The Borrowed Tongue

I have started to notice something strange when I speak.  

I have started to catch myself using a lot of generic words, and sometimes I am no longer sure if the thought was ever mine to begin with.

This is not a comfortable thing to admit, especially for someone who makes a living with words.

But it is the truth, and I think it is happening to more of us than we want to say out loud.

We are losing the ability to think in our own voice. Not because we have become stupid. But because we have become efficient. 

We collect. We scroll. We assemble. A line from a tweet here. A framing from a caption there. An opinion that felt exactly right because someone else had already done the hard work of forming it. 

And we move on, fluent and fast, never quite stopping long enough to ask, 'But what do I actually think?'

I don't think social media created this problem, but it perfected the conditions for it. The architecture rewards familiarity. What spreads is what already sounds like what spread before. 

Check it out yourself

So over time, the language normalises the same emotional hooks, the same sentence rhythms, the same gestures toward depth without the actual descent. You can even guess people's thoughts before they finish them. And they do not notice, because neither can they.

And now AI sits inside this same loop. I say this knowing the irony that this very essay could be assembled, predicted, and pattern-matched. That the style I am writing in right now has its own grooves worn into it by thousands of similar essays making similar arguments. 

I am not exempt from what I am describing. That is one reason, amongst many reasons, why it unsettles me.

The deeper problem is not even noise. It is the quiet disappearance of solitude, because real thinking requires time you cannot monetise. It requires the discomfort of sitting with a half-formed idea and not reaching for your phone. It requires being wrong privately before you are right publicly.

That process is slow, and it looks, from the outside, like nothing is happening. So fewer people are doing it. And the ones who are not doing it cannot always tell.

When you stop sitting alone with your thoughts—really alone, without input—they never develop their own weight. 

They stay reactive. They stay dependent on the next thing trending to give them direction.

I am not sounding an alarm from outside this. I am writing this from inside it, having caught myself, again, borrowing.

Think about the last genuinely surprising conversation you had. One where someone said something that stopped you. Not because it was loud or provocative, but because it came from somewhere you could not immediately locate. A thought with a particular shape to it. Something that felt owned.

How long ago was that?

Because what I notice more and more is that conversations have started to feel like exchanges of inventory. We bring what we have collected; we recognise each other's references; we nod. 

There is warmth in it. There is even the feeling of connection. But underneath it, something is missing – the friction that only comes when two people are actually thinking, in real time, in front of each other. 

That friction is not comfortable. But it is where understanding actually lives.

And this matters beyond conversation. 

Because people who have stopped thinking in their own voices do not just lose originality, they lose the capacity to resist borrowed thoughts. 

Borrowed thought is, by nature, already approved. It has already passed through the filter of what is acceptable, familiar, and popular. It does not threaten anything. It does not build anything either. 

It simply circulates; warm, weightless, and entirely safe.

And that is the part that troubles me most. Not the noise. Not even the sameness. But the safety of it. How comfortable it has become to think in other people's containers.

Well, what I know is this: the antidote is not digital detox or nostalgia for some purer era. It is the deliberate, inconvenient practice of thinking something all the way through before you say it; even when no one is watching, even when it is slow, even when the half-formed version would have performed better.

Language without that process is just a movement of sound. Sound travelling from one mouth to another, wearing the semblance of meaning.

Author: Daniel Okereke