Writing Is the Gym of the AI Era

There was a time when nobody needed to “work out.”

Physical activity was built into life. You worked on a farm, in a factory, or with your hands. Staying strong wasn’t a separate habit. It was required to function.

Then machines removed physical effort from everyday life.

Exercise became optional. Most people stopped doing it. BUT… the disciplined went to the gym because they understood that something could stop being necessary for survival while remaining necessary for a good life.

We are entering that era with writing.

Writing has never just been a way to communicate a thought. Writing is how you produce the thought.

You begin with something vague. Then you try to explain it. You discover the holes. You notice the contradictions. You rewrite it until you understand what you actually believe.

That struggle is the point.

AI can now produce two competent-looking pages in seconds. But producing two pages is not the same as thinking.

Our schools prepared us to confuse the two. Teachers assigned “two pages on X,” as if the length of the document had anything to do with the quality of the thinking.

That instinct followed us into work!

A boss asks for an analysis.

Someone gives AI a prompt and returns with two polished pages. The sentences are clean. The structure looks right enough. The “assignment” appears complete.

But nobody necessarily did the thinking!

Soon, everyone will be able to produce a good-looking memo. Very few people will be able to tell you whether it is true.

The disciplined will keep writing.

They will sit with a blank page and force themselves to clarify what they know, what they assume, and what they still need to understand. They may use AI afterward to challenge or improve the work. MAYBE.

But they won’t outsource the part that forms the thinking.

Writing by hand will look increasingly “inefficient”.

So does going to the gym when an elevator can carry you up the stairs.

But the people who continue doing the work will become dramatically better thinkers. The gap will compound until it becomes impossible to miss.

In a world overflowing with generated words, writing will become exercise.

Everyone will know they should do it.

Only the disciplined will.

Now get your ass to the gym!

Yallah Habibi,

Jon