For a good part of my life, I was an athlete. Or at least I’ll call myself one. I wasn’t going pro, but I played soccer for years and showed up enough that my body mostly did what I asked of it.
Then my focus shifted. Not because something went wrong, but because I found work I genuinely loved. Building things. Creating things. Solving problems that kept me leaning into a screen for hours without noticing the time. That work just happened to live at a desk.
I didn’t realize what that quiet trade had cost me until I started training with Jason Witt at Fit House KC. Within a few sessions, he could tell me exactly which muscles I had stopped using. Not from an injury. Just from years of sitting still.
Those muscles didn’t fade because something happened to them. They faded because I stopped asking anything of them.
That is what atrophy actually is. It isn’t damage. It’s the absence of demand.
I’ve been thinking about that word a lot lately, because it’s the one everyone reaches for when they talk about AI. The worry goes like this: if you let AI write for you, you’ll forget how to write. If you let it analyze for you, you’ll lose the ability to think. We’re watching a whole generation outsource the skills our culture has prized for decades, and the fear is that those skills will quietly waste away.
That fear isn’t wrong. It’s just aimed at the wrong question.
We’ve done this before
It reminds me of the movie Hidden Figures. It’s a few years old now, but if you haven’t seen it, it’s worth the watch. It tells the story of the women whose calculations helped put NASA astronauts into orbit. Before the agency trusted electronic computers, rooms full of brilliant people did that math by hand. They were extraordinary at it. Then the machine arrived, and the work they had spent careers mastering became something a computer did in seconds.
You could tell that story as a loss. A hard-won skill, devalued overnight.
But that’s not what actually happened. The people who thrived weren’t the ones who fought to do arithmetic faster. Some of them learned to run the new machine instead of competing with it. They moved up a level, to the problems the computer couldn’t frame on its own. The math didn’t stop mattering. The work just moved.
That’s the part we keep missing in the AI conversation. We’re so focused on what’s atrophying that we don’t notice the muscle that’s being asked to grow.
The muscle you’re actually building
Here’s what my week increasingly looks like. I’m not doing the task. I’m explaining the task.
I’m taking something that lives as intuition in my head, what I want, how it should feel, what the other person should experience, and putting it into words clear enough that something else can execute it. AI is brilliant and capable, but it doesn’t know the ins and outs of my world. So I have to train it, the way you’d train a sharp intern who showed up on day one knowing everything except what actually matters here.
Most people never had to build that muscle. You can be excellent at your craft and never once have had to articulate, step by step, what makes your judgment good.
That’s the skill the next decade rewards. Delegation. Training. The ability to create clarity out of a mess of instinct. These were always valuable, but they lived at the edges of most jobs. AI is dragging them to the center.
So the work isn’t going away. It’s changing shape. And the muscles that got us here, raw output and doing it all ourselves and holding the whole thing in our own two hands, are not the same muscles that get us there.
The honest risk
I don’t want to pretend there’s no danger in this.
There is a real gap in the middle of any transition, where the old muscle fades faster than the new one forms. That’s the uncomfortable place. And there’s a quieter risk underneath it. If you lean on something long enough, you should be honest about what happens the day it isn’t there. If you’ve never lifted the weight, you can’t will yourself strong in the moment you suddenly need to be.
I don’t have that fully figured out. I’m living in the same transition as everyone reading this.
But I’ve stopped asking whether AI is making us weaker. That question assumes the only muscle worth measuring is the one we’re setting down.
The better question is the one I keep sitting with. If the work is moving, am I moving with it? Am I still pouring everything into the things that got me here, or am I building the ones that will carry me forward?
What got us here isn’t going to get us there. It never has.