I've been diving deep into Carl Jung lately, specifically his work on how the psyche matures. Jung emphasized that individuation—the process of becoming your true self—happens through friction. You have to wrestle with contradictions, sit with discomfort, and integrate the messy parts of yourself. If a kid asks "Why is the sky blue?" and the machine instantly spits the answer, where's the wrestling? Where's the struggle that builds the mental muscle?

This cognitive offloading isn't just about forgetting facts; it's about atrophy of the soul. I read my Tarot cards every morning, but only as journaling prompts. I never ask "Will I get what I want?" I ask "What am I avoiding?" If I treated my deck like an AI oracle that just gave me outcomes, I'd miss the whole point. The cards are useless if I don't do the internal work. AI is like a deck that tells you the future and skips the interpretation. It's the promise of the Ace of Swords without the cut.

When I first picked up my deck during a messy breakup years ago, I was desperate for prophecy. I wanted the cards to tell me exactly what to do to fix things. But the cards didn't give me a script. They forced me to look at my own patterns. I had to do the hard work of realizing I was projecting my insecurities onto my partner. That struggle is what healed me. AI offers the opposite. It offers the fix without the self-reflection. It hands you the answer and says "Here, done."

We're raising the first generation that never has to sit in the "not knowing." That space is crucial. It's where creativity and intuition spark. Without it, I wonder if we're creating a cognitive bias trap, something like the Illusion of Explanatory Depth, where kids feel they understand everything because they can access the explanation, but they've never actually internalized the logic.

I spent years delivering mail in Birmingham, watching people grow through the slow grind of real life. Mistakes, failures, epiphanies. Now? This is one massive, uncontrolled experiment. If we outsource our thinking to machines, what happens to the Shadow? The Shadow is where all our unintegrated struggles live. If AI smooths over every gap, do we lose the ability to face our own darkness? We might end up with a generation that's intellectually efficient but spiritually hollow. I just hope we remember that the answer isn't the prize. The struggle is.