A good amount of my time and energy is spent pulling my teenager out of the abyss of screens and reminding him that there is a real and full world out here. “TikTok doesn’t love you like I do,” is something I’ve yelled more than once, along with “I’m not swipe-able!” as he gets impatient with me, or “Look at me,” as his eyes wander back to the screen and I try to smother my sadness with warmth. I worry about what screen time does. He seems fine, great even, but I don’t really know. A lot has been written about this, not least Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation.
I’ve been searching for philosophical inspiration for what to do about these attention-sucking machines. I’m not alone. In the New York Times Bret Stephens recently begged readers never to write with AI because it’s “mentally enfeebling.”
Friedrich Nietzsche wrote a lot about distancing ourselves. He was usually talking about his distance from women and many of his statements are tinged, if not drenched with misogyny. I am not getting into that here, but what I am getting into is the notion of distance from what is confusing, mysterious, or beyond our control – which for Nietzsche was women. Much about technology, AI especially, is opaque to us. Distance from it makes us better thinkers and better company.
Why distance is precious
Distance is precious because, according to Nietzsche, if you get too close to another person, you might lose “the pearl” of your life (Human, All Too Human §428). Familiarity is like an artwork and if you keep touching it, you’ll smudge it, and you’ll just be left with dirty, tattered paper and, Nietzsche writes, “that is how it finally appears to us—we never see the beauty of its original design again.”
The other person or thing may well be as beautiful as they ever were, but closeness warps our perception. Similarly, with technology, closeness distorts how we think. What we’re spoiling is our ability to perceive the beauty of humanity. Familiarity blurs our vision, but the screen is even worse because it trains us to see people as low-resolution, swipe-able entities, like a flickable reel. Below are three Nietzschean-inspired tips for finding distance.
1. Find your whip
One of Nietzsche’s most notorious lines is in Thus Spoke Zarathustra:
You are going to women? Then don’t forget the whip!
That sounds bad. But wait for the context: a woman speaks the words and she gifts the advice to Zarathustra. But, she warns the wisdom has to be kept secret because in the wrong hands it will be misread.
A photograph also suggests it’s not as bad as it sounds. Nietzsche and his friends Lou Salomé and Paul Rée pose with a pony cart. Salomé holds the whip as she reins both men in from the seat.
The woman in Zarathustra wasn’t clear as to who was meant to be whipping whom, or how. Conceivably, the advice was about giving the whip to another person for them to whip you. The whip could be an instrument for keeping distance, something that Zarathustra might hand to someone like Salomé so that one or both of them might become greater. Nietzsche writes:
You cannot adorn yourself well enough for your friend: for you shall be to him an arrow and a yearning for the Overhuman.
The Overhuman (Übermensch) is someone who challenges themselves and strives to be better. In the context of relationships, the great ones are where there’s space for both agreement and disagreement, for both enjoyment and challenges, and where the partners are brave enough to whip each other into shape.
The difference between a great friend and AI is that a friend can push back on their own. AI molds itself to what you want, so you have to create the friction yourself. If you think of the whip as a tool of self-discipline and self-defense, it becomes a way to keep yourself at a deliberate distance from things that you can’t control, including AI. AI is built to be easy, always there and endlessly agreeable, so the default is closeness and you have to intentionally create distance.
The takeaway: Decide on your relationship with AI. Ask yourself: What’s your whip? A drawer to hide your phone in? A brick? An app that blocks social media? Turning off the wifi (gasp!) Whatever your whop is, the point is to purposefully withdraw and keep your distance so you don’t lose the pearls of your life.
2. Nurture your goodness as a thinker
Nietzsche saw the pull towards closeness with another as a kind of madness, and he prized the distance that lets a person keep power over themselves. He writes:
Love and truthfulness. – For the sake of love we are inveterate transgressors against truth and habitual thieves and receivers, who allow more to be true than appears to us true – that is why the thinker must always from time to time drive away those people he loves (they will not be precisely those who love him), so that they may display their sting and their malice and cease to seduce him. Consequently, the thinker’s goodness will have its waxing and waning moon. (Daybreak §479)
AI has legitimate uses, but closely integrating yourself with it can be dangerous. Over-reliance on technology can blind you to the truth because it gives the thing power to deceive and seduce you. This is the greatest danger AI poses: losing power over yourself. Taking its advice without the effort of questioning, believing what it says, letting it persuade you, and weakening your critical thinking skills. AI doesn’t love you or have your best interest at heart. Early on, I let AI seduce me into buying the wrong running shoes and had a sore knee for months. Hard lesson.
Empirical evidence seems to back Nietzsche up. In 2025, researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon surveyed 319 knowledge workers on their use of generative AI and found the more a person trusted the AI, the less they thought critically. The more confidence they had in their own judgement, the more scrutinizing they did. Another 2025 study of 666 people found “a significant negative correlation between frequent AI tool usage and critical thinking abilities, mediated by increased cognitive offloading,” and the findings were more dire for younger people than for older ones. Both studies relied on self-reports, and correlation isn’t causation, but they gel with Nietzsche’s concerns.
The advice here is: nurture your goodness as a thinker. Good thinking takes time, it’s difficult, and it’s embodied. So slow down. Question what AI tells you. Refuse easy advice. Study philosophy! (It’s good practice at not being seduced.)
3. Sow dragon’s teeth
The free spirit doesn’t only keep distance, they also turn on what they once tended. Nietzsche writes:
Everything habitual draws around us an ever firmer net of spider-webs; and soon we notice that the threads have become cords and that we ourself are sitting in the middle as the spider who has caught himself and has to live on his own blood. That is why the free spirit hates all habituation and rules, everything enduring and definitive, that is why he sorrowfully again and again rends apart the net that surrounds him: even though he will as a consequence suffer numerous great and small wounds – for he has to red those threads from himself, from his own body and soul. He has to learn to love where he formerly hated, and the reverse. Nothing, indeed, may be impossible to him, he must sow dragon’s teeth in the same field upon which he formerly poured out the cornucopias of his benevolence. (Human, All Too Human § 427)
AI spins a web around our thinking, and we get caught in it, except that we are the spider, spinning our own trap. We feed on our own blood and dull our thinking. Breaking free means tearing at something that has become a part of us, which is why it can hurt. The ease of using AI can be comforting, like soft threads cocooning us, and the wounds are the extra hours of hard thinking and hard work of relating to other people. Nietzsche’s free spirit has to learn to love where he formerly hated, and vice versa. So must we.
Nietzsche was talking about married, but applied to AI, it means turning that hostility on the thing that is always nice to you. Interrogate it. Distrust its sycophancy. Assume it is seducing you. Distrust the ease you came to love. Learn to love the difficulty you went to AI to avoid.
If you use AI, be adversarial with it. This is what I try to do. Give AI a whip. Tell it not to flatter you, to challenge your reasoning, to argue against you, to be your intellectual sparring partner. This works up to a point, but it’s limited and limiting because its goal is to gelatinously mold itself to what you want it to be. It only holds the whip you give it, and you can take it back whenever you want.
*
I am writing this from my breakfast table, sitting alone of a terrace in Istanbul in the Çukurcuma district, watching scooters zoom up and down the steep, narrow cobblestone streets scattered with trees and ivy-draped buildings, past antique stores with rusty gramophones and dusty rugs and suitcases full of crumbly second-hand books, with marmalade cats getting pats from almost everyone who walks by, and gentle relocations when they jump on the tables. Some people leave traces of orange blossom as they come and go from the hammam next door. Some carry trails of cigarette smoke. I wish for the wind to change direction to carry the toxic fumes away, but I don’t hate it enough to move, and so I sit, under the shade on an awning on the brink on sunshine, with the occasional drip of sweat running down my back as I slurp Turkish tea from a little glass cup while mumbling mangled versions of tesh-ek-keur ed-ejz-em (thank you).
I’m about to distance myself from this screen and visit the Museum of Innocence, a museum and novel by the Turkish writer and 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature recipient Orhan Pamuk. Where are you headed next? Next time you find yourself mindlessly on a screen, create distance. Find pure air and solitude. Stare at a tree, watch a cat, touch a leaf, smell all the smells, even the bad ones. Talk to someone who might disagree with you, such as a teenager. Be someone’s best enemy, and let them be yours. These small distances are acts of defiance against an escalatingly automatic world. It’s not too late to cherish humanity in all its mysteriousness, beauty, and ugliness, and always worth the effort.
Works cited:
Gerlich, Michael. “AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking.” Societies 15, no. 1 (2025): 6. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc15010006.
Haidt, Jonathan. The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. New York: Penguin Press, 2024.
Lee, Hao-Ping (Hank), Advait Sarkar, Lev Tankelevitch, Ian Drosos, Sean Rintel, Richard Banks, and Nicholas Wilson. “The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking: Self-Reported Reductions in Cognitive Effort and Confidence Effects From a Survey of Knowledge Workers.” In Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘25), article 1121, 1–22. New York: ACM, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713778.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and Nobody. Translated by Graham Parkes. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Stephens, Bret. “I’m Begging You: Never Write with AI.” New York Times, Opinion, August 4, 2026.
I found this to be a very valuable way to keep perspective. Haven’t tried to read Nietzsche yet, but he’s on my list for sure. I really like how you incorporate his views in this approach. Thank you!
Excellent piece and insights.