So I gave up Reddit for Lent.

I wasn’t planning to—I’m not Catholic, and I don’t generally, um, ‘celebrate’ Lent or partake in themed-month challenges as a rule. I have enough to keep track of! But in early March I had a bug in my brain. I was thinking too much about LLMs and chatbots and ‘AI’—honestly at this point LLMs should pay us $10 a month for the privilege of our thinking so much about them, if not 20 times that—and about the delegation of thought: from half-joking ex-twitter users asking “grok is this true” to an acquaintance who mentioned having asked a chatbot for help with small talk in the bleachers at a youth sports game. ChatGPT, how do I hang, how should I dress, how should I play with my kids?

At first, thinking about all this, I felt superior—“I’d never trust my thinking to a machine!”—but one night I had a long look in the black mirror and did not like what I saw.

I haven’t been using LLMs, mind—I genuinely do not feel a need for such a thing in my daily life or work, which makes my disdain for the technology easy to indulge; my experiences with even the most up-to-the-minute chatbot tech support have been somewhere between lackluster and disastrous—but one night when I was over an hour into reading Reddit threads about… I think it was a shoulder bag?—or perhaps compare/contrasting various to-do list programs that I had in fact used myself—I experienced ‘what alcoholics term a moment of clarity.’

Chatbots and LLMs are new (well, new-ish): we haven’t had the ability to make a machine extrude relatively coherent natural language text on command for long. But they build on a belief that’s had much longer to hollow out the collective psyche: the notion that the Internet knows more than you do.

It does, of course! Well, sort of—you can go on the internet and find someone who knows more than you do about almost any topic, or at least thinks they do and is happy to say so. Maybe they’ve even written about what they know, and posted it online. They put in the work—well, you hope they did, they sure seem confident in their opinions and dismissive of others’!—first to acquire the expertise or knowledge, and then to write it up. For the low low price of your attention, you can enjoy the product of their thoughts, and build upon them through the magic of reading and contemplation.

By itself there’s nothing wrong here. We can use this process to find great taco joints in new towns, to discover the neat stationery store around the corner, to answer niggling tech questions, to learn languages faster, maybe even to find our next favorite book. “If I have seen far, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.” Right?

Well, maybe. If you bother to look out. If you keep looking at the giant, you’ll just see their shoulder.

It might seem like a huge jump, asking a machine to think for you. But asking the internet to think for us—we do that all the time! And look how well we’re all doing as a result!

Lol, lmao, sob.

In the wake of this moment of clarity, I started paying attention to the why of it all, asking what emotions drove me to the internet. I didn’t much like what I often saw—the hollowness and exhaustion reflected there. If I was feeling nervous about the state of the world I’d go looking for—well, I’d like to say guidance and wisdom, and sometimes yes! But just as often I sought validation of my fears, which would lead, quite naturally, to more fears. If I felt angry, I would look for anger. When I was thinking about buying something—a shoulder bag, say—I’d look for confirmation of the decision I wanted to make anyway. Should Judas go forth tonight, it is to Judas his steps will tend!

So I gave up Reddit. It was oddly easy, once I’d made the decision. Sure, I was out the value of a few strangers’ opinions, and once in a while some critical stain-removal advice. But none of those strangers really knew me, and most of them were just bored at work anyway.

There’s nothing like giving up something, to come to terms with how much a part of you it has become. For the first week I kept reaching for the prop that wasn’t there. I’d chosen to give up reddit in particular not because I find it all that pernicious as a site, but because I don't: it’s one of the few places on the ‘net these days that feels more or less alive; most factual Google searches on topics of any complexity would be next to useless without it. But as I committed to the exercise I found that if I asked myself the question I meant to ask the black mirror, three or four times, and gave myself a few minutes of uncertainty, an answer, or at least a path forward, would often suggest itself.

The error is one of limits and proportion: buying into the notion that since someone out there probably knows better than you on any topic, that there’s no point thinking about it yourself. When in fact: you might not know everything but you know a hell of a lot! And the crowd doesn’t know much at all—certainly not about your experiences, your needs, your situation, your context. You may be, probably will be, much better served consulting the weird little goblin in your own skull, than by seeking the wisdom of the strange demons of the black mirror. (Unless you’re trying to write a grep statement. The demons are pretty good at grep.) And the more you consult and trust the goblin in your skull, the stronger and wiser and more confident she will grow. It’s funny how that works.

I’m not saying that we should try to subsist entirely on our own expertise or live entirely inside our own heads. I’ve read too much Augustine and Milton and Dostoyevsky for that! Besides, the internet is genuinely great at some things (like grep). It’s simply a question of balance and awareness, like so much else—realizing when you are actually relying on yourself, and when you are relying on the black mirror—and deciding where you will turn for support when you come to the end of your own knowledge and strength.

I’d rather start with friends. Friends know a lot. Mentors and family (depending on the family) are also good. My own shelf of reference books is pretty useful, too. (I am very much in my reference book era at the moment—another essay for another time.) Anyone with whom I have a sufficiently trusting and analog connection that they can tell me (in their own loving way) that I am full of it, or that I need a nap—I treasure those people.

And sure, sometimes I do come around to a question for which the demons likely have an answer.

But first, now, I’m trying to let the goblin have her say.