Cooking at Home in the Age of AI
When I was a child, eating out was a luxury.
It didn’t happen often. Restaurants felt curated. Special. Someone had thought carefully about the ingredients, the preparation, the experience. It was rare — and because it was rare, it mattered.
Fast forward fifty years
Today, I can afford to eat out whenever I like. Yet I find myself cooking at home more than ever. Not because I have to — but because I prefer control over the ingredients. Over the taste. Over the quality. Fast food is engineered for volume and repetition. It is optimized to be consumed quickly and often. It fills you up, but it doesn’t always nourish you.
Lately, I’ve realized that my relationship with the internet has followed a similar arc.
There was a time when going online felt like entering a vast library. In the early days, information was something you searched for deliberately. You read long pages. You followed links thoughtfully. You explored.
Before that, serious learning meant shelves of books — sometimes entire 26-volume lexicons — carefully edited and curated. They were expensive. Heavy. Intentional. Knowledge had weight.
Then came scale.
Search engines won the indexing race. Social platforms won the attention race. Monetization became the dominant incentive. The goal quietly shifted from serving depth to capturing time.
The internet didn’t become useless. It became abundant.
And abundance changed everything.
Signal was diluted by volume.
Curation gave way to algorithms.
Discussion gave way to performance.
Over time, I noticed something in myself: I was consuming more information than ever — yet thinking less deeply about it.
Then AI arrived
When large language models became usable tools rather than distant research projects, I felt something unexpected: relief.
For the first time in decades, I could interact with knowledge without advertisements, without comment sections, without performative noise. I could ask a precise question and receive a structured response. I could explore a topic deeply without navigating pop-ups, outrage cycles, or ten conflicting opinions fighting for attention.
It felt strangely familiar.
Like opening a well-edited volume again.
Only now, it could talk back.
So I made a decision
I did not leave the internet.
I reduced it to a utility.
I check email once per day — the way people once checked a physical mailbox. Necessary. Contained. Finite.
I stepped away from forums and reactive posting.
I air-gapped two of my three computers.
I began using local AI as my primary research interface.
Instead of publishing constantly into the stream, I began building quietly.
Not to disconnect from the world.
But to regain signal.
The beginning of an experiment
Over the coming months, I will document what happens when I intentionally redesign my digital life around depth instead of exposure — around inquiry instead of scrolling — around creation instead of reaction.
This is not a manifesto.
It is a configuration change.
If you’ve felt that something about the modern internet no longer nourishes you the way it once did, you may find this exploration interesting. If not, that’s fine too.
I cannot change the architecture of the web.
But I can change my own.
And perhaps that is enough to begin.