This piece was written by one of our dear readers—a woman with something real to say. Each month, we handpick the best submissions for Dear Reader because we’re after that PROVOKED bite: truth, intelligence, and heart. These stories come from women our age—women who’ve lived enough to know better and still care enough to tell it anyway. Because being seen and heard matters. Because storytelling is how we stitch ourselves to one another. And because when one woman speaks her truth, another finally recognizes her own. — Susan Dabbar, Editor-in-Chief
I fought for the right to make my own decisions. Now I’m asking Siri to make them.
My husband might drive us in circles, but I could always get us turned around, even on Northern New Jersey’s tangle of roads. I was our navigator, good with directions. On a date night in New York City, it would take me under 30 seconds to figure out which subway lines could get us from midtown to the Upper East Side, and I instinctively knew the best spot to catch a cab.
Whether drafting a laser-sharp email, cooking the perfect roast chicken, or painting a bookcase, I had built a knowledge base through chatting with friends, reading books and magazines, and simple trial and error. I arrived in midlife with skills and discernment, sure of what I knew, and good at getting the right kind of information when I wasn’t.
When the internet, and later, smartphones arrived, I saw tech as a welcome addition; progress that made life easier and saved time. I appreciated buying groceries on my porch or shopping for a new pair of pants without trekking to the mall.
But with the infiltration of AI, something shifted. Instead of offloading jobs that were time consuming or stressful, I started using tech to do simple tasks that took seconds. Seemingly overnight, I no longer had the patience to flick on a light switch or use the remote to turn on the TV. It was easier to open my mouth and shout orders at Alexa.
Before long, tech became my default for virtually every decision.
A drive to a favorite lunch spot was now mediated by Siri’s interruptions because I no longer felt sure of how to get there. I started asking ChatGPT to tell me how I should style my hair and the best way to reach out to former colleagues—all things I’d done for decades without tech intervention. It was only after I’d spent an hour chatting with the bot, looking for its chirpy stamp of approval on new throw pillows for the living room sofa, that I took a breath.
I know how to buy a throw pillow, I thought. Why am I asking you?
Watching My Agency Evaporate
I grew up in the 1960s, when women were considered incapable. By the time I entered the workforce in the late 1970s, Second Wave feminists had laid siege to these stereotypes and forced a seismic change in the political and cultural dynamics that denied women full agency. Sexism was still rampant, but dramatic societal change meant we could build our own lives.
Achieving more than my elders was a source of satisfaction for me, and them, and even the most humbling of mistakes—from a bad choice of boyfriends to a work blunder—were mine to fix. My bad decisions made me smarter, sharper, and more attuned to what I was good at and what needed work, even as I was building competence and self-awareness.
But now, with AI and algorithms, I could feel myself getting dumber by the day, allowing an eerily insistent chatbot to tell me what to buy, how to dress, even how to organize my days after leaving full-time work. That morning, while pillow shopping, I could sense my skills and confidence waning.
And it wasn’t all in my head.
They’re Stealing Our Brains
Research shows that overreliance on tech can chip away at our critical thinking skills, our self-mastery, and the resilience that comes from overcoming challenges. Keep asking tech for answers on how to plan and orchestrate your life, and you’ll end up with one designed and directed by AI and algorithms. When you’re no longer able to cultivate and trust your own interests and preferences, you’ve essentially relinquished your personal identity. You no longer have a mind of your own.
Experts openly admit that tech is purposely designed to diminish human agency, keeping us tethered and reliant. But tech barons figure we’re so addicted to convenience that we’ll gladly go along with this power grab. So far, we’re proving them right.
About half of women use a voice assistant daily and social media and music gatekeepers like Spotify are more popular with women than men. One-third of women have adopted AI, and usage is expected to soon surpass that of men. Tech is now our constant companion, telling us how to manage our health, our households, our kids’ schedules, and what to do when we break under the stress.
But, despite all the chatter about convenience, offloading is simply a replacement for the 60s-era husband who dictated the terms of women’s lives. Every aspect—from how they dressed to the food they cooked to their likes and dislikes—was his to determine and direct. The suffocating cultural message was simple: Men know best. Women did as they were told.
The Question We Need To Ask
So we need to ask ourselves: Are we ready to squander the richness of our complicated, brilliant, and messy lives, and the intuition and critical thinking that helped build them, to a system that is engineered to diminish those skills? Are we okay with returning to a life of dependency and self-doubt, seeking tech’s imprimatur on every aspect of our lives?
There’s nothing wrong with convenience, and women—especially those with young children—need support. We’ve tried to equalize household labor, but it never happened. That said, can we agree that a wholesale handover of agency is too big a price to pay for “frictionless” ease?
That morning on the sofa with the bot, I knew I was squandering something precious, singular, and hard won. And in that moment, I asked the question we all need to ask, every time we default to tech: Do I need to ask this question or do I already know the answer?
With that, you can put the brakes on the non-stop ceding of your brain to a system focused on monetizing your dependency. In those brief moments, you can reclaim something that isn’t for sale—the authority to steer and design your own life on your own terms.
