We're Searching for Self Online, but the Cost Is Profound

A college professor discovered that 12 students from diverse backgrounds submitted nearly identical final essays written with AI, revealing a growing trend of young people outsourcing their internal experiences to artificial intelligence. The reliance on AI for self-discovery is preventing young people from developing their own emotional, intellectual, and spiritual selves, leaving them substanceless and disconnected. Even adults, including experts in mindful technology, fall victim to this cycle, experiencing heightened anxiety and existential angst when searching for their identity online.

Artificial Intelligence /us/basics/artificial-intelligence We're Searching for Self Online, but the Cost Is Profound We can find fabulous things on the internet, but we can’t find our feelings. Posted June 2, 2026 Reviewed by Lybi Ma /us/docs/editorial-process The assignment the college professor gave her students was to write about their experience of the course and how they felt about it. Twelve students from vastly different cultures, religions, and socioeconomic backgrounds were enrolled in the anthropology seminar, but what the professor received was a dozen iterations of essentially the same essay. Not only were the topics they covered the same: learning, growth, and concepts related to anthropology and cultural traditions. But at the same time, the essays all shared a language and structure far more sophisticated, organized, and complex compared with the language the students had used throughout the semester. Put simply, their final papers stunk of AI https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666920X2500147X . One particularly disturbing aspect of AI is that it encourages young people to look outside themselves for their own internal experience. Simultaneously, it may be preventing young people from actually developing a self at all. More and more, young people are looking for who they are, what they feel, want, and believe from the internet—Claude, ChatGPT, and other social media https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/social-media . The idea of turning their attention https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/attention to themselves—exploring internally, has become a pointless and irrelevant venture. Young people are undeveloped as human beings, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually; they can hold information, but on their own are increasingly substanceless. Will AI eventually replace our personal selves https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/02/24/how-teens-use-and-view-ai/ altogether? But it’s not just younger folks who are looking outside themselves https://iamh.northwestern.edu/research/research-highlights/ai-vs-identity.html for their internal experience. I’m an adult, and I write specifically about mindful https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/mindfulness technology; I wrote The Power of Off on this very topic. So too, I’ve been giving workshops for years on learning to trust your own experience and personal truth. Despite that, I too fall victim to the seduction of technology. Every so often, I fall into the technology rabbit hole; I go hunting for my own north star inside my laptop. I go anxiously searching for what’s percolating in the ether. What does ChatGPT have to say about my search? Where should I put my attention? Who else is writing similar material? How are they saying it? And of course, how many people are reading it? After a couple of days of sleepwalking through my own cortisol-fueled hellscape, I realize that I feel agitated and disconnected. By that point, I’ve probably also fallen back into a major caffeine addiction https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/addiction and feel twired , both tired and wired. But my relationships with my daughters, my husband, and myself feel frayed and untethered. After a few days of looking outward for what should matter to me, I usually feel like nothing matters. An Existential Angst Having fallen asleep, again, into the trance of technology and the fantasy https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/fantasies that its limitless knowledge and delicious distractions will guide me home to myself, I am left feeling vacuumed out at my core, hopeless, and filled with craving, striving, and anxiety https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/anxiety . My drive to be saved from my own existential angst only ends up intensifying that angst to what feels like a full-on Munchian scream . Regardless of age, most humans are susceptible to the pull and pleasure of technology. We’re drawn to the intelligence https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/intelligence and entertainment available on our screens, seduced by the distractions, and prone to looking for answers outside ourselves. We’re not taught to look inside for our own wisdom https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/wisdom , substance, and truth—to relate to ourselves as a destination. Rather, we’re conditioned to see ourselves as a launching pad from which to seek and find answers in the world. As we develop a greater sense of self, we’re better equipped to recognize when we’ve abandoned our internal home. We can discern when we disappear into the rabbit hole, scrolling the internet for what to do, know, think, or feel. But with young people, that “self” often hasn’t developed yet. As a result, they’re unaware that they’re turning over their internal authority to the AI masters, giving them the power to tell them who they are and what they’re experiencing. They haven’t yet built the awareness to notice when ChatGPT has become their personal truth-teller, and their north star is something they’re looking for on Instagram. Looking outward for their own experience will just be what is . As a writer, I’ll often have an idea for a topic without a clear picture of what I want to say. The idea needs to marinate; I need to live in the questions, contemplate why it matters to me. If, at that embryonic stage, I start asking AI for its ideas on the topic, I end up walking away with a head full of other ideas, ones that ChatGPT thinks are relevant. While they may be interesting, they’re not my ideas, not my curiosities, and not the musings I might have pursued. My embryonic thoughts are faded and gone, crowded out by Claude and Gemini’s thoughts, at which point it all feels like a research paper. I have lots of new content to write about, but the excitement of the exploration process, the surprise and delight that comes with not knowing where my interest will lead or what will unfold—it’s all gone. With the help of ChatGPT, my “want” has become a “should,” and I usually end up ditching the whole project. We can find a lot of fabulous things on the internet, intelligent and wise things, transformative things, but we can’t find ourselves in there. Our truth, our experience, what interests, delights, and matters to us—what creates meaning, wags our tail, and wants attention in us, none of it can be found through AI. Our voice and whatever magic fairy dust makes us uniquely us can only be accessed by looking inward. It’s only by using our inner GPS that we arrive at the destination of ourselves. The answers might not come as quickly or easily as with Google, but if we’re patient and trust the not knowing, the marinating process; if we trust our own wisdom and keep looking inward, we’re rewarded again and again with the real jewels of our own uniqueness—we get to meet who we really are.