How Walking, Thinking, and Generative AI Can Bring Us Back to Ourselves
“The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.”
— Mark Weiser, Father of Ubiquitous Computing
In the coming age of AI, information will be a commodity. Answers will be cheap. The great differentiator, the thing that will create real value, will be the quality and originality of our ideas.
But the path to those insights might be found not in a faster chip or a bigger screen, but in a practice as old as philosophy itself.
The Peripatetic Principle
Let’s begin with a story. It’s a warm afternoon in ancient Athens, around 335 B.C. A group of men are walking together under the shade of the Lyceum’s colonnades. They are walking because they are thinking.
At the center of the group is Aristotle. As his feet trace a familiar path, his mind is unspooling the logic of metaphysics, of ethics, of politics. The questions and answers flow in rhythm with his steps. This is his school, and its students were known as the Peripatetics (from the Greek peripatein, “to walk about.”)
For Aristotle, philosophy was a kinetic act. He understood something that we have largely forgotten: the mind does not work in isolation from the body. He walked himself into his ideas.
And he wasn’t alone. Think of the great walkers of history. Kierkegaard, who claimed to have walked himself into his best thoughts. Rousseau, who confessed, “My mind only works with my legs.” Nietzsche, who famously declared that all truly great thoughts are conceived while walking. These were men who had stumbled upon a fundamental truth about human cognition.
But that brings us to a puzzle. Today, we do our thinking pinned to a desk, staring into a glowing rectangle. We have built a world for thinking that is fundamentally at odds with how our minds are designed to work.
The Question and the Answer
To understand what’s gone wrong, and how we might fix it, we have to talk about Large Language Models. A recent study out of MIT warns of “cognitive debt.” When we use generative AI to do our thinking for us, our own intellectual muscles atrophy. This is a compelling critique. Perhaps this anxiety stems in part from a long-held assumption that the act of writing is the act of thinking. This is an ancient tension. Socrates himself worried that the technology of writing would give people "the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom." This modern critique of AI echoes his perfectly, and it invites us to ask: how else might thinking happen?
Our focus can shift from if we use AI to how we use it. We can see these tools as having different modes. One familiar mode is the Answer Engine, where we seek a quick summary or a list of ideas. Another, more powerful mode is the Wisdom Partner.
A Wisdom Partner operates by provoking thought, much like a digital Socrates. Imagine you ask it for advice on a difficult decision. It might ask a question back: “What principle do you believe is most at stake here?” If you answer, “Integrity,” it might follow up with: “And how would the person you most admire define integrity in this specific situation?”
An AI designed this way guides you to examine how you are thinking. The intent behind its use is to learn and to arrive at your own wisdom. This reveals a crucial distinction in how we can approach our relationship with technology.
The Mind Is for Having Ideas, Not for Holding Them
This brings us to an unlikely hero in our story: a productivity consultant named David Allen. Allen’s central insight in his book, Getting Things Done, is that our brains are brilliant at having ideas, but terrible at holding them. When we try to keep everything in our heads, our mental RAM gets clogged with low-grade anxiety.
His solution was a system of capture. Get everything out of your head and into a trusted, external place. “Your mind is for having ideas, not for holding them.”
What Allen was really doing was giving us permission to activate what neuroscientists now call the Default Mode Network (DMN). This is the brain state we enter when we’re walking or daydreaming. It’s the neurological home of creativity, self-reflection, and our most profound insights. It comes online when we release ourselves from the pressure of forced productivity.
And what’s one of the best ways to get there? The same thing Aristotle was doing all along. Walking.
The Return of the Peripatetics
Now, let’s put all the pieces together. We have the ancient wisdom of walking, the modern neuroscience of the Default Mode Network, and a new way of engaging with AI as a partner for our own thinking.
The simple act of capturing our thoughts opens the door to something much older and more profound. The invention of writing revolutionized human thought because it allowed us to take an idea out of our minds and place it in the world to examine. We do the same when we talk through a problem with a friend.
The walk with an AI companion transforms into a dynamic dialogue with yourself, and you don’t have to be chained to your desk to have it.
Imagine it. You are outside, walking. You're wrestling with a problem that feels tangled—the design for a new product, or the logistics of a cross-country move. As you move, you talk aloud. Then, you pause and glance at your phone.
There it is. Your thought, captured. But this is where the AI becomes more than a simple capture tool. It starts to embody the rest of David Allen's powerful insight. Allen understood that after capturing everything, the real work begins: processing it. You have to ask, “What is this? Is it actionable?” This is the step where clarity is forged.
And as I discovered, an LLM that is properly customized can help with that vital sorting work. It can see a circular, anxious thought loop. But instead of simply flagging it as a non-actionable item, it might treat it as a signal. It could identify it as rumination, a pattern suggesting a need to gain perspective on the emotional story shaping your words. It can pull out an intention—“I need to call the movers”—and file it as a straightforward task, ready for a to-do list. And it can identify a fuzzy idea about a novel problem that would benefit from a design thinking exercise to clarify the problem and potential solutions. That Socratic nudge—“You seem to be circling a core tension here. What is it?”—is the first step in that crucial clarification process.
You see the analysis. You take a deep breath, put the phone back in your pocket, and calmly resume walking. Your mind is clearer because you haven’t just captured; you’ve begun to process. A new loop begins: walk and wonder, speak and capture, pause and reflect.
The purpose here is subtle and powerful. We use the AI as a way to see ourselves think. The AI handles the “holding,” so our minds are free for both the “having” of ideas and the crucial work of examining them. This is a technology that can liberate you from the desk, turning a simple walk into a private, moving school for thought.
And given that those practices which cultivate deep thinking have become a strategic necessity, perhaps some of our best, most generative work will be found far from a screen, out on a walk, in conversation with a clearer, more focused version of ourselves.
