Understanding Tax: The Cost of Letting AI Think for You

“I don’t have to think. ChatGPT can do that for me.”

At first, that sounds like progress, like you’ve found a secret shortcut that saves time and gets you to the answer faster. There’s a cost that comes with it, though, and most people don’t notice it until later. Call it the understanding tax.

Don’t get me wrong. I love AI, and I use it multiple times a day for so many things. We’re living in a time where answers are easy to access. You can get a clean, well-structured response to almost any question in seconds. That’s powerful. It can help you move faster, learn quicker, and remove friction from your day. 

Here’s the challenge: when everything becomes that easy, there’s a part of the process that quietly disappears. The thinking.

Understanding has never come from speed. It comes from sitting with ideas long enough to actually process them, from asking a second question, then a third. It comes from wrestling with something that doesn’t fully make sense yet and staying with it instead of moving on. When we skip that part, we might still get the answer… but we lose the depth behind it.

I heard this framed up in a powerful conversation between Steven Bartlett and Daniel Priestley on the Diary of a CEO podcast, and it stuck with me. They talked about how too much reliance on AI, without enough independent thinking, creates a kind of tax. You still get the output, but you don’t build the understanding that allows you to use it well. You didn’t earn the insight, you borrowed it… and borrowed insight has a way of falling apart the moment you actually need it. 

Daniel shared a simple approach that feels almost too basic in a world that is always moving. Pause, reflect, and document. Give yourself space to sit with your thoughts. Step away from the noise and let your mind slow down enough to notice what’s actually there. Sit on a bench without your phone, and let yourself get bored for a few minutes instead of immediately filling the space.

Think about that. Let yourself get bored.

When was the last time you did that? Most people avoid boredom, reaching for something to consume the second there’s a gap. 

A reality check… Boredom is where the interesting connections start to happen. It’s where your mind begins to pull together things that didn’t seem related before. In boredom, you can take a conversation you had last week, a problem you’ve been trying to solve, something you read months ago that didn’t fully click at the time… When you slow down, those pieces start to connect.

Journaling can help here. Not in a forced or structured way, but simply as a place to get your thoughts out of your head and onto paper. When you write things down, you start to see patterns. You start to notice what you actually think, not just what you’ve heard. You begin to connect ideas across different parts of your life. 

It’s worth asking yourself a simple question. When was the last time you slowed down enough to let your mind catch up with your life?

The Takeaway

The goal isn’t to avoid tools like AI. They’re incredibly useful. Instead, the goal is to use them without giving up the responsibility to think for yourself. Use them to accelerate, not replace. If you want depth, you have to create space for it. You have to be willing to sit in the quiet long enough for your thoughts to form and your ideas to connect. That’s where clarity and confidence come from… without the tax.