Cognitive surrender is an essential new term that’s arisen to describe the abdication of our own reasoning to a machine that sounds fluent, confident, and authoritative. Studies are showing that when people interact with AI tools, they accept flawed reasoning at a startling level (almost 75% of the time). Not because they don’t have the capacity to reason better themselves. But because it is easier not to question. As a writer, it will likely come as no surprise that I’m leery of outsourcing. I worry about dulling not just my cognitive capacity, even more so my creativity.
And, yes, I have started working with AI tools, because I also think it’s important to understand what these machines are all about and how I might use them in an un-surrendered manner. I almost used the word collaborate in that last sentence, instead of use. I chose not to, because I’m not yet ready to acknowledge these machines as entities. That feels like surrender. This from someone who is more than willing to see trees as sentient beings well before reading Michael Pollan’s new book, A World Appears.
I am exploring the border between surrender and leveraging these cognitive machines to free my time for deeper engagement with the world. More akin to my vacuum cleaner than a friend.
I have been thinking a lot about surrender in my body, too. Every time I read an article about aging and activity, which tells me that I should move more gently, now that I’m on the verge of a new decade, a part of me growls protectively. Not yet.
This physical version of surrender can be seductive. Messaging that encourages the little voices that say: I’m older now. Intensity is harder. Recovery is harder. Maybe I should just… let these things be harder. Be gentle with myself. Slow down. Stop. Lie down. The End. Okay—those last four are the hyperbole kicking in.The reasoning (without exaggeration) arrives fluently, confidently, with authority. And, as with AI reasoning, if I’m not careful, I might accept these blandishments about aging without interrogating the particularities of my own case.
I see the parallel this way: an authoritative-seeming signal in the form of an AI answer or an aging body; the availability of a path of least resistance; the ways that acceptance is not neutral, reshaping what we expect of ourselves and ultimately what we are actually capable of.
What the cognitive surrender research captures is that the problem isn’t using external tools. We humans have been off-loading cognitive tasks for a while now. Thank you, calculators. The red flag is what happens when we stop verifying. When silken reasoning substitutes for truth. When we accept not because we’ve evaluated, but because it’s so frictionless (and pleasant) to not expend the effort.
In the physical realm, adjusting our expectations as we age is not always surrender. Of course not. Surrender is unexamined acceptance. Letting the message of limitation go unchallenged. Sliding past the effort of finding out just what we are still capable of.
I turn 60 this year. I’d like to say I feel easy, breezy about that. I don’t. I’m in search of the right balance of grace and grit. I have set myself the goal of running a half marathon (21 kilometers or 13.1 miles) every month. Twelve months, twelve runs (among all the other runs I will do). When I was younger, that distance was a regular sized effort. Last year, I did not run that distance even once. And my year culminated in foot surgery in late November (which I wrote about here).
The decision has an element of stubbornness, to be sure. I am a Taurus, after all. On New Year’s Day, I started the year running 21k with my brother on mountain trails. I had a genuine concern that I would not run the whole distance. It took a while. I got it done. I was inspired. And so, this challenge. As I write this, four 21k are done. Eight to go.
I hear the voices that tell me: You’re not built for this anymore. I’m checking their veracity. They might be right. I might not be up for the challenge. I want to be gentle with myself, if I’m not. This is not about punishment. It’s about exaltation. The joy of discovering, each month, that I still have the capacity.
When I was a child, my mother always made us take the stairs. I remember glancing longingly at elevators as we passed them by. Now I live on the eighth floor, and I take the stairs almost every time I leave or come home. Not always. I’m realistic, not rigid. Not because I’m proving something. Because the habit of not surrendering has become its own kind of instinct. My mother was training something in me: the reflex to push gently against the available convenience, to stay curious about what I might actually be capable of.
The AI researchers found that people with higher fluid IQ scores were more likely to maintain their own judgment under pressure. I do not claim any extra intelligence. I think gentle resistance is more about habit. The habit of fact checking.
This is what I want to hold onto as I run my way through this year, one half marathon at a time. Not the delusion that there no limits that come with age. I have plenty. Instead, I want to cultivate the discipline of inquiry, to distinguish real limits from the limits that are presented with confidence, waiting for me to accept them without scrutiny.
My body, like a large language model, will tell me what it thinks I want to hear in smooth and reasonable tones. Rest. Take the elevator. Watch Netflix.
Sometimes my body is right. And I will be dancing with surrender and resistance, until I find the choreography that leads to graceful, gritty acceptance.
