My daughter Malena is two years old. When someone does something for her that she wanted to do herself, she becomes inconsolable.
A friend described it perfectly: only parents understand the drama of an already-opened banana. The child isn’t upset about the banana. She’s upset because she wanted to open it herself. And now that’s gone. Irreversible. That exact moment, that exact experience — gone.
It sounds absurd. It isn’t.
This drive is not accidental
Evolution wired it in. The children who insisted on doing things themselves — stumbling, failing, getting back up, trying again — those children actually learned. The ones who waited to be helped, who accepted the already-opened banana without protest: they learned less. And in a world with saber-toothed tigers, learning less was expensive.
The drive to do things yourself isn’t stubbornness. It’s the only learning mechanism that actually works. Not the most efficient in the short term — but the only one that sticks.
Somewhere along the way, it stops
At some point, adults start saying: “We’ve always done it this way.” “Why should we change?” “I don’t have time to figure this out.”
And in most parts of life, that’s fine. You don’t need to re-learn how a dishwasher works.
But in a field that’s changing as fast as ours is right now, that switch-off is expensive. Not immediately. Quietly, over months. Until suddenly you’re the person who doesn’t understand what’s happening and can’t see why.
The AI version of this
I use AI every day. And there’s a specific habit I’ve noticed in myself that I think matters.
When something surprises me — when an answer comes back that I didn’t expect, when something doesn’t work the way I assumed — I don’t just accept it and move on. I ask: “Okay. Tell me what’s going on here.”
Not because I have to. Because I want to understand. Because letting a surprising result pass without understanding it is how you slowly stop understanding things.
That’s the distinction I keep coming back to: AI as a shortcut kills the drive. AI as a conversation partner feeds it. The same tool, two completely different relationships with learning.
Malena doesn’t know what she’s teaching me when she insists on opening the banana herself. But I think about it every time I’m tempted to just take an answer and move on.
Alleine machen.