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Cover page Writing and intellectual atrophy
Think

When did you last write something that was purely yours?

If you cannot remember, then this is for you.

Umama Shaikh

Delivery Manager

Take a second with that question. Not “when did you last write something good?” Just, “when did you last write something that came entirely from you?”

I use AI. I want to be honest about that before I go any further, because if I’m not, this chat is futile. I use it for briefs, as a brainstorming buddy, for generating images (if you’re thinking about Instagram trends, then you’re exactly right). It is useful. Sometimes it is very useful. And still, I find myself sitting with an uncomfortable feeling that I cannot quite shake.  

Seven years in marketing will do that to you. You develop a feel for language, not just what works, but what is yours. The way you open a pitch or a de-briefing session. The instinct that tells you a sentence needs to be shorter, tighter, more surprising. The campaign idea that arrives at 11pm and doesn’t let you sleep until you have written it down in the notes app. That’s not a skill you can document. It lives in the body of your experience. 

And I’m starting to wonder what happens to that thing when you stop using it. 

The slow erosion nobody's talking about

There’s a term for it – Intellectual Atrophy. The gradual decline of cognitive abilities, critical thinking, memory, and analytical skills through disuse. We apply it to physical exercise, to language learning, and to mathematics. We don’t apply it nearly enough to writing. 

Writing is thinking. It is how humans have always worked out what they actually believe, what they actually feel, what they are actually trying to say. The act of finding words forces a kind of clarity that no amount of reading or listening can replicate. When you outsource that process, even partially, even just for the email that felt tedious – you are outsourcing a small piece of your cognition. 

If you do it often enough, something changes. The sentences don’t come as quickly. The ideas feel less sharp. The brainstorm room gets a little quieter. You start to wonder if you were ever as good as you thought, or if you were just doing more of the work yourself. 

The brainstorm room getting quieter is not a tech problem. It is a muscle problem. And muscles atrophy when you stop using them. 

This is not about AI being bad

I want to be clear about that. AI is not the villain here. When autopilot entered aviation, it did not make pilots obsolete, it let them manage complexity at a different altitude 

The question is always: what level are you working at and what are you freeing yourself for? 

If you are using AI to handle the mechanical so that you can do the meaningful, that is fair trade. But if you are using it to handle the meaningful too, like the client message that actually required you to think about the relationship, the campaign idea that required you to sit with the problem long enough to find the unexpected angle, or the social media caption that you should have written – then something else is happening. 

You are not becoming more efficient. You are becoming replaceable. And not by the tool. By the next person who never stopped doing the work themselves. 

What I'm actually asking you to do

Not to delete the tools. Not to perform some purist rejection of technology to prove a point.  

Just to write something. One thing. Without touching it up, without running it through any chatbots, without softening whatever comes out. It could be a paragraph. A message. A page of ideas that embarrasses you a little because it’s unpolished and fully yours. 

Notice what that feels like or notice if it feels harder than it used to. Check if the voice that comes out still sounds like you. 

Because here is what I know after seven years of all of this: the campaigns that made an impact, the copy that actually moved people and stayed with them, the pitches that won, they came from a place that no model has ever been trained on.  

They came from that specific and strange, particular way you see the problem. That is not something to be optimised. It is something to be protected. 

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