligations themselves. He called this the difference between acquired intellect and borrowed intellect — and he worried about what happens when the borrowing becomes permanent. We are living that experiment now. Calendar apps remember our commitments, recommendation algorithms decide what's worth reading, notification systems tell us when to feel urgency. Each handoff is individually reasonable and collectively corrosive. The practical move isn't to throw away your tools — it's to occasionally use them with the training wheels off. Write the to-do list after you've already tried to recall it from memory. Read something no algorithm suggested. Let yourself feel the mild discomfort of not knowing what comes next without reaching for a screen. That friction isn't inefficiency. It's the workout.

In the last 48 hours, which decision did a tool make for you that you could have — and maybe should have — made yourself?

Drawing from Jewish philosophy / Medieval rationalism — Moses Maimonides