AI, SSRIs and GLP-1s: Behavioral and Cultural Considerations Critical for Sustainability, Health and Happiness

Years ago, at a psychedelic-assisted therapy training in the forests of Northern California, a teacher made the astute personal observation that Western culture values “speed, certainty and status”.

When I hear things like this, I often consider the behaviors involved in aligning to these cultural values. I also tend to follow the road back to its root.

Humans are generally programmed to behave according to:

• what gets us what we want (or think we want)
• in the shortest amount of time
• with the least amount of effort and resources needed

In looking back only a few years, its clear that we are still, as a society, battling a basic pattern in human behavior: blindly following the path of least resistance, driven by a sense of scarcity or urgency.

What is not inherent to our original evolutionary learning is what is most concerning today— that the monetary- and ego-driven desires of a few are globally driving decisions for the many, without consent or full understanding of process, alternatives, or possible long-term outcomes.

If we look back over the last half century, a clear pattern emerges:

1. A promising new thing arrives.
2. We trust the marketing and embrace it without question, because we want to believe that our cheap, easy, andhealthy solution has finally arrived.
3. We overuse it for everything as marketing and late stage capitalism take hold.
4. We later realize we overused it for everything.

Then, instead of pausing, listening more intently to the science, and returning to the wisdom that came long before the tech booms and money-making ventures, we continue our misuse.

We can’t help ourselves. The new thing quickly becomes normalized; we habituate to its convenience and give up on finding another way.

The substance, the program, or the gadget has so threaded itself into our increasingly comfortable and convenient existence that we cling to it at our own peril rather than admit there’s a better way.

The Chemical Imbalance Theory

In the 1980s and 90s, psychiatry was trying to solve a big problem: depression was complicated, slow to treat, and hard to measure. Then came an appealing explanation— a chemical imbalance in the brain must be responsible. Pharma rushed to the rescue, creating a world of lever-pulling and re-dosing that still presides over psychiatry today. At the last conference I attended, a well-known psychiatrist stood on stage, sighed, and admitted, “We are still really just guessing.”

It has become clear that what goes without mention in medical school is that the chemical imbalance theory was never actually proven. It was a working hypothesis that made intuitive sense and helped us consider the brain, but the neuroscience never quite shook out in the way psychiatry would have liked it to.

That didn’t stop the medical field from building an entire framework around it.

SSRIs were dubbed the answer and were designed with a specific purpose: stabilize patients for three to six months while in therapy, thus providing the emotional stability required to do the psychological work that sustainably produces change. The medication was the bridge. The therapy was the destination.

But we kept the bridge, and abandoned the destination.

Millions of people stayed on SSRIs for years—sometimes decades—without the therapy that was supposed to happen in tandem. They weren’t chemically addicted to the medication, but they’d developed something just as durable: a psychological dependence on the idea that their problem was chemical and therefore didn’t require their participation to solve.

The system worked brilliantly, if the goal was treating symptoms and getting through the day. It worked terribly if the goal was generating lasting change. Most people didn’t notice the difference until years later, when they realized they had outsourced the emotional resilience and deeper exploration they could have been learning on all along. 

They were functional— able to go to work, take care of the basics in life, and likely have friendships and relationships.

But the sadness, grief, anxiety, and heaviness eventually returned, side effects took hold, and when life threw challenges— as it does— many individuals realized they were no closer to handling them with strength and equanimity than they were a decade earlier.

The opportunity for strengthening themselves by going through instead of around was missed. This lack of psychoeducation, in my opinion, is one of the most harmful mistakes made by the pharmaceutical and psychiatric fields.

Something can be medically safe and psychologically risky at the same time. A tool can solve the immediate problem while simultaneously preventing us from developing the skills we actually need long-term.

As a result, we become dependent.

GLP-1s Continue the Pattern

GLP-1s came into play in 2005 for individuals with diabetes and moved into the weight loss market in 2021. Again, what began as helpful for individuals under medical care became an environment ripe for misuse and overuse. Now, in many cases including celebrity overculture, GLP-1s are a continued example of the behavioral pattern that arrives alongside the newest quick and easy answer.

We now have a generation of people willing to take GLP-1s indefinitely—not for metabolic reset, not as a bridge to behavioral change, but as a lifestyle hack to losing weight.

In a growing number of cases, their use is not medicine or pharmacology. It is a simple and somewhat predictable continuation of the same quick-and-easy (and lucrative, for some) approach, with marketing that takes advantage of an un-evolved human condition, and with a host of willing influencers and “wellness experts”.

Modern medicine is once again failing to ask the hard questions before going to market with an understudied product:

- Can we trust people to use them responsibly?

• Can lawmakers and medical professionals use the science of human behavior (the same science used to addict us to phones) to build protective factors into the prescribing and use of these substances, so people are protected from the innate human tendencies we can’t simply override?
• Will pharmaceutical companies actually invest in research that proves they should be used short-term, or will they invest in research that justifies indefinite use?
• Do we know the long-term effects of having an entire generation on sustained appetite suppressants? What are the genetic effects?
• What effects will undesired results, like reported muscle loss, have on longevity?

Weakening Is Not Wellness

Similar to my point on the overuse or misuse of SSRIs potentially weakening our ability to build resilience and tolerate discomfort, thus rendering us dependent upon them, GLP-1s can also keep us coming back for more short-term, but maybe not long-term, benefits.

Alongside recurrent weight gain once regular dosing has stopped, GLP-1 use is also shown to reduce muscle mass, a critical factor in longevity and mortality. Research suggests that muscle loss while taking a GLP-1 is equivalent to any calorie-restricted diet or bariatric surgery, but this has not been my personal experience.

This summer, I took a GLP-1 for a sugar addiction. No matter how hard I tried, I could not manage to reduce my intake and, as a result, I experienced brain fog and mood effects to the point of concern. My recent Substack article shares my personal story, successes and concerns, but in the matter of muscle loss, it shook me to my core to attend a simple yoga class, my normally athletic legs struggling through sun salutations as never before.

According to research at the National Institute of Health, muscle mass and strength is an independent and important predictive factor for lower all-cause mortality and longer lifespan. If adequate muscle is healthy, less muscle is unhealthy. If GLP-1s as they currently stand are overused or misused, it may absolutely contribute to a physical weakening of the body.

Same pattern. Same culture. Same desperate reach for the shortcut, and the dollars.

AI for the Trifecta

In November of 2022, artificial intelligence arrived on the scene with the publicly available ChatGPT, delivering a compelling promise alongside its ease of use and quick results: it will make us more creative, more productive, less stressed.

Among AI’s most fervent champions, Open AI CEO and poster boy for tech-bro psychosis, Sam Altman, states time and time again that this technology will enhance human potential, his words rippling through the mouths of rabid maxxers and fellow techies. They wanted to believe the hype. We all did.

We quickly ate up the best case scenario— that we would be able to use this technology to our benefit, with absolutely no downside.

Then, we became acutely aware of the downsides.

The mind tends to over focus on, remember, and reinforce what makes it feel right and safe, then promptly offloads any information that contradicts it.

Stated by Altman (paraphrased): “AI helps us to do the things no one wants to do.”

Also stated by Altman: “AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world.”

Both things can be true. The question is not which statement is true, but which statement will drive our behavior.

The current illusory marketing on AI is that we won’t fall behind, we will get ahead. We will finally get relief from having to think so hard about everything.

But to more critical, more independent and more logical thinkers, this claim— that thinking less makes us more creative and is cognitively advantageous— will immediately read as a mental weakening, not strengthening.

Creativity IS cognitive load.

It’s the mental friction between what you want to make and the challenge of making it. It’s the struggle of sitting with an unsolved problem in white space and solace until a solution appears. Research consistently shows that this kind of environment is where creative thinking actually develops, and that challenging the brain maintains our cognitive skills as we age.

In other words, something that reduces cognitive load should logically reduce creativity, not enhance it. But that contradiction got lost in the excitement.

The technology is extremely useful—for certain things. Analyzing data sets, generating routine code, optimizing content. These are real, legitimate applications. But we didn’t stop there, because we just couldn’t help ourselves, even when we knew better.

We started using AI for everything. For writing, because writing is hard. For communicating, because finding our own words feels uncomfortable. For creative work, because the struggle is supposed to be the point, but nobody knows how to effectively tolerate struggle anymore.

Neuroscience shows that challenging the brain protects against cognitive decline as we age. Thinking is a neuroprotective factor.

When my father received his dementia diagnosis, the first thing his doctors suggested was to use his brain more. They explained that continuing to challenge his mind and keep the act of thinking relevant would be beneficial. Even though the process could not be stopped, it could be slowed. And I truly believe that his cognitive decline would have started years earlier if he wasn’t the student who read every book in his college and law school library, or if he didn’t love our typical four-hour conversations at the dinner table— a decidedly Italian thing.

His mind was something with which he identified strongly, and this potentially kept his cognitive decline at bay until his early 80s.

There’s also something worth acknowledging on the environmental side. AI systems consume enormous amounts of electricity and water. They don’t have to, but it’s — you guessed it— the cheapest and easiest way.

A single query to a large language model uses more water than a typical person drinks in a day. Circling back to the original plot, these days, we’re not ignorant of this. We now understand the cost, we just find the convenience appealing enough to rationalize our use so we can escape the discomfort of finding a better (and, ironically, more creative) way.

Akin to the SSRI boom, we outsourced the inner, very human-centered work we are capable of doing ourselves — without the environmental impact on water, air, nature, animals and communities— to the next new thing.

And this time we didn’t just outsource to big pharma trying to make a buck or to psychiatrists who didn’t get the whole picture, we outsourced to a handful of men who are, in their honest belief, racing toward the potential finish line of humanity, and who hold the unhinged ideology of AI Successionism — that AI super-intelligence is a “worthy successor” to humans, and that it is simply digital evolution taking place.

These views are their own, which is their right. What is currently sounding global alarm bells is that they are building these technologies biased by their own ideologies, without guardrails or foresight, and at the expense of the other 8 billion humans who do not hold these beliefs.

“The only thing we learn from history, is that we learn nothing from history.”

This quote by German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is frequently misrepresented— what he allegedly meant was that history is too unique and complicated to use for future thinking, and that the past only teaches very broad ideas.

The real quote is, “But what experience and history teach is this, - that peoples and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”

I disagree. Even as a board certified behavior analyst who believes that each situation and person is unique, and who centers her clinical practice around nuance, I disagree. There is complexity and detail, and there are patterns. Both things can be true.

The Pattern Nobody Wants to Acknowledge

Every time something legitimately useful comes along, we ask the same question: “How do we use this everywhere?” instead of “Where is this safely, sustainably and effectively useful?”

Excitement and speeding to market takes hold before proper evaluation. Speed, status and certainty (or the illusion of it) once again point to our dominant Western values.

The SSRI is useful when someone needs immediate stabilization before they can think clearly, make safe choices and attend therapy sessions. AI is useful for very specific tasks where human creativity isn’t the point, though I would argue that it is still a net negative in many cases. GLP-1s are useful for people with genuine metabolic disease who need a tool to reset their relationship with food, or for short term support while the individual can get their footing and repattern their behavior.

But usefulness at the margins doesn’t justify use at the center of everything.

The problem isn’t SSRIs, AI, or GLP-1s, it’s our conditioning, and our failure to evolve as quickly as modern life.

Its our conditioned unwillingness to tolerate discomfort, cognitive friction, or the slow, annoying work of sustainable change. Its our addiction to outsourcing and effectiveness, and in our conditioned scarcity mindset, demonstrated in our terror of “falling behind”—though behind what is never quite specified.

So we reach for whatever is new, telling ourselves we’re being efficient, smart. We let ourselves believe the research will eventually prove this was the right call, and we’re just early adopters of the inevitable.

But in reality, we’re skipping the experience that makes us human. The work of thinking, of struggling, of changing.

The conscious endeavors that build resilience, independent thinking, and the kind of sustainable, enjoyable lifestyle built on something more solid than the business model of the entitled, empathy-averse, robot-obsessed, over-compensatory, tech bro.

The addiction isn’t always to the substance. It’s to the story we allow ourselves to be sold about why we need it. We’re addicted to the idea that there’s a shortcut, that challenging ourselves is something we should avoid rather than cultivate, that outsourcing is efficiency and progress.

That’s the water we swim in, and its the water that billions of marketing dollars are poured into.

Until we acknowledge, remedy and sustainably divert ourselves from this pattern, we’re going to keep watching this movie. Different characters, different props, same predictable, unsatisfying ending.

Anyone who sells you the story that the agency to think, create, eat well, emote, exercise or seek love and understanding from your community is something to be outsourced, is a person who stands to profit from the solution they are selling you instead.

Some things are worth cultivating, and they’re the things no one can take from you.

Your own cognitive development. Your own psychological resilience. Your own creative capacity. The slow process of understanding yourself from the inside, instead of adopting the personality given to you through your algorithm and your Amazon, Shein, or other horribly tragic product “haul” into which you’re currently dissolving.

But that’s the rub of Returning to Human— for most, speed is still more attractive than slowness, false certainty still feels safer than the curiosity and humility of not knowing, and there will always be another promising shortcut waiting.

Being human is not designed to be easy, it’s designed to be experienced.

We are not in this life to avoid discomfort, but to engage with it. To learn to contend with life, because life will contend with us. It’s a dance, a process, that is becoming more and more diluted. But I believe in it immensely.

The question is whether we’ll think before we reach for the next new thing, and whether those who approve substances and make laws and create technology will ever have the rebellious audacity to design and build from a magnanimous place.

It’s the harder way, and I genuinely don’t know if our culture has the discipline to choose the harder path.

I hope it does.

Editor’s Note: This essay was originally published by Gianna Biscontini over on Substack. Be sure to like, share, and subscribe today!