I hate hearing “you haven’t changed at all.”

People often treat it like a compliment, suggesting that remaining the same is something to be proud of. They imply that who I was at 18 or 25 still serves as my blueprint today.

I actually hear them saying, "You didn’t grow. You didn’t update. You stayed in the same box".

There’s a metaphor from my grad school CAE course I keep returning to: the stress–strain curve. Apply force to a material, and it deforms. In the elastic region, it bends and returns to its original shape. Push past the yield point, and you enter the plastic zone: permanent deformation. No bounce back. The shape locks in.

Most minds start elastic. You encounter a new idea, wrestle with it, bend, adjust. Maybe grow stronger.

Then, somewhere, many people cross the yield point. They become plastic. Worldview hardens. Identity update scripts stop running. The beliefs at 45 are carbon copies of beliefs at 35, not because they survived rigorous testing, but because testing stopped.

The dangerous part? They don’t notice. Plastic deformation doesn’t feel like breaking. It feels like finally knowing who you are.

We grow up with scripts. How to be a good child. How to succeed. What a respectable adult looks like. Helpful at first: structure provides a good starting point.

But scripts stop being guidelines and become unquestioned law.

Your job defines you. Your religion defines you. Money, politics, family role: locked in early. Once hardened, you stop asking if they fit. You assume permanence.

Script becomes identity. Identity becomes plastic.

Plasticity. Nowhere more obvious than in politics and religion.

At 20, you argue. Doubt. Change your mind. Still elastic. By 40, many people repeat positions absorbed a decade ago. Zero curiosity. Zero updates. Hardened certainty.

The pattern isn’t about being wrong. It’s about stopping the verification process. You see policies play out. Watch institutions behave. Meet people who complicate your assumptions. However, instead of integrating new evidence, you file it under 'confirming' or 'dismissing' based on its fit with the hardened model.

The irony is brutal: politics and religion are exactly where lived experience should force model updates. For most people whom I've seen, these are the first places to go plastic.

Every year, I run through Steph Ango’s 40 Questions to Ask Yourself Every Year
(https://stephango.com/40-questions).

Personal elasticity check.

Where did I actually change? What beliefs evolved? What habits dropped? What priorities shifted?

If my answers look copy-pasted from last year, that’s a red flag. Plasticity is creeping in.

The questions force uncomfortable truths. Make me articulate what I believe, then test whether I live that way. A forcing function for staying elastic.

Not change for change’s sake. Proof that my curve can still bend.

I am sure we can come up with our own set of questions, but this was a good starting point for me, and I have appended my own questions to this list over time.

Google pushed us from deep reading to skimming snippets. We stopped wrestling with ideas, started collecting answers.

LLMs go further. They don’t fetch answers, they generate them, perfectly tuned to what we want to hear. Meet us exactly where we are.

That’s a trap.

When you consume only AI-generated answers, you outsource the elastic part: struggling with contradictions, building mental models, and integrating conflicting evidence.
You keep the plastic part: “OK, that’s the answer. Moving on.”

The danger isn’t that LLMs make us dumber. They make plasticity feel like efficiency. You think you’re learning faster. You’re actually hardening faster.

Depends entirely on usage.

Misused AI accelerates plasticity.
Fewer new skills built from scratch.
Weaker memory.

You stop building understanding because the AI already handed you one, pre-packaged.

Used well, they stretch your elastic region.

Ask the LLM to critique your reasoning. Generate counter-arguments to your fixed beliefs. Use it as a thought partner, not a ghostwriter. Crucially: do the first pass of hard things yourself. Writing, planning, problem-solving. Then bring AI in to stress-test your thinking. If you can’t articulate your position before prompting, you’re outsourcing cognition.

//the AI should make you bend, not let you harden.

Here’s what I’m trying:

Do the hard work first, then use AI as a critic.
Don’t let it think for you. Let it challenge the thinking you’ve done.

Read uncompressed sources.
Full books. Long essays. Technical docs. Not summaries or bullet points. Compression is lossy, and the losses compound when you never see what got compressed out.

Keep a personal change log.
Inspired by the 40 Questions. Track beliefs updated, skills added, habits dropped. An empty log means hardening. If you can’t name 2-3 substantial shifts in the past year, you’re probably becoming more plastic.

Stress-test your identity.
Do things your old self swore “aren’t you.” See what breaks, what bends, what grows. That’s where the elastic region lives. The discomfort is the point. It’s proof of deformation without yield.

Aging is inevitable. Becoming plastic isn’t.

In a world of strong identities, rigid politics, and AI that’s perfectly willing to reinforce whatever shape you’re already in, the real flex isn’t “I’ve always been the same.”

It's the opposite.