Is Technology Making Us Forget How to Be Human?

We live in a time when nearly every cognitive demand can be softened by technology. Phones remind us of birthdays. GPS handles our navigation. Notifications nudge us before we act. Search engines and AI recall facts in milliseconds. It feels efficient, and in many ways, it is. But efficiency always carries trade-offs.

What’s being traded away isn’t just memory for phone numbers or directions. It’s something more fundamental: the repeated practice of holding information, orienting ourselves, and constructing maps of meaning inside our own minds.

Cognitive Offloading in Everyday Life

Psychologists call this cognitive offloading. It happens any time we use external tools to store, cue, or process information that our brains could otherwise hold. Humans have always offloaded. Writing, printing, and even knotting ropes served this role in the past.

What’s new is the scale and immediacy. Offloading isn’t occasional anymore; it’s constant. And because attention is finite, what we repeatedly outsource, we also rehearse less internally. Over time, the brain adapts.

• Memory becomes thinner, with fewer durable anchors.

• Attention becomes more fragmented, constantly shared with incoming prompts.

• Agency feels diminished, because we practice less self-directed sequencing and more reliance on cues.

This doesn’t make us incapable, but it reshapes what our baseline cognition looks like.

Why This Matters Beyond the Individual

At first, the costs seem small. Forgetting directions without GPS. Struggling to recall details without notes. Losing the thread of a conversation while glancing at notifications.

Zoom out, and the implications become cultural.

• Shared maps thin out. If fewer people build internal narratives or spatial memories, less common ground is carried in mind.

• Intimacy erodes. Relationships thrive on remembering and continuity. Thinner memory weakens connection.

• Societal coherence frays. A population conditioned to rely on external prompts is easier to distract, fragment, or manipulate, because its internal compass grows weaker.

  
  

This is where the existential concern enters. If widespread offloading undermines presence and coherence, it may not just inconvenience us as individuals. It may destabilize the scaffolding that holds societies together.

Why “Just Choose Differently” Doesn’t Work

It is tempting to frame this as a matter of willpower: if we simply decide to put our phones down, memorize more, or pay closer attention, the problem would resolve. But that underestimates the scale of what we are up against.

The less we think, the less we are.

Modern devices are not neutral tools. They are precision-engineered to capture and hold attention by exploiting deep reward pathways. Every notification, infinite scroll feed, or autoplay feature is designed to trigger dopamine release and nudge us back for more. Once those loops are established, choice alone does not break them.

Even for people who are self-aware, motivated, and yearning for presence, the barrier remains high. To consistently resist requires unusual persistence, literacy, and environmental control. Outliers can manage it. Most people cannot.

That does not mean people are weak. It means the system is tilted. Expecting widespread reversal under these conditions is unrealistic.

What We Can Still Do

If we cannot fix this at the level of the whole culture, where does that leave us? The answer is local.

• Start with yourself. Reclaim practices that demand memory, presence, and self-direction. Not to become perfect, but to keep the skill alive.

• Invest in your microsystems. Family, friends, clients, colleagues. The small circles where your influence is strongest. Model what it looks like to be present, remember, and orient without outsourcing everything.

• Create more outliers. Every person who learns to resist, even partially, becomes a stabilizing force in their own network. Enough of those pockets will not flip society overnight, but they can preserve and propagate coherence.

  
  

Outliers have always been the seeds of new patterns. Mindfulness was once fringe and is now mainstream. Fitness was once niche and is now cultural norm. The same could be true for presence and intentionality, but only if enough people practice and teach it in their immediate worlds.

The Ethic of Small Scale

At scale, this may be a lost cause. But locally, it is not. And the local matters. Because while you may not save the entire system, you can safeguard meaning, connection, and coherence where you stand.

So, the invitation shifts. Do not think in terms of fixing the whole world, as you risk falling down the slippery slope of cynicism, despair, and eventual surrender. Think in terms of activating the world immediately around you. Teach your kids to build their own maps. Invite friends into experiences that demand presence. Hold continuity in your relationships.

The tools will not stop trying to take it from us. But you can decide how much you give away. And by keeping some of it, you make sure that the internal maps that anchor us as human beings do not disappear completely.

If you’ve made it this far, chances are some part of you may feel the weight of what is at stake. Maybe it stirs a kind of vertigo, realizing how much of your inner world has been shaped by tools you did not fully consent to. Or maybe it is a quieter anxiety, wondering what this means for your kids, your relationships, your future. That is a natural response. It means you are awake to the problem, which is already rare. The good news is you are not powerless. You can reclaim pieces of presence, rebuild skills, and protect coherence in the spaces that matter most. And you do not have to figure it out alone. This is the work I care about most as a therapist: helping people navigate complexity, re-anchor themselves, and find ways to live fully human in an age that often pulls us away from ourselves. If that is a path you want to explore more deeply, I would be honored to walk alongside you.

Warmly,

Matthew

A therapist trying to navigate the future the best I can, helping any I can along the way.