Since I turned 35, I noticed perimenopause symptoms slowly creeping up onto my aging, decrepit body.
One symptom that truly gave me pause was the brain fog. Days felt my head was always full of cotton. I always caught myself fixing typos in my work conversations. It felt like my hands were not working well with my brain.
People on the internet recommended I take creatine. The fog lifted. I felt like my brain worked properly again.
A couple of years ago when Chat GPT was starting to take over at work, sure, I tried using it too. Could it write me captions? Could it write some blog posts on things I barely knew about? Sure.
But everything it spat out felt like it was made by a brain addled with fog. It always said the same thing over and over, hallucinated data, and just corrected itself just to keep you talking to it. But it will still make the same mistakes the next time. I ended up doing the same work I would’ve had done if I just researched and fact-checked on my own from the start.
What my actual, physical brain fog made me realize was I actually didn’t like not feeling my brain work. It scared me. I didn’t want to offload any of my thinking to “AI” anymore.
I doubled up on my reading. Took on more hobbies that required my hands and my imagination. My brain was the one thing I could always count on growing up, I sure as hell would not want to have it fail on me now.