Both sharp enough that people argued over which of them was sharper — which is its own kind of compliment, and the only detail that matters here, because it means nothing that happens next can be explained by talent.

You already know two versions of this story. You’ve probably lived both sides of it in the same week.

Last month, one of them read something that raised a real objection in their head — the kind that needs another person to push on it before you know if it holds. There was no one nearby who wanted to hear it, and no time carved out to work it through. So they typed the gist into an AI, took the smoothed-over answer it handed back, and moved on with their day. Ninety seconds. Felt like thinking.

The other had the same kind of itch that same week, and brought it to a few people who were going to take it apart whether they liked it or not. By the time that conversation ended, the objection had turned into something none of them would have reached alone.

If you don’t recognize any version of yourself in either of those two people, this letter isn’t for you — close the tab, no hard feelings. If you do, keep reading, because the gap between them is the whole subject of this letter.

Call it luck if you want. Ten years gives you a hundred forks — job, money, who you married, what city you landed in. But ask either one of them when they last sat with a hard thought for longer than it took to look up the easy version of the answer, and you’ll find the one difference that actually explains the other ten.

That’s the part worth sitting with. Cognitive laziness isn’t a failing you’d catch yourself doing. It’s the small, reasonable choice of the easier option, made often enough that the harder option quietly stops being available to you at all — not because you decided against it, but because the reach for it finally went slack.

This was already underway before any chatbot existed. In 2024 the NAEP found 32% of US twelfth graders scored below Basic in reading — the largest share ever recorded, with the average score ten points lower than in 1992. NAEP, 2024 ↗ Among adults, the federal PIAAC survey found the share reading at the lowest literacy level rose from 19% in 2017 to 28% in 2023 — more than one adult in four. NCES, PIAAC 2023 ↗ A tracked sample of 394,378 US adults from 2006 to 2018 showed several measured cognitive ability scores declining over that span — what researchers describe as a reverse of the Flynn effect, the long rise in measured intelligence across the 20th century, now running the other way. Dworak, Revelle & Condon, Intelligence, 2023 ↗ And across 236,270 tracked Americans, the share who read for pleasure on a given day fell from 28% in 2004 to 16% in 2023. iScience, 2025 ↗

No single number here proves that joining anything will sharpen you, and these four studies measure different populations in different ways — a reading test, a literacy survey, a leisure-time habit, a cognitive-ability tracking study. Put them side by side and they don’t add up to a lab result. They add up to a direction: the habit of sitting with something difficult, alone, until it yields, is going out of use at the exact moment it got easiest to avoid.

Picture — not a prediction, just a plausible place this road ends if the direction holds — the last human left on an abandoned, overgrown Earth in that one cartoon everybody’s seen: reclined in a hovering chair, a screen inches from his face, who has to be taught, like a toddler, how to stand up and walk on his own legs again. Nobody put him there. He drifted there, one convenience at a time, the same way everyone in that story did.

That sentence isn’t a slogan. It’s a conclusion, and here it is:

Not because anyone is plotting it in a room somewhere. Because arithmetic doesn’t need a plotter. A population that has quietly stopped reaching for anything difficult doesn’t need to be controlled by force. It has already stopped reaching.

No one out-thinks an entire culture built for ease alone, indefinitely, through willpower. That was never going to be a fair fight for one person to win solo. What’s actually worked, for longer than any of this has existed, is older and simpler: a mind sharpens in live contact with other minds that are allowed to disagree with it. Take that contact away and even a strong mind goes soft — not from weakness, from disuse, the same way any muscle does.

You’ve probably already tried the obvious substitutes and found them wanting: a book club that fizzled by the third meeting, a group chat that turned into a dozen unread messages a day, a long, honest post into a feed that scrolled past it in nine seconds. None of those were stupid things to try. They just weren’t built to hold what you actually wanted to say.

We’re calling the founding group The Circle, and we’re honest that it’s founding: we’re still gathering the first members, and the exact dates aren’t locked yet. That’s not a gap we’re hiding — it’s the actual offer. You’d be one of the first people in the room, helping set what it becomes, not arriving at something already finished. At launch: two live 90-minute conversation salons a month, one guest Q&A with a working practitioner, a monthly project-circle check-in for the thing you’re actually building, a recordings archive, and a members-only discussion space to keep it going between gatherings.

The gap between the two people at the start of this letter didn’t open in one dramatic year. It opened one convenience at a time, the same way it opens for everyone, including you, including now. The room you pick for your next unfinished thought is how you decide which side of that gap you’re on — not ten years from now, this week.

While checkout is being set up, the Join button opens an email to Evie. Say whether you prefer monthly or annual membership, and ask about launch timing before joining.

Yours in curiosity,
Expand Your Intelligence

P.S. Pick a Tuesday, any Tuesday, ten years out, and decide now which of the two people from this letter you’d rather be sitting as. Cancel anytime if The Circle turns out not to be how you get there — but you’ll only know by actually sitting in the room, the same way you’d only know if the harder thought held by actually picking it up.