Interdependence Is Not a Crutch: We Were Never Meant to Hold It All Alone
On how cognitive offloading, accessibility, and care are framed as weakness in a culture that worships struggle.
Reflecting on memory, technology, and care: from Thomas Guides to iPhones, from shame to interdependence. On offloading cognitive burdens not as laziness, but as access, liberation, and the quiet grace of maps that speak.
Sunday Musings: The Quiet Grace of Offloading
I have been thinking, as I often do, about memory. Or perhaps more accurately: about where memory now lives.
There is a meme that drifts through social media from time to time: “I wonder what the part of my brain that used to store phone numbers is doing now.” It always makes me smile. Partly because I remember, dimly, the odd satisfaction of knowing a dozen numbers by heart. Partly because I know how anxious I often felt when I couldn't recall one quickly enough, standing in a phone booth or staring blankly at a rotary dial.
And partly because, if I am honest, I don’t miss it.
In those days, though we like to pretend otherwise, people still offloaded information. Rolodexes on office desks. Little address books by the home telephone. Tattered notebooks tucked into handbags. Some people memorised, yes, but most simply managed information with whatever tools they had to hand. The difference now is not that we have abandoned memory; it is that we have woven external memory more fully, more seamlessly, into the flow of daily life.
I think of my iPhone. In its small frame live the cameras, calculators, video recorders, address books, and digital organisers that once each required their own physical form. I remember my youth—the way each of these tools lived separately on desks, in cupboards, tucked into handbags. Film cameras with carefully counted exposures. Calculators with their chunky buttons. Spiral-bound planners covered in stickers and scribbled notes. The camcorder — theirs, not ours — cradled in a padded case that whispered affluence.
Now they are all here. Converged. Accessible. Lightweight. And crucially, in many ways, kinder.
I think of the Thomas Guide.
If you grew up in Southern California before GPS, you likely know it well. A thick spiral-bound atlas of endless map grids, cross-referenced by page and coordinate. Every family had one in the car, every delivery truck had one on the passenger seat. As a child, I was often tasked with reading it whilst my adoptive father drove his delivery routes. “Quick, what’s the next turn? Find me that street with all the muffler shops, by the taco stand where you threw up last year!”
There was a certain pride in learning to read it, I suppose. But there was also panic. The fast flipping of pages, the cross-checking of grids, the pressure of real-time navigation as my father barrelled down unfamiliar streets, his own stress sharp in the air beside me. If I hesitated, if I misread, there were consequences: sharp words, anxious corrections, the dread of getting it wrong.
The Thomas Guide never spoke gently. It never warned me that a turn was coming. It never recalculated when we missed a street. It simply sat there—silent, expectant, full of demands. And of course, it was already outdated the moment it was printed — its grids quietly eroding as roadworks, closures, and new developments reshaped the city faster than the pages could keep up.
I adore modern Maps. The soft voice that warns me of upcoming turns. The way it adjusts, without judgement, if I miss a street. The way it reduces my cognitive load so I can focus on other things: on the road itself, on breathing, on calm. It is not that I am incapable of reading a map. It is that I no longer have to burn precious executive function on something that can be handled more kindly, more gently, by a tool designed for care.
And yet, even as technology offers these mercies, there is an old refrain that persists: We are becoming lazy.
This accusation often comes most fiercely from older generations who, in truth, had their own offloading systems—the Rolodex, the little phone book by the kitchen wall. But they frame those tools as somehow different, more legitimate, more “earned.” They forget, or perhaps never realised, how much scaffolding they themselves relied upon.
Beneath their critique lies something more troubling: the American cult of hyper-individualism. The moralised belief that one should contain the entire apparatus of survival within oneself. That self-reliance is virtue, and any leaning on external supports is weakness.
It is an ethic that frames struggle as character-building and ease as moral decay. And it is, at its heart, profoundly ableist.
For many of us—especially those of us who are neurodivergent—these technologies are not indulgences. They are access. They are care. They are liberation.
I am a gestalt language processor. I am autistic. My mind builds understanding relationally, associatively, sometimes non-linearly. My working memory is a slippery, unreliable thing. The demand to hold arbitrary strings of digits, to track multi-step spatial coordinates whilst managing sensory input and social pressure—this is not a neutral task. It is a site of constant, exhausting labour. I hate to drive. But in Los Angeles, where public transit is patchwork at best and often absent where one most needs it, driving becomes compulsory. And so the navigation, the coordination, the management of it all, falls heavily on my already taxed cognitive systems.
To offload some of that labour onto tools is not laziness. It is wisdom. It is adaptive. It is survival.
Yet the narrative persists that one should be able to read a physical map in the dark, to navigate without aid, to store every phone number, every address, every appointment unaided. That to build systems of mutual aid, of technological support, of shared scaffolding is somehow suspect.
I sometimes think of how much of this stems from a rejection of care itself.
Care requires interdependence. It acknowledges that we do not, and cannot, hold everything alone. That we exist in webs of support, in relationships of mutual holding. That sometimes it is enough to simply breathe, and let the system carry a piece of the weight.
But hyper-individualism rejects this. It casts dependence as failure. It lionises the isolated hero—self-made, self-sufficient, unneeding. Even as, quietly, most lives do not actually function this way.
It is not lost on me that what is called “convenience” when used by the able-bodied majority becomes “accommodation” when used by disabled people—and that the latter is often framed as suspect, as coddling.
When a neurotypical person uses Maps, it is simply efficient. When I rely on it, it is framed as a crutch. When they use reminders, digital calendars, AI transcription, it is productivity. When I use them, it is dependency.
The double standard is glaring.
And yet, I would not wish to return to the old way.
I sometimes hear older people lament that “young people these days don't know how to memorise phone numbers.” I hear echoes of my childhood—of that tense cab of the delivery truck, the Thomas Guide flapping in my lap, my father growing frustrated as I scrambled to find the right page. His cursing in sharp Spanglish filled the air — as if I, his light-skinned gringo adoptee, wouldn’t understand what he was saying. I remember the pressure, the shame of not knowing fast enough.
I don’t romanticise it.
Instead, I think of how grateful I am that today, I can let Maps speak to me gently. That I can let my phone remember the numbers. That I can reserve my cognitive resources for what matters more to me: for care, for connection, for creativity, for presence.
The part of my brain that once held those phone numbers? I suspect it is not idle. It has found better things to hold.
It holds stories now. Threads of meaning. Gestalts of understanding that serve not just me, but my students, my friends, my kin. It holds the seeds of poetry. The Marxist canon. The memory of trees. The layered knowing of how systems intersect, of how power operates, of how care can be reclaimed.
And perhaps that is the quiet grace of offloading: not an abandonment of capacity, but a redistribution. A releasing of burdens that never needed to be held alone.
I choose interdependence. I choose care. I choose maps that speak.