I think the „my brain isn’t the same anymore“ sensation is pretty universal.
Between addictive online media in our personal lives and AI at work, I think we’ve made mental effort largely optional.
That must be a horrible thing.
One of my favorite theories is the physical activity transition.
In my grandparents‘ generation, physical movement became more optional as work shifted from manual labor to knowledge work or operating machines and transportation became motorized.
Exercise was an ambient byproduct of daily life. Then it disappeared (exercise as a hobby was viewed as extremely weird, runners used to be arrested!) and a few decades later heart disease, diabetes, and so on became deadly epidemics.
We now know exercise is not optional for health. And we’ve reintroduced it via gyms, clubs, etc.
But that took decades. And I believe we’re now in the Mental Activity Transition.
We’ve stripped away ambient mental effort so we practice it much less.
I don’t know what the decades-long consequences of that may be, but they can’t be good.
I hope it won’t take decades for societies to rediscover its value and figure out how to reintroduce it.
I have another suggestion which doesn't contradict yours.
When I was younger I used to get bored way more often. I had to wait regularly during a week (e.g. for a bus, friend, appointment) or even at work as a software dev (e.g. compilation which used to take more time).
This was also the case when doing some physical activities which didn't require lot of thoughts.
Back then, before mobile phones with internet access, you were either reading something or alone with your thoughts in those situations. This was when I had time to think back at things that happened, processing the information I had, refining ideas etc.
Nowdays those are often situations where we ingest more information like listening to podcast, reading stuff on the phone, etc... or situations that just doesn't exists anymore having optimised our work to remove those waiting points.
I personally find myself with clearer thoughts when I break those habits and give my brain some time to be bored again.
I do think there is "lack of boreness" epidemic leaving people with way more raw thoughts and way less time to process and challenge information, leading to some form of exhaustion and lack of clarity.
I have another suggestion which doesn't contradict yours:
This is only a small part of it (tech addiction 24/7 via phone); certainly there is something bigger at play, here (e.g: "the brain isn't the same anymore;" agreed).
I do not use email nor a cell phone (several years; outgoing landline, only), so I have more than enough time to ruminate (and read a few dozen books, annually) – and yet agree very much with OC's theory on needing mental health exercises to replace our newfound AGI tools/workers.
As an extremely conversive person (unbound by a cellphone), it's become an extremely strange world, particularly when talking with strangers, even in just the past two years. It's like: everybody is just mentally exhausted, mortal.
At early-forties, I don't think I count as "young" anymore.
Definitely: growing up without a cell phone was beautiful. I still remember driving around semi-lost, using paper maps, quite fondly (I still print directions).
My last partner (eight years my junior) "grew up on her cellphone" and it was just remarkable how fucked her brain was... at least different from my own landlined-childhood POV (e.g: attention-span; need for constant contact).
----
And yet, my brain also enmushifies (lately: increasingly).
It is questionable what is, at present day, considered young and old (and particularly during mid-forties), as life expectancy doubled last century from roughly ~40 to ~80 years. which makes everyone in their forties old by ... olden standards and mid-life at current ones.
if we get to live through the (forthcoming or already unfolding) singularity, there's a fair chance new life standards extend to 140-180 years*, with medicine, yoga, nootropics** and all.
I’m a professional theoretical physicist in my 40s and I never thought the day would come that I would realize I became shit at mental math. I can do quantum physics in my head but don’t ask me to add 17 to 34
> It's like: everybody is just mentally exhausted, mortal.
Very much this. I think a lot of it is that the "slack" of our lives is being eliminated little bit by little bit to improve "productivity", and in so doing it is making life harder, mentally and physically, in ways that we don't really grasp because we're the frog being boiled. We are more "productive" and "efficient" than ever, but we're not happier or living better lives, and a lot of that I think is due to us eking out the last bit of gain for our work lives and leaving nothing left in the tank for when we aren't working.
This three day weekend, I only really felt like I could do things today, but now I have to go back to work tomorrow. Wouldn't it be great if I didn't need 2-3 days just to become a normal person again every time I don't have to work? Wouldn't it be great if I could use at least one day on the weekend every weekend to do something of personal interest rather than mental recovery in a fog?
I’m a champion of boredom. I really feel it’s a life skill. Personally, I do all kinds of things to create space for boredom. But really it’s my kids where I want them to experience some boredom and structure my parenting style somewhat around creating space for their boredom. On their own, they would never be bored a moment of their life. There’s too any screens and amounts of content available and my kids don’t even use the internet/SM, yet.
I doubt that's the only factor, but I agree that it's almost certainly a factor. The modern "tech" industry has filled our waking hours with unceasing demands to do something. Buy this product, watch this video, listen to this podcast, react to this social media post; even "practice self-care" has somehow turned into an obligatory virtue-cultivating task. We obviously had advertising before, but this is a different beast, something akin to living in a casino.
As Bo Burnham put it, "apathy's a tragedy and boredom is a crime".
I too subscribe to theory that "being bored" was an important part of our day to day lives. I think it gave us time to basically decompress and "defragment" our minds, and that is also when a lot of novel ideas or clarifications would come to us. Now having 24/7 entertainment at the tips of our fingers is almost completely removing this extra time from us, and there is much less processing that actually happens.
Definitely. Much of the structure of internet media encourages constant, passive consumption. Or, to use the terms of the grandparent, we move traded ambient thinking, reflection, and imagination, which the brain is pushed into during boredom, for ambient consumption.
I think a lot of people believe that, as long as they consume "high quality" or more intellectual content, the negative effects of constant consumption are mitigated, but I think that's false. It's less about the content and more about the structure and process. If you never give your brain moments to stop basic processing of wildly different inputs and to just critically examine them instead, you will suffer brain rot, even if the content you consume is "educational".
Yes. And I'd also add that so much of it is about context and intention.
If you intentionally sit down to enjoy some low-brow entertainment (Maybe a silly action movie or a mediocre rom-com) because you enjoy that, great.
But I recently realized that there are podcast episodes from 10 years ago that I still remember parts of, but few from recent years, even though I've listened to far more podcasts (and they haven't become less intellectual).
We can totally avoid (being conscious of) processing stuff during sleep too. Just take some SSRIs or smoke weed and you wake up in the next day. I think that that has more effect on people than people realize, dreaming is important but many people don’t experience that side of things any more.
I get the wildest dreams. Lately it's nonstop cardio in my dreams. It's been like this for weeks. It is not relaxing, I don't know why my sleeping self won't just rest. Instead I have to spend the night dancing or jumping from moving train cars like frogger, climbing to the tops of high places, or just straight up running at a sprint for hours.
This is my default experience. Falling asleep, then waking up an unknown amount of time later as if nothing happened. Maybe I don’t pay attention to my dreams
That seems less likely then people being tired and stressed from the costs of living and the increased economic instability.
We have smartphones but we're perilously few missed pay cheques away from not having a house, with a capital class gleefully telling everyone how they'll all be unemployable very soon.
It would be the greatest irony if failing to manage the economic fallout of the coming AI revolution had a larger negative impact than the benefit it brings
We might just run into the worst recession in history as the heavily skewed service economy quickly runs out of customers who can afford to pay for it
We're already several years into the worst economic depression in history. People aren't having children because they cannot afford a home. But it can get worse of course.
Being bored, showering etc is well known to engage the DMN (Default Mode Network) where your brain connects pieces together from larger, more distant areas together. We as a society are missing this and its obvious.
It's possible that I'm in your grandparent's generation, or maybe your parents. I'm 65. I don't want to derail the conversation, but I do want to correct the bit about "exercise as a hobby was viewed as extremely weird, runners used to be arrested!". In the '70s at least, running was extremely normal. Endurance bicycling was normal. For instance, starting in 1979. I bicycled all over the South: FL GA NC, at least. These were then as they are now quite provincial from the POV of alternate ideas. 10K runs were a thing, with thousands of participants. As were Marathons. Cross country running was a popular high school sport.
If you want to talk about work, well I'm adjacent to 5th generation farmers. Self driving climate controlled machinery is a thing now, but! hard to imagine I know, people had tractors back then too.
So, plausible as it might sound to ascribe some of the causality to flow from "the physical activity transition", I don't think it holds up.
I think the physical activity transition they are describing would have been closer to the end of the 19th century when mechanization really started to take hold (e.g. the car)
I can't remember which decade he's talking about or verify his claims, but in Shoe Dog the creator of Nike talks about how running for exercise was viewed as very weird in the last century, and he implies that Adidas pretty much singlehandedly changed public perception on this. Not that nobody did it, but that it was considered very weird and rare.
He was only talking about running, not exercise in general, but I seem to remember Schwarzenegger reflecting similarly about the public perception of weight lifting
I'm about 5 years younger and yes running and exercise was popular in the 1970s. Maybe not quite like today in terms of people really spending a lot of money on gyms, personal trainers, and expensive bikes or equipment, but certainly not considered weird.
>I think the „my brain isn’t the same anymore“ sensation is pretty universal.
I disagree with the premise that you're propping up with the exercise example; I disagree that humans are thinking less because of mechanisms available in society.
if anything I think people are thinking more than they ever have, and that has triggered a lot of people into overthinking themselves into a quagmire of inaction , judgement, and group-think.
Telling codex how to program a feature is a much different, much easier type of thinking than back in the olden days of a year ago, when I had to get everything to work myself. I can't imagine that's going to be great for my long-term brain health.
This only holds when you keep the task fixed and compare with and without AI. But because AI changed expectations the difficulty of work we supervise today is much higher. My theory is that AI runs our brains just as hard as no-AI, maybe harder. That is if you want to have high quality outputs, not for slop.
Certainly, AI is allow us to 10x our code, but also 10x our mental work. Steve Yegge calls this the AI Vampire[0] and it does effect us, more so than TV or old school social media ever did.
My father went through a stroke a few years ago, and is now always online. He blames the stroke for his brain fog, but I still feel that the modern day dopamine addiction is a huge factor.
Yeah I think this is also true. Maybe "thinking less" is the wrong framing. Whether it's an excess or a deficiency of thinking, there's definitely a lack of straining cognitive activity.
It might be reading books, pondering deep ideas, painting a landscape, doing software engineering, or solving crossword puzzles.
But all of those are happening much less due (in my opinion) to the factors I described.
But this quagmire of inaction, judgement and group-think is older than technology though. Just because social media wasn't available before didn't mean there weren't "mechanisms" of society to channel those impulses into. So why do you think people are thinking more than before and why this quagmire is a modern invention? Like how are we measuring what people are thinking and what people are not thinking?
I understand its your subjective opinion but I would like to know what basis your claim stands upon. Just like more easy information so people overthink?
Quick example which just happened, my adult son is starting a new job and was looking at the bus schedules to work out what time he would need to leave the house. One bus runs "every 15-20 minutes" and he has to transfer to another bus that runs on a schedule. So he wanted to know what time he had to be at the first bus stop to be on time to work in a worst-case scenario. This problem he presented to Gemini because he just didn't want to think about it.
I look at ads on TV for AI platforms and the examples they show, of course they are a bit contrived, silly, or funny for effect but they always make me feel a bit uneasy... like why do you even have a job if you're using AI to do everything while you just dance around your desk or spin in your chair?
For public transit in my city they have an official website where you can type in where you are and where you want to go and it plan it all for you. Can choose from arrive asap to picking a time when you want to depart or a time you want to arrive. This has been operational since 2002.
More recently Google Maps has the same functionality and it will work in many cities across the world.
I think their broader point is that it's becoming common to reach for an AI chat to solve problems that should take a few seconds of thinking to solve. Notably this kind of thing is not a search problem, since you presumably already know the schedules for both busses and just need to come up with a reasonable allowance for schedules not lining up properly.
The neurologists and neurotherapists for a family member who is a stroke survivor have been pretty consistent in saying that cardiovascular exercise and regular social engagement seem to be the most promising activities to stem cognitive decline.
Yes, I think both things can be true. And also, we haven't had decades of mental activity being mostly optional, so we're not yet seeing the consequences nor science of long-term impact.
In the 1950s, many doctors were convinced that exercise was actively harmful and running was dangerous.
We know already what's happening after decade of optional thinking: electing dumass Presidents, walking the same path than Germany about 100 years ago, cut scientific research, social nets, etc.
We know already what's happening with optional thinking.
>I think the „my brain isn’t the same anymore“ sensation is pretty universal.
One would hope so, but there are countless people that believe this can't ever be the case, and it's just lack of personal motivation that's the problem.
Yes, this is a big issue. I really think these things are basically like cigarettes used to be when they were ubiquitous.
I'd have a hard time blaming someone in the 1930s for being addicted to cigarettes. Everyone constantly smoked everywhere and their harm was rumored, but not proven.
Try to quit smoking in that environment: the thing you're trying to get away from is inescapable and it's not even clear why you should quit. They might blame themselves for not being motivated enough.
We're in that exact environment for the things I describe above.
That's because the folks who are unemployed, unfortunately, are largely those who already were further down the curve. We're destroying the minds of those who were supposed to move society forward and gaining nothing elsewhere.
I struggle to understand this. I use AI quite regularly and find it frees up hours of my day to do consequential “understanding” work that previously got eaten up by there literally not being enough hours in a day to solve my own problems and understand others enough to help them solve theirs.
I think they exist already... Crosswords, sudokus and puzzles have long been popular. Has the world also forgotten the brain training craze of the naughties?
Additionally, everyone seems to have forgotten that covid can leave lingering mental symptoms for years after “recovery”. I wonder how much of the mental fatigue/ brain fog that people blame on tech is actually from covid…
It's not just COVID, either. You can get brain fog effects from a variety of things. The first and biggest is sleep apnea (woefully underdosed).
Plenty of things can develop as you grow older. Some of them may have been present all your life and you only start to notice them when your body is a little less resilient. Food sensitivities, for instance -- eat the wrong thing, trigger a major release of histamines (which trigger both the stomach acid and a whole-body response). Too much of that releases other neurotransmitters, too, and you can get Depression and Fatigue too. (And then try changing the whole way you eat while at the bottom of a depressive slump where all the easiest foods are the likeliest triggers!!) Autistic people (plenty of us in tech) are especially predisposed to many of these inflammation-related issues.
If you're brain fogged, see the doctor... and be prepared for a long slog of self advocacy, and maybe shopping around.
I have bad news for you: for the majority of the population mental effort was always a foreign concept. That's exactly what got us in this mess in the first place.
Not sure if always but probably there's a rise of anti-intellectualism in general since I'd say the 2000s. I remember being amazed by how intelligent adults were when I was little. Always doing cross-words, sudoku, reading books, discussing the classics, etc. But now those same adults don't read anything anymore, and just spend their time watching netflix on bed. The same adults that used to correct my vocabulary, grammar and ortography, somehow forgot the meaning of slightly obscure words and don't remember if a certain word was written with an "s" or "c" for example.
I think the anti-intellectualism crisis gets mischaracterized. Common rejection of experts, academia, and empirical findings is certainly a part of it, but I tend to see more of an issue with targeted, self-serving ignorance, particularly among the elite.
You have extremely intelligent and influential people balking at, say, the undeniable net benefits of universal healthcare, renewable energy investment, and cash payment UBI.
Worse, they use their intelligence to attack interventions that run against their preconceived notions. Milton Friedman was not an idiot, and yet he and his acolytes did (and do) untold damage in anti-intellectual perpetuation of their outmoded ideas.
The common thread between that and skipping conversation for Netflix is disengagement with cognitive load that doesn't immediately benefit you. They both suck, but I think that one hurts more, and hurts more.
This second thing (either slightly different from anti-intellectualism or maybe a different form of it$l) is quite odd. I wonder where it comes from. Sometimes it feels like we have a strong bias toward surprising effects, to the point where we’ll start treating the first “possible, counter intuitive hypothesis” as if it ought to be the default assumption. I wonder to what extent that’s a natural thing, or to what extent it is the result of consuming pop-sci content that has to start with “Rebel scientist overturns conventional wisdom…”
I don't think that's true. Even if you think about what was considered junk entertainment decades ago, they still required much more cognitive effort.
Reading about a celebrity breakup in a gossip magazine requires more cognitive effort than hearing about the same breakup in a gossip TikTok:
-You consumed the thing for minutes at a time vs. seconds at a time and your brain had to actively decipher something, not just passively perceive.
-You had to read and couldn't do it while also doing something else, which meant you were more focused.
-You couldn't swipe in a split-second and have another equally stimulating thing that might be completely different, which meant you were more intentional about your mental context.
The medium in which we consume something absolutely matters, independent of what we decide to consume.
I mean, I’d argue that the overwhelming majority of the populous is not doing physical activity as they should. Even in a future with gym “for the mind”, I also assume attendance to be low.
We have 'gym for the mind' now in the form of puzzles (eg crosswords, quizes). It's a different sort of complexity to writing assembly or proving mathematical identities ... most people weren't doing those things though. I'm more concerned that as a species rigorous education is giving way to machine-learning.
I think running down the road is still suspicious and to get you stopped by the cops (not arrested per se I’m not sure that ever happened…) which is why runners wear a uniform.
As someone who started their software engineering career in 1988 and is at the tail end of it, I can report that my peers and I have experienced the same thing, even as we start retiring.
What we didn’t have was constant dopamine hits. It took effort to get dopamine. A lot. I’ve struggle with doomscrolling in my 50’s, just like teenagers, except I remember a time when it didn’t exist. I think that’s the key: if all you’ve ever had is velveeta, you’re going to have to work twice as hard to unlock the pleasure some stinky washed rind raw milk French cheese.
I agree with the author, I think reading books is the only way out, and extend that to analog activities. An analogy is fast-twitch muscles: they respond quickly, but burn their ATP faster. You have to operate at an oxygen deficit for about 10 minutes before your analog/aerobic system kicks in. Same thing with any analog activity like reading, you have to put the monkey-brain to sleep.
I think this answer depends on age. For me, it was up until right around 2014. That’s when, I think, social media and mobile phones unlocked a number of generally unproductive behavior both personally and in business.
A number of years ago I had a period of my life where I decided to shut my laptop for a while.
I was working as a line cook and trying to find time and energy to code study so I could land a role in software (no degree). I was really struggling with my mental health and was having issues making or maintaining progress in pretty much any area of my life.
I got a new job, cooking breakfast in a small mountain town at a bakery. Before I left I sold my laptop and borrowed a bunch of books from some friends.
I really did feel much better a few months later. Taking the time to decompress allowed me to get my priorities in order and surface some biases / blind spots I had. I ended up re-enrolling in school the next spring and am now happily employed in software.
I don’t think the modality is particularly important - coding vs reading vs anything else - but taking the time to put your goals away for a little while and decompress can make you more effective in actually reaching them
Lots of thinkers throughout history have pointed this out (David Hume and Seneca are the first 2 that spring to mind, but I'm sure there are hundreds more). Our mind doesn't work correctly when it's constantly focused, and as much as we think scrolling is not focusing, it is. The part of your brain that lights up and pays attention is active when you're zooming through content. There's nothing wrong with it, but like everything the dose makes the poison. You have to take breaks and balance it against other mental modes.
One formulation I like is the Kethledge and Erwin definition of solitude. They say that solitude is not so much physical isolation as it is a lack of input from other minds. What electronic media do (among many other effects) is flood your consciousness with the presence of other minds. Even if that mind is deranged, anti-social, or even pleasant, your own thought gets crowded out. I'm a huge reader, and I realize even books do this, although less oppressively than electronic media, which is why I think people imagine them as antidotes to this problem. But I think maybe the most important thing is to take a rest and don't let anyone else talk to you for a time, either in person or via media.
This essay I read recently speaks about solitude in a way you might find interesting. Basically how valuable it is to be in solute but also become sensitive to how it feels when you’re not getting influenced by other minds, as you say. https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/good-ideas
Turns out t-breaks works for social media too if you admit it's an addiction that it is. When you are in it day in and day out you don't realize how much time it's costing you without the benefits that you signed up for at the beginning.
Actually it’s about -100%, in fact. Given that talking about not being on social media is just another excuse for you to go on social media. Self-defeating and, honestly, quite dishonest.
In fact, doing this might be even worse than just doomscrolling, given that all you’re doing is massaging your own ego while doing absolutely nothing in favour of actualising what you are preaching.
This is something I've felt very deeply intuitively. (It's also something that it feels like my life actively optimizes against to prevent me being able to do it.)
A couple of times now I have walked a stretch of the Camino de Santiago (each time it was just a small bit near the end; sadly don't have the time off to do a full route which can take a month or longer). I find the simplicity of it super rewarding and enjoyable compared to my busy life back home. Just, for the most part, miles and miles of peaceful countryside.
It's kind of the opposite of what is described in the article, where the author is using his time off to improve his knowledge in other areas. Personally, I find that back home I am constantly thinking, both at work and in my time off, so much so that I forget what the end goal of all that thinking actually is. So doing these long walks helps me take a break from that and put it in perspective. No laptop, as little smartphone use as possible, I will maybe read a book or two in the evenings but nothing too heavy, etc.
As an aside, I am in a non-tech field, and programming is my hobby (and nothing like my day job). I enjoy it and I think it helps me stay sharp, but it has its drawbacks as a hobby. Being a solo hobby, and not one that many people in my field are into, it's not really something I can easily bond with others over (unlike, say, golf or chess). And sometimes it can be the opposite of relaxing when you encounter a bug that you can't seem to diagnose or fix.
Chess for me is not a social hobby, I've tried, but I can either have a conversation or play chess. I'm pretty sure the limited ability I had to do both has waned over the years too.
I used to read fairly voraciously as a child; nothing like the kids who could devour a Harry Potter book between sunrises, but a respectable "novel every 2-3 weeks", somewhat above my grade level.
I can remember almost the exact instant I fell off: being dissatisfied with a particular turn in a YA novel in 9th grade, and the odd moments that had been filled with page-turning suddenly became designated for sketching and doodling (at the height of deviantArt's power).
I don't think I finished a single class-read novel in high school; hated Wuthering Heights and beloved (on vibes) L'Etranger alike are a blur. (Still aced the AP exams.) I knew it was really over when I had to drop a classical literature course in college because I couldn't keep up with the readings.
I've a few dozen unfinished books in the ~15 years since, and less than a dozen finished ones. 1Q84 has been a multi-year odyssey.
I've introspected about what's gone "wrong". My reading speed is quite slow, and has never progressed, which I think is a major part of it. I often become distracted, stopping a little too frequently to mull things over - really, squaring the reading with my preconceived notions, which was not as much of an issue when I was younger and had fewer of them.
I also stress over finding time to begin reading in the first place, and about being disconnected from reality when I'm in a book's headspace.
I'd love to know if anyone's had a similar experience and can boast a "recovery" (and how they managed).
I had a similar drop off in high school. For me it happened when the volume of assigned reading, particularly summer reading, crowded out all of the reading for pleasure. I just never started back up after that, despite fits and starts over the years.
I decided that I wanted to change about three years ago.
The first thing that helped was finding a book that I really wanted to finish and that I saw as a challenge. I tend to be motivated by challenges. Instead of “I want to get back to regular reading”, it was “I want to finish this one book no matter what”.
Second, I bought an e-reader that let me set the margins and text size to old man settings, such that there are only a few lines per screen. My mind wanders easily, especially when it feels like there’s an ocean of text on a page, so less text and frequent page turns helped me keep my momentum up and avoid constant wandering and re-reading.
As much as we all hate commutes here, getting a job that has me back in the office has had a silver lining in that time on the train is scheduled, routine time where I can’t do something else. I made the decision that it would not be dead time, so I religiously put my phone in my bag, get my book out, and focus on it for the 40 minutes until my destination.
I am a relatively slow reader like you, but much like exercise, sticking to a routine has meant slow but noticeable improvement. I think of myself as a book reader again, and I’ve made it over the hump where sustained concentration feels effortful. You can do it!
I noticed you listed all fiction here. Do you ever try reading nonfiction? You might just need something more concrete to hold your attention rather than fictitious characters in imaginary scenarios.
Another thing I suggest to lots of people is to try audiobooks. It's not the same as traditional reading, but it's way better than not reading at all. Sometimes I use a screen reader on my laptop and follow along with my eyes. I've noticed this allows me to read something for much longer and the comprehension feels stronger.
Also, I wouldn't worry about finishing books if that's hard for some people. If something doesn't hold your interest, there's no point in slogging through it just so you can earn your imaginary 'finished' trophy. Especially for fiction.
I read a ton so I can’t really relate directly; but I will say to try out thrillers. Most are written to keep you reading, because you want to see what happens next.
Personally this usually means 20th century detective fiction (Chandler, Hammett, etc.) but there are a lot of modern writers that fit the same bill. Harlan Coben is a good example, if a bit “generic thriller.”
I made a “recovery” and unfortunately the method I used is the boring one - discipline. I found that I was using social media to distract myself from anxiety, so I started going for a half hour run first thing in the morning, followed by an hour of reading. This required me to get up very early, but I found that the leftover endorphins from running helped me focus on the book and not the anxiety.
And don’t bother finishing 1Q84, you could read like four better Murakami books for the same time investment
Thanks for this post, I can truly relate. Some thoughts from a 50+ year old genx guy (EE/CS) who’s worked to stay current and keep a sharp mind in the face of these challenges plus the inevitable age-related decline:
- regular exercise has incredible benefits for the body+ mind (and the attitude that directs it). Biggest impact of everything on this list.
- Side projects that involve actual doing and not just study. e.g. I spent some money on gear for embedded development and am doing things that involve physical things and using my hands and making gadgets … phone is out of the picture while in the lab.
- Ironically, using LLMs for reviewing and refreshing knowledge you once had but now has gaps is amazing. I spend a bunch of my phone time now having in-depth chats where I know what I’m talking about to a large degree, but the LLM is helping me fill in gaps and then quizzing me on concepts and I know that the things it’s telling me are solid due to my background, then I go check, etc. A really good way to do super focused study to reload a field back into your brain. Might as well take advantage of the fact that they stole all of the world books.
- Write things down! After reviewing, do some problems with pencil and pad. After studying, doing a problem on pencil and paper is actually daunting, but then grooving through a few problems actually makes you realize you know the stuff again! And using an expensive Ampad notebook and nice mech pencil is a great sensory experience.
I spend a big chunk of my summers in nowhere cow-ville France (la Creuse). No Michelin star restaurants, no art galleries, no shopping worth note. Just landscapes, hiking, lakes and slower life. BUT what surprises me most is how often I describe this to people, even the French, and they’re like “why / pourquoi ?!” Is it not obvious? There’s a reason people say they need a vacation after their vacation. I think it’s that people are expecting too much of their vacations.
Having a family, the best rest for me is the 2-3 days when I'm back at work after vacation. No kids running around, no need to plan anything, just slowly going through hundreds of already irrelevant emails, pretending to do something productive, sipping coffee while telling everyone that I'm "catching up, sorry, can't help ya".
Sounds like there's two kinds of vacations, the one to relax, decompress, slow down and go offline for a bit, and the one where you explore the world and experience new things. Both are valid, and combining the two is great.
I'm now thinking of USAmericans taking a eurotrip and visiting a different city every day. I hope some of them mix it up and stay in cowville, France for a few days.
When I spent 3 weeks in Türkiye solo traveling (from the US) I tried to have a few home bases. For example 5 full days of hiking 15-20 km in Cappadocia, 3 days near Selçuk and the rest in Istanbul.
You wouldn't think a massive city like Istanbul would be relaxing but it is when you're out of your hotel for 15 hours a day on foot with nothing but a list of bullet points that don't depend on planning anything ahead of time other than to make sure the thing you want to see is open when you're near the area.
Everyone is different but for me, I like not needing to be at X location at Y time a bunch of times in a row. A few of those are fine, but it can't be a majority of the trip. I try to treat road trips the same, 3-4 nights per stop (maybe 2 nights if it's a smaller place).
Time to decompress and explore is important IMO. Walking around while seeing new things is the ultimate form of decompression for me.
Was lucky enough to spend a week in Rome this summer, and even that was not enough time (and I've been before, still not enough combined time). It's wild when I hear about people hitting 4 different EU cities in the same time period, sounds exhausting.
I quit paris to work on the coast to sail at least every two weekends (and took up foiling for the evenings), I'd say I now need way, way less vacations than I used to.
I was a university student around the time the iPhone came out. I stuck with a motorola razor until I graduated. I think back on the DAILY grind of university amd the consistent context switching between challenging studies that were so varied: analog circuits, aeronautical engineering, practicing foreign language, along with the other demands of working and ask how did I manage that cognitive load?
I think the brainrot is less noticeable when I fill my schedule, but when I have time off my brain atrophies IFF I emable brainrot.
Reading books, picking solid podcasts, or journaling leaves my brain feeling refreshed.
I feel this is the next wave of 'clean your processed diet up' or 'mind the tobacco'
I’m married and have kids so there’s always something going on in my life and I don’t get many opportunities for “peace and quiet”.
What works wonders for me is swimming. I only do front crawl so I’m basically staring at the bottom of the pool for the entire duration of the swim. It’s incredibly boring. But something happens in my head, I can just think better. I will often take a problem from work and mull it over in the water, and very often I come up with either a solution or otherwise put it in perspective or some other strategy to deal with it.
Highly recommend. Also at my age (mid-40s), some form of movement that is gentle on the joints is appreciated.
Just take Baby Rudin and a serious stack of paper with you on these holidays and you should be set.
My two experiences of de-brainrotting:
1. Doing a pilgrimage walk in Japan with a cleared phone home screen. Only the Gaia GPS app on there with the route, and some other local weather and mapping applications. No consumption of anything external during the day. Just steady walking and eating and looking around. It was excellent. You can probably do this anywhere given the right context and commitment.
2. We slept several nights in a hut at 2100m altitude in the Austrian Alps just out of range of cell reception so the icon on my phone was "satellite" all the time. It turns out that without the possibility of communication or fresh input, you can read a bit on your kindle in the evening and then go KO at around 22:00 sleeping like a rock until 06:30. Such an amazing amount of rest and refreshment just from a simple accident of geography.
When I got fired a few months ago—which I'd somewhat anticipated since the CTO was becoming ever more temperamental—I took the money I'd aggressively not spent and decided to spend the summer doing things I enjoyed, letting the stages of grief subside, and letting myself get bored, instead of trying to force myself to AI this or that or even apply to more than a few jobs. I turned off my website that I wasn't doing anything with anyway, and I've been letting my brain churn on the prospect of leaving software entirely. I still don't feel confident that if I do spend the time trying to land another contract, that it'll be a fruitful endeavor, nor if I pursue something else, but I've got some great hiking done, spent lots of time with family and friends, and I'm glad I haven't wasted it while being mired in the swamp of anxiety that I presume a more Type A person would. It was cheap to buy this time, and it's better to buy it back when it can be spent doing physically adventurous things.
I may go back to applying for the few jobs around, or I might decide it's such an unlikely venture that I'll just see if I can meet someone on a hiring team at a climbing gym or something. Either way, I don't really care to spend much of it behind a screen until winter rolls around.
My suggestion is to get a plain old bicycle (not an electric or stationary bike). One hour outdoors on a bike clears away at least a day’s worth of mental detritus for me.
And also readers not using it. So far I’ve gotten no legit webmention on any post. But I keep it hoping that some day someone will make a reply post and it will be magical
> Nothing is that novel anymore, and solving day to day problems, more than requiring mental exhaustion, mostly require spending some time at them
I felt this too recently and I linked it to excessive passive information grazing exacerbated by AI. Symptoms of this are being in a daze or mental fog, and not being in touch with the feeling of curiosity. Reading doesnt help since for me, reading is passive process of meme gathering. What helps in my view is effortful creation in the form of writing code, hand writing essays, creating music etc.
I don’t and never have particularly enjoyed reading. I am a fast consumer of information and data, as that has tickled my brain ever since I was a small child which looking back, completely explains my career path.
That said, I enjoy going deep on things by learning and playing around, a very much hands on learner. My other issue I have is that with hobbies or interests, because I strive to become an “expert” in terms of knowledge as quickly as possible and am very good at it, I often lose interest in hobbies as I quickly realize that the difference between an expert in something and a Master in that thing is usually simply time/decades and I don’t have that kind of patience.
Two hobbies that I’ve found in the past few years that have been extremely beneficial to helping me decompress while still holding my attention.
1/ Deciding to finally learn Guitar. It’s a common one for sure, but I approach it from a pure enjoyment standpoint and put zero pressure on actually getting better. It’s something I usually pick up a couple of times a week and play, I’ll find videos of tutorials and give them a try, just kind of random exploring while getting slowly better. It’s been nice
2) Growing rare Cacti, Succulents and Caudex plants in my basement. They require very little attention, most needing water every 2 weeks or so and leaving them for vacations or other activities is of zero concern. After only a year or two I only grow from seed, focusing on extremely rare, newly discovered, or under researched species as that scratches my itch of continuing to learn. Though again, I keep it purely an enjoyment activity and find myself just sitting there looking at my plants, enjoying them and appreciating their weird nature.
> I don’t and never have particularly enjoyed reading. I am a fast consumer of information and data, as that has tickled my brain ever since I was a small child which looking back, completely explains my career path.
I thought I was the same way until I decided to buy a book on a whim from a guy slinging books from the back of a Japanese kei truck two years ago. Cheesecake by Mark Kurlansky. I love Cheesecake; how could I not read a book about it.
I suggest things such as building an "offline room" like an 80s/90s living room setup complete with a thrifted CRT TV, old game consoles, VCRs, shag carpets, old lamps, woodgrain walls, physical books, instruction manuals, etc.
The best de-brain rot vacation I had so far was on a remote island in Raja Ampat: it wasn't about the island being remote, but about spotty internet access.
It was just the correct amount of spotty: enough for text to load and IMs to go through, but not enough for any serious photo or video content. I was able to get YouTube to download videos in 240p on one end of the island, but I had to be picky about what I select.
After two weeks I felt like my old self again, but unfortunately, it popped like a bubble after just a few days.
Yes. This is my favorite way to vacation, and I'm glad someone has found a better name for it. I do not enjoy simply sitting around idle and occasionally going on a trip, I end my time off feeling drained and need a vacation from my vacation.
One year, I had an itch to try my hand at Godot and game programming, and I saved it for my next vacation. I'd never felt more relaxed after a vacation, it's the same as what the author describes: I like being intellectually stimulated, I just needed a break from work, not from trying new things.
This article has helped me figure out some of what made that work, and has given me some ideas of how to try to capture that again.
I find staycations to be the same thing as a vacation but at home. Especially if you liv in more touristy places (NYC for instance), there's plenty of vacationy things you can take while not leaving more than 10 miles from your house. I like going to the beach or to my parents or what not (even going on trips), but I still need something to keep my mind busy. I hope that sums up the difference well.
> Add to that videogames, comics/manga, TV shows, etc, and I literally just can’t get bored anymore.
It's a bit strange to me (and I figure I'm just unusual in this respect), but all of those things lead me quickly to boredom these days. It's the brain rottenness of it all that leads me to be bored, and in a way I'm thankful for it. I find that even compared to my childhood, I'm more bored today than I've ever been.
I recognize myself in the first paragraph (except being totally exhausted to the point having to sleep). And I started working as a SWE 4 years ago (so full dopamine brainrot access). Maybe it is because I have a reasonable usage of LLMs?
> Add to that the usage of AI. While I know I’m way more productive than during those first months, my thoughts are getting slower, less profound, lazier.
I have mostly stayed away from LLM usage, I think I am better for it. I use it just to offload things I wouldn't have had time for. I get more stuff done, but I am still doing what I did before.
> Plus, dopamine is available at just a tap on my phone. There’s a ton of content in shorts that interest me and require little to no investment on my end, both time and effort-wise.
If you have and Android phone, enable Developer Options and flick through to Simulated Color Space - set it to Monochrome. I only wish it was possible to automate colour space switching based on time, like is done for redshift.
You can do the same on iOS in the Accessibility settings. I have my phone set up so that I can toggle the monochrome filter by double tapping the back of the device. I keep it in black and white but can switch back to colour easily if I need to show someone a photo.
Last year I took my parents' caravan and put it in bumfuck retirement home nowhere, spent a week just riding my motorcycle through that section of the country, reading, listening to music, and painting Warhammer figurines. Little human contact. It was boring and unstimulating, but also almost the opposite of my usual daily grind.
> Nothing is that novel anymore, and solving day to day problems, more than requiring mental exhaustion, mostly require spending some time at them.
You're the largest fish in your bowl, time to move to a larger bowl. It's OK to be comfortable but if you're unhappy there's always another level to aim for.
Thankfully I'm happy where I am for now. Bigger bowls would require life choices that not only would affect me, but also my family. I'm really grateful for the position I'm in currently.
I think it’s great that we’re discussing this more often as time goes on. This is not the first post I’ve read this month about this topic, and that’s a good sign.
I also think it takes a certain level of intelligence to be able to _notice_ these shifts in mental load.
A lot of people are going through this same thing, but their response isn’t “i need to unplug, slow down, and let my mind reset,” it’s quite literally the opposite - they scroll more, binge more, swipe more. Mostly because they aren’t aware of why they feel the way they do.
The more we discuss this issue, openly, the more likely it is we’ll bring attention to it to those people who are currently unaware of why they feel so empty all the time, despite never being more occupied.
And it is a massive problem. The complete overflow of impressions you get from mindless scrolling is really not talked about enough. Before you realize it, you begin forgetting important tasks, rationalizing wasting your time and showing up late to things. Please take back your life
I’m no expert on self improvement, but my ambitions tend to be a lot lower on vacation. Instead of trying to cultivate better habits, I mostly just try to interrupt the old dumb ones. Instead of phone in bed, it’s a huge win if I’m in a hammock with a fun book. Instead of checking email over coffee, maybe I can sit outside with that coffee and listen to birds. Etc etc.
Similar to OP’s new hobby of math and physics, I recently started scratching a long standing itch to teach myself electrical engineering. I’m using books, YouTube and my brain to learn, and it feels like such a breath of fresh air compared to what my day job as a SWE has become since AI took it over. Because I’m not trying to build anything in particular — and since the learning _is_ the goal — I don’t hear that nagging voice saying, “AI could do this so much faster,” that pops in my head when I write code by hand these days.
The intro paragraphs talking about the mental disengagement or decline or whatever we want to call it really resonated with me. It's something I've also taken measures to counter. In fact I'm on vacation right now to Basque Country. I read "A Basque History of the World" to prepare for the trip and that act reassured me I'm not getting less capable of engaging intellectually, I just have different intellectual interests now than the most intimate details of making websites for and serving them to customers at varying scales.
I’ll assume the complaint is that the desktop is his space and shouldn’t be real estate for ads.
Around 2005 it became obvious that consumer software licensing for operating systems was no longer profitable. Nothing like Windows 95 sold again. Apple coupled the OS cost with the high margin hardware. The “profitable” Linux distros catered to high margin enterprise contracts. Windows pivoted toward ads.
When consumers complain about ads on software products, are they offering a viable alternative? Would you pay $250 for Windows Pro Ads Free? To Microsoft’s credit they’ve tried many different ways to package the software, and settled on the ads model.
A refreshing read. While not in the same lane as the author re maths/physics/SWE, I empathise.
I think on one hand, things are simply less novel as we get older and more expert in a given lane. That’s age old.
But the dopamine hit/attention deficit issue is altogether new, and it’s troubling from a societal perspective. I suspect it’s fairly universal that adults in 2026 aren’t reading nearly as much as they aspire to, or claim to be.
Can someone please recommend a good English version of "De Newton a Einstein y algo más eBook" (the book mentioned in the blog post) or a similar book?
Same happening for me. The fog clears when I do breath meditation - I think (hope) going deeper into mindfullness will be even more effective than reading at clearing the mind and breaking the dopamine addiction.
I struggle w my advanced learning in that much of it I will Never use due to my retirement status.
I attempt screenplays; reading classical electrodynamics by Jackson; studying chess; and learning Spanish. I love to write code but that sucks me back to the computer.
Cooking is always fun.
What do you think about doing LeetCode as an hobby? i really didn't like these type of exercise before, but after the advent of AI i'm more prone to do them. and actually started to enjoy them.
I wonder if the author is missing an opportunity to step further away by learning physics on this vacation. I usually follow the same playbook- little phone use, slow vacation, hiking in nature, phyical books (carefully selected beforehand- nothing work related, nothing technical), even used to spend a fair bit of time selecting the music i was going to listen to while driving to avoid radio or incar spotify. If lucky, i get these moments of inspiration. if not i return refreshed with slightly altered goals. Like everyone i have a chimp on my shoulder questioning me: could i have been more productive, maybe learn something useful?
Leaving the phone charging out of the bedroom (or unreachable without getting up) during night and having a kindle in bed did the 80% Pareto De-Brainroting me every day and changed my life
my idea of de-brainrot is by going to destinations where everything is new and experiencing everything there physically & mentally. either going to a new city or drive to a new place. i'm not sure if it's anecdotal but there's a feeling of astonishment when experiencing a new place. i find that when you go back you have this new perspective and you feel refreshed.
I have experienced a similar feeling. Often I will dream of the newly "mapped" area once I arrive home (with cartoonish/dreamlike elements that are far from perfect). After I awake from this dream I feel likewise refreshed.
Something I noticed from this post is that the immediate go-to hobby for the author when forgoing time-swallowing brainrot is learning. This has been the exact same for me. After I actively started reducing my screen time, I have seen an almost unconscious kneejerk reaction consisting in me simply learning new things. Learning for fun is awesome. Never stop.
Just this this weekend got a cabin on the Mississippi and went totally no phones or tv. Wife and I spent the weekend reading, doing yoga and playing checkers.
I have no idea how I didn't get sucked into doomscroll culture.
Facebook was the center of my life back in college (2005-2009) and for a few years after graduating. What is now my diary started its life in Facebook Notes! I had Snapchat and Instagram accounts when those came out and used MySpace and even Friendster (a bit) prior.
All of those accounts have been deleted within the last three years. Aside from me arriving to closed businesses sometimes because they announced a change of hours on Instagram instead of Google Maps or (gasp!) a website, I miss nothing.
Maybe it was me trying to build a "things to do" service and seeing how locked down, not-open and not user friendly Facebook's Graph API was (in 2014).
Or maybe it's me having grown up a sort-of computer addict (on my computer all of the time when I wasn't in school) then, during college, seeing people get sucked all the way into World of Warcraft when that was new and connecting the dots.
What I do know is that these apps are extremely good --- casino-level good --- at sucking people into their portals and keeping them there.
Consequently, this has made going about my day in modern life difficult in some ways.
Playing music off of phones used to be verboten and socially enforced. These days, blasting 1, 2, 5, 10 second blips of nonsense every few seconds is "normal."
Walking around pretty much anywhere knowing that at any moment I can get hit by someone who overran the crosswalk so they could whip out their phone and scroll is a real possibility.
Driving around --- when I choose to do so --- is equally frustrating since people will tailgate me or cut me off so they can park 30 seconds faster and spend 5, 10, 15, 20 minutes FUCKING SCROLLING.
I keep my email inbox empty, thus turning it into a to-do list of sorts. But because most people have surrendered to their 90k unread email inboxes, doing things via email can be slow and frustrating.
Then there's the double standard of criticizing AI services while (sometimes within the same breath!) citing Google AI Answers as fact or spending hours and hours building whatever with Claude or Codex or whatever, whose web crawlers continue to descend on the web like ants onto a piece of bread and make everything I used to love using (Reddit, random blogs, this fucking site) increasingly inaccessible.
I spent my vacation reading From Third World to First by Lee Kuan Yew.
And I have a couple of university textbooks (Physics and Biology) lying about, waiting for me to keep working on them.
I concur with the general feeling of it being difficult to plan much ahead. I think that learning and reading is good, and has been good basically always (just because someone else knows something doesn't mean that you shouldn't learn it too, even if this someone else is an LLM).
Anyway, I enjoyed your post and mostly feel the same (and funnily I have similar interests).
Reflecting on my life, I think there is a mind body connection. And your brain doesn't work properly unless you also exercise. The best shape (post university) and sharpest I felt is when I played tennis daily. It just seems to be a sport that improves everything; reflexes, strength, cardio, speed. And I just felt very sharp physically and mentally during period.
Hiking, and especially kayaking are like the antidote to brain rot for me now. Sitting in a kayak, watching a sunset on lake, surrounded by birds and wildlife and nature, it just kind clears your mind. Kayaking seems to have just the right amount of effort (you can go at your pace) and relaxation (provided you're in calm water) and nature and novelty, that it seems to connect you back to the world.
Interestingly, many of the former US presidents where also big fitness buffs.
Indulging in musicianship works very well, too. As in, learning a musical instrument, say classical piano, with some external guidance.
You'll have to activate parts of brain you might never had to previously, it's quite some mental gymnastics but also an immersive mind + body + aural connection. You may feel exhausted after an intensive practice session but in a very rewarding way. You'll have to learn to learn differently.
My daily de-brainrot vacation is .. playing with synthesizers. Nothing gets the webs cleared out faster than a quick jam, maybe laying down a couple loops, getting some ideas fleashed out into a bigger structure.
Music-making and musicianship in general is great de-brainrot.
Starting to learn to play the keyboard was an awesome experience for me. Unfortunately I was learning on my brother's and I don't have it anymore. I think I'll gift myself one on christmas.
When I'm on vacation I like nothing more than reading history books; it really helps transport you to another time and place, helping you to disconnect from the present and immerse yourself in your vacation.
Closer to home, surely there are work books that can teach you something new? I just picked up a fantastic academic tome called Experimental Economics by John List, to learn more about running experiments. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/E/bo250610...
For fuck sake nerds why do you overcomplicated everything.
Go to the hardware store, buy some tools and fix something on your car or house, or build a new wall or stairs or something... Or even simpler. Get a shovel Go dig a ditch and plant some trees...
Yeah, we're watching AI obsolete intellectual work in real time. Human brains simply won't be able to compete. We're not going to have to toil, we just ask for results.
This is no longer skilled labor. It's massively more productive when machines take over the thinking, but you need to look elsewhere for intellectual stimulation.
I think the „my brain isn’t the same anymore“ sensation is pretty universal.
Between addictive online media in our personal lives and AI at work, I think we’ve made mental effort largely optional.
That must be a horrible thing.
One of my favorite theories is the physical activity transition.
In my grandparents‘ generation, physical movement became more optional as work shifted from manual labor to knowledge work or operating machines and transportation became motorized.
Exercise was an ambient byproduct of daily life. Then it disappeared (exercise as a hobby was viewed as extremely weird, runners used to be arrested!) and a few decades later heart disease, diabetes, and so on became deadly epidemics.
We now know exercise is not optional for health. And we’ve reintroduced it via gyms, clubs, etc.
But that took decades. And I believe we’re now in the Mental Activity Transition.
We’ve stripped away ambient mental effort so we practice it much less.
I don’t know what the decades-long consequences of that may be, but they can’t be good.
I hope it won’t take decades for societies to rediscover its value and figure out how to reintroduce it.
I have another suggestion which doesn't contradict yours.
When I was younger I used to get bored way more often. I had to wait regularly during a week (e.g. for a bus, friend, appointment) or even at work as a software dev (e.g. compilation which used to take more time). This was also the case when doing some physical activities which didn't require lot of thoughts.
Back then, before mobile phones with internet access, you were either reading something or alone with your thoughts in those situations. This was when I had time to think back at things that happened, processing the information I had, refining ideas etc.
Nowdays those are often situations where we ingest more information like listening to podcast, reading stuff on the phone, etc... or situations that just doesn't exists anymore having optimised our work to remove those waiting points.
I personally find myself with clearer thoughts when I break those habits and give my brain some time to be bored again.
I do think there is "lack of boreness" epidemic leaving people with way more raw thoughts and way less time to process and challenge information, leading to some form of exhaustion and lack of clarity.
I have another suggestion which doesn't contradict yours:
This is only a small part of it (tech addiction 24/7 via phone); certainly there is something bigger at play, here (e.g: "the brain isn't the same anymore;" agreed).
I do not use email nor a cell phone (several years; outgoing landline, only), so I have more than enough time to ruminate (and read a few dozen books, annually) – and yet agree very much with OC's theory on needing mental health exercises to replace our newfound AGI tools/workers.
As an extremely conversive person (unbound by a cellphone), it's become an extremely strange world, particularly when talking with strangers, even in just the past two years. It's like: everybody is just mentally exhausted, mortal.
I know I am.
–Phoneless
Maybe we’re just getting older.
As a young person, I can at least anecdotally say the same thing is happening to people who, while older, ain't old yet.
>>We get wise too late...
>>...and old too soon.
>>–Danish Proverb
----
At early-forties, I don't think I count as "young" anymore.
Definitely: growing up without a cell phone was beautiful. I still remember driving around semi-lost, using paper maps, quite fondly (I still print directions).
My last partner (eight years my junior) "grew up on her cellphone" and it was just remarkable how fucked her brain was... at least different from my own landlined-childhood POV (e.g: attention-span; need for constant contact).
----
And yet, my brain also enmushifies (lately: increasingly).
It is questionable what is, at present day, considered young and old (and particularly during mid-forties), as life expectancy doubled last century from roughly ~40 to ~80 years. which makes everyone in their forties old by ... olden standards and mid-life at current ones.
if we get to live through the (forthcoming or already unfolding) singularity, there's a fair chance new life standards extend to 140-180 years*, with medicine, yoga, nootropics** and all.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Maximum ** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nootropic
Forties isn’t old. You might not have the energy reserves of a younger person, but you shouldn’t feel like your brain is mush.
I’m a professional theoretical physicist in my 40s and I never thought the day would come that I would realize I became shit at mental math. I can do quantum physics in my head but don’t ask me to add 17 to 34
Thanks for mentioning this. It makes me feel better about stumbling with metal math in front of some colleagues that are faster.
As a young person, I have no idea what you guys are talking about, and recommend not overgeneralizing from anecdotes.
Ratio /s
> It's like: everybody is just mentally exhausted, mortal.
Very much this. I think a lot of it is that the "slack" of our lives is being eliminated little bit by little bit to improve "productivity", and in so doing it is making life harder, mentally and physically, in ways that we don't really grasp because we're the frog being boiled. We are more "productive" and "efficient" than ever, but we're not happier or living better lives, and a lot of that I think is due to us eking out the last bit of gain for our work lives and leaving nothing left in the tank for when we aren't working.
This three day weekend, I only really felt like I could do things today, but now I have to go back to work tomorrow. Wouldn't it be great if I didn't need 2-3 days just to become a normal person again every time I don't have to work? Wouldn't it be great if I could use at least one day on the weekend every weekend to do something of personal interest rather than mental recovery in a fog?
I’m a champion of boredom. I really feel it’s a life skill. Personally, I do all kinds of things to create space for boredom. But really it’s my kids where I want them to experience some boredom and structure my parenting style somewhat around creating space for their boredom. On their own, they would never be bored a moment of their life. There’s too any screens and amounts of content available and my kids don’t even use the internet/SM, yet.
I doubt that's the only factor, but I agree that it's almost certainly a factor. The modern "tech" industry has filled our waking hours with unceasing demands to do something. Buy this product, watch this video, listen to this podcast, react to this social media post; even "practice self-care" has somehow turned into an obligatory virtue-cultivating task. We obviously had advertising before, but this is a different beast, something akin to living in a casino.
As Bo Burnham put it, "apathy's a tragedy and boredom is a crime".
I too subscribe to theory that "being bored" was an important part of our day to day lives. I think it gave us time to basically decompress and "defragment" our minds, and that is also when a lot of novel ideas or clarifications would come to us. Now having 24/7 entertainment at the tips of our fingers is almost completely removing this extra time from us, and there is much less processing that actually happens.
Definitely. Much of the structure of internet media encourages constant, passive consumption. Or, to use the terms of the grandparent, we move traded ambient thinking, reflection, and imagination, which the brain is pushed into during boredom, for ambient consumption.
I think a lot of people believe that, as long as they consume "high quality" or more intellectual content, the negative effects of constant consumption are mitigated, but I think that's false. It's less about the content and more about the structure and process. If you never give your brain moments to stop basic processing of wildly different inputs and to just critically examine them instead, you will suffer brain rot, even if the content you consume is "educational".
Yes. And I'd also add that so much of it is about context and intention.
If you intentionally sit down to enjoy some low-brow entertainment (Maybe a silly action movie or a mediocre rom-com) because you enjoy that, great.
But I recently realized that there are podcast episodes from 10 years ago that I still remember parts of, but few from recent years, even though I've listened to far more podcasts (and they haven't become less intellectual).
Sleep is also a forced meditation, so we can't avoid processing information. But in a different way of course.
We can totally avoid (being conscious of) processing stuff during sleep too. Just take some SSRIs or smoke weed and you wake up in the next day. I think that that has more effect on people than people realize, dreaming is important but many people don’t experience that side of things any more.
I get the wildest dreams. Lately it's nonstop cardio in my dreams. It's been like this for weeks. It is not relaxing, I don't know why my sleeping self won't just rest. Instead I have to spend the night dancing or jumping from moving train cars like frogger, climbing to the tops of high places, or just straight up running at a sprint for hours.
> just sleep and wake up
This is my default experience. Falling asleep, then waking up an unknown amount of time later as if nothing happened. Maybe I don’t pay attention to my dreams
If that's the case, you are missing the most important aspect of your life.
glib bullshit
I suspect you mean benzos or Z-drugs not SSRIs based on context.
That seems less likely then people being tired and stressed from the costs of living and the increased economic instability.
We have smartphones but we're perilously few missed pay cheques away from not having a house, with a capital class gleefully telling everyone how they'll all be unemployable very soon.
It would be the greatest irony if failing to manage the economic fallout of the coming AI revolution had a larger negative impact than the benefit it brings
We might just run into the worst recession in history as the heavily skewed service economy quickly runs out of customers who can afford to pay for it
We're already several years into the worst economic depression in history. People aren't having children because they cannot afford a home. But it can get worse of course.
The kids thing isn’t an economic thing, read the paper about the iPhone basically being birth control…
> the worst economic depression in history
You need to touch grass, friend. I am as concerned with the direction of things as anyone, but this is extreme hyperbole.
Being bored, showering etc is well known to engage the DMN (Default Mode Network) where your brain connects pieces together from larger, more distant areas together. We as a society are missing this and its obvious.
It's possible that I'm in your grandparent's generation, or maybe your parents. I'm 65. I don't want to derail the conversation, but I do want to correct the bit about "exercise as a hobby was viewed as extremely weird, runners used to be arrested!". In the '70s at least, running was extremely normal. Endurance bicycling was normal. For instance, starting in 1979. I bicycled all over the South: FL GA NC, at least. These were then as they are now quite provincial from the POV of alternate ideas. 10K runs were a thing, with thousands of participants. As were Marathons. Cross country running was a popular high school sport.
If you want to talk about work, well I'm adjacent to 5th generation farmers. Self driving climate controlled machinery is a thing now, but! hard to imagine I know, people had tractors back then too.
So, plausible as it might sound to ascribe some of the causality to flow from "the physical activity transition", I don't think it holds up.
I think the physical activity transition they are describing would have been closer to the end of the 19th century when mechanization really started to take hold (e.g. the car)
I can't remember which decade he's talking about or verify his claims, but in Shoe Dog the creator of Nike talks about how running for exercise was viewed as very weird in the last century, and he implies that Adidas pretty much singlehandedly changed public perception on this. Not that nobody did it, but that it was considered very weird and rare.
He was only talking about running, not exercise in general, but I seem to remember Schwarzenegger reflecting similarly about the public perception of weight lifting
I think he was full of shit. I wasn’t around then myself but know tons of people who trained for their sports by jogging.
I'm about 5 years younger and yes running and exercise was popular in the 1970s. Maybe not quite like today in terms of people really spending a lot of money on gyms, personal trainers, and expensive bikes or equipment, but certainly not considered weird.
>I think the „my brain isn’t the same anymore“ sensation is pretty universal.
I disagree with the premise that you're propping up with the exercise example; I disagree that humans are thinking less because of mechanisms available in society.
if anything I think people are thinking more than they ever have, and that has triggered a lot of people into overthinking themselves into a quagmire of inaction , judgement, and group-think.
Telling codex how to program a feature is a much different, much easier type of thinking than back in the olden days of a year ago, when I had to get everything to work myself. I can't imagine that's going to be great for my long-term brain health.
This only holds when you keep the task fixed and compare with and without AI. But because AI changed expectations the difficulty of work we supervise today is much higher. My theory is that AI runs our brains just as hard as no-AI, maybe harder. That is if you want to have high quality outputs, not for slop.
Certainly, AI is allow us to 10x our code, but also 10x our mental work. Steve Yegge calls this the AI Vampire[0] and it does effect us, more so than TV or old school social media ever did. My father went through a stroke a few years ago, and is now always online. He blames the stroke for his brain fog, but I still feel that the modern day dopamine addiction is a huge factor.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/software-engineer-steve-yegg...
I think it feels that way because there's much more waiting and context switching, which is tiring
Yeah I think this is also true. Maybe "thinking less" is the wrong framing. Whether it's an excess or a deficiency of thinking, there's definitely a lack of straining cognitive activity.
It might be reading books, pondering deep ideas, painting a landscape, doing software engineering, or solving crossword puzzles.
But all of those are happening much less due (in my opinion) to the factors I described.
I agree with this. We can think of anything and nothing can prevent that at all. I have to go therapy to be told, it's okay to not think 24/7.
But this quagmire of inaction, judgement and group-think is older than technology though. Just because social media wasn't available before didn't mean there weren't "mechanisms" of society to channel those impulses into. So why do you think people are thinking more than before and why this quagmire is a modern invention? Like how are we measuring what people are thinking and what people are not thinking?
I understand its your subjective opinion but I would like to know what basis your claim stands upon. Just like more easy information so people overthink?
Quick example which just happened, my adult son is starting a new job and was looking at the bus schedules to work out what time he would need to leave the house. One bus runs "every 15-20 minutes" and he has to transfer to another bus that runs on a schedule. So he wanted to know what time he had to be at the first bus stop to be on time to work in a worst-case scenario. This problem he presented to Gemini because he just didn't want to think about it.
I look at ads on TV for AI platforms and the examples they show, of course they are a bit contrived, silly, or funny for effect but they always make me feel a bit uneasy... like why do you even have a job if you're using AI to do everything while you just dance around your desk or spin in your chair?
For public transit in my city they have an official website where you can type in where you are and where you want to go and it plan it all for you. Can choose from arrive asap to picking a time when you want to depart or a time you want to arrive. This has been operational since 2002.
More recently Google Maps has the same functionality and it will work in many cities across the world.
I think their broader point is that it's becoming common to reach for an AI chat to solve problems that should take a few seconds of thinking to solve. Notably this kind of thing is not a search problem, since you presumably already know the schedules for both busses and just need to come up with a reasonable allowance for schedules not lining up properly.
The neurologists and neurotherapists for a family member who is a stroke survivor have been pretty consistent in saying that cardiovascular exercise and regular social engagement seem to be the most promising activities to stem cognitive decline.
Yes, I think both things can be true. And also, we haven't had decades of mental activity being mostly optional, so we're not yet seeing the consequences nor science of long-term impact.
In the 1950s, many doctors were convinced that exercise was actively harmful and running was dangerous.
We know already what's happening after decade of optional thinking: electing dumass Presidents, walking the same path than Germany about 100 years ago, cut scientific research, social nets, etc.
We know already what's happening with optional thinking.
> runners used to be arrested!
This reminds me of Ray Bradbury's excellent short story, _The Pedestrian_: https://www.libraryofshortstories.com/onlinereader/the-pedes...
IIRC, this story also informed and inspired _Fahrenheit 451_.
>I think the „my brain isn’t the same anymore“ sensation is pretty universal.
One would hope so, but there are countless people that believe this can't ever be the case, and it's just lack of personal motivation that's the problem.
Yes, this is a big issue. I really think these things are basically like cigarettes used to be when they were ubiquitous.
I'd have a hard time blaming someone in the 1930s for being addicted to cigarettes. Everyone constantly smoked everywhere and their harm was rumored, but not proven.
Try to quit smoking in that environment: the thing you're trying to get away from is inescapable and it's not even clear why you should quit. They might blame themselves for not being motivated enough.
We're in that exact environment for the things I describe above.
>> I think the „my brain isn’t the same anymore“ sensation is pretty universal.
Another pretty universal thing is that we compare to younger versions of ourselves. That might explain the gap.
If that was the case it would be a constant throughout history.
And often it's also just "compared to 5 or 10 years ago" not 20s vs 40s or 50s.
If AI at work is rotting everyone's brain then it should be like a superpower to be unemployed. But that doesn't seem to be the case...
That's because the folks who are unemployed, unfortunately, are largely those who already were further down the curve. We're destroying the minds of those who were supposed to move society forward and gaining nothing elsewhere.
I struggle to understand this. I use AI quite regularly and find it frees up hours of my day to do consequential “understanding” work that previously got eaten up by there literally not being enough hours in a day to solve my own problems and understand others enough to help them solve theirs.
I've been thinking about this as well.
Certainly we will have mental gyms in the future.
I think they exist already... Crosswords, sudokus and puzzles have long been popular. Has the world also forgotten the brain training craze of the naughties?
Additionally, everyone seems to have forgotten that covid can leave lingering mental symptoms for years after “recovery”. I wonder how much of the mental fatigue/ brain fog that people blame on tech is actually from covid…
It's not just COVID, either. You can get brain fog effects from a variety of things. The first and biggest is sleep apnea (woefully underdosed).
Plenty of things can develop as you grow older. Some of them may have been present all your life and you only start to notice them when your body is a little less resilient. Food sensitivities, for instance -- eat the wrong thing, trigger a major release of histamines (which trigger both the stomach acid and a whole-body response). Too much of that releases other neurotransmitters, too, and you can get Depression and Fatigue too. (And then try changing the whole way you eat while at the bottom of a depressive slump where all the easiest foods are the likeliest triggers!!) Autistic people (plenty of us in tech) are especially predisposed to many of these inflammation-related issues.
If you're brain fogged, see the doctor... and be prepared for a long slog of self advocacy, and maybe shopping around.
I have bad news for you: for the majority of the population mental effort was always a foreign concept. That's exactly what got us in this mess in the first place.
Not sure if always but probably there's a rise of anti-intellectualism in general since I'd say the 2000s. I remember being amazed by how intelligent adults were when I was little. Always doing cross-words, sudoku, reading books, discussing the classics, etc. But now those same adults don't read anything anymore, and just spend their time watching netflix on bed. The same adults that used to correct my vocabulary, grammar and ortography, somehow forgot the meaning of slightly obscure words and don't remember if a certain word was written with an "s" or "c" for example.
I think the anti-intellectualism crisis gets mischaracterized. Common rejection of experts, academia, and empirical findings is certainly a part of it, but I tend to see more of an issue with targeted, self-serving ignorance, particularly among the elite.
You have extremely intelligent and influential people balking at, say, the undeniable net benefits of universal healthcare, renewable energy investment, and cash payment UBI.
Worse, they use their intelligence to attack interventions that run against their preconceived notions. Milton Friedman was not an idiot, and yet he and his acolytes did (and do) untold damage in anti-intellectual perpetuation of their outmoded ideas.
The common thread between that and skipping conversation for Netflix is disengagement with cognitive load that doesn't immediately benefit you. They both suck, but I think that one hurts more, and hurts more.
This second thing (either slightly different from anti-intellectualism or maybe a different form of it$l) is quite odd. I wonder where it comes from. Sometimes it feels like we have a strong bias toward surprising effects, to the point where we’ll start treating the first “possible, counter intuitive hypothesis” as if it ought to be the default assumption. I wonder to what extent that’s a natural thing, or to what extent it is the result of consuming pop-sci content that has to start with “Rebel scientist overturns conventional wisdom…”
I'm sorry but just because I disagree with cash payment UBI doesn't mean I'm not anti-intellectual.
Surely that much ought to be clear if you give it a little more thought, no pun intended.
I don't think that's true. Even if you think about what was considered junk entertainment decades ago, they still required much more cognitive effort.
Reading about a celebrity breakup in a gossip magazine requires more cognitive effort than hearing about the same breakup in a gossip TikTok:
-You consumed the thing for minutes at a time vs. seconds at a time and your brain had to actively decipher something, not just passively perceive.
-You had to read and couldn't do it while also doing something else, which meant you were more focused.
-You couldn't swipe in a split-second and have another equally stimulating thing that might be completely different, which meant you were more intentional about your mental context.
The medium in which we consume something absolutely matters, independent of what we decide to consume.
I mean, I’d argue that the overwhelming majority of the populous is not doing physical activity as they should. Even in a future with gym “for the mind”, I also assume attendance to be low.
We have 'gym for the mind' now in the form of puzzles (eg crosswords, quizes). It's a different sort of complexity to writing assembly or proving mathematical identities ... most people weren't doing those things though. I'm more concerned that as a species rigorous education is giving way to machine-learning.
I think running down the road is still suspicious and to get you stopped by the cops (not arrested per se I’m not sure that ever happened…) which is why runners wear a uniform.
As someone who started their software engineering career in 1988 and is at the tail end of it, I can report that my peers and I have experienced the same thing, even as we start retiring.
What we didn’t have was constant dopamine hits. It took effort to get dopamine. A lot. I’ve struggle with doomscrolling in my 50’s, just like teenagers, except I remember a time when it didn’t exist. I think that’s the key: if all you’ve ever had is velveeta, you’re going to have to work twice as hard to unlock the pleasure some stinky washed rind raw milk French cheese.
I agree with the author, I think reading books is the only way out, and extend that to analog activities. An analogy is fast-twitch muscles: they respond quickly, but burn their ATP faster. You have to operate at an oxygen deficit for about 10 minutes before your analog/aerobic system kicks in. Same thing with any analog activity like reading, you have to put the monkey-brain to sleep.
"Fifteen years ago, the internet was an escape from the real world. Now the real world is an escape from the internet." https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-internet-wants-to-be-fragm...
7.5 years ago it was perfect
I think this answer depends on age. For me, it was up until right around 2014. That’s when, I think, social media and mobile phones unlocked a number of generally unproductive behavior both personally and in business.
The early 2000s were truly great.
A number of years ago I had a period of my life where I decided to shut my laptop for a while.
I was working as a line cook and trying to find time and energy to code study so I could land a role in software (no degree). I was really struggling with my mental health and was having issues making or maintaining progress in pretty much any area of my life.
I got a new job, cooking breakfast in a small mountain town at a bakery. Before I left I sold my laptop and borrowed a bunch of books from some friends.
I really did feel much better a few months later. Taking the time to decompress allowed me to get my priorities in order and surface some biases / blind spots I had. I ended up re-enrolling in school the next spring and am now happily employed in software.
I don’t think the modality is particularly important - coding vs reading vs anything else - but taking the time to put your goals away for a little while and decompress can make you more effective in actually reaching them
Lots of thinkers throughout history have pointed this out (David Hume and Seneca are the first 2 that spring to mind, but I'm sure there are hundreds more). Our mind doesn't work correctly when it's constantly focused, and as much as we think scrolling is not focusing, it is. The part of your brain that lights up and pays attention is active when you're zooming through content. There's nothing wrong with it, but like everything the dose makes the poison. You have to take breaks and balance it against other mental modes.
One formulation I like is the Kethledge and Erwin definition of solitude. They say that solitude is not so much physical isolation as it is a lack of input from other minds. What electronic media do (among many other effects) is flood your consciousness with the presence of other minds. Even if that mind is deranged, anti-social, or even pleasant, your own thought gets crowded out. I'm a huge reader, and I realize even books do this, although less oppressively than electronic media, which is why I think people imagine them as antidotes to this problem. But I think maybe the most important thing is to take a rest and don't let anyone else talk to you for a time, either in person or via media.
This essay I read recently speaks about solitude in a way you might find interesting. Basically how valuable it is to be in solute but also become sensitive to how it feels when you’re not getting influenced by other minds, as you say. https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/good-ideas
Turns out t-breaks works for social media too if you admit it's an addiction that it is. When you are in it day in and day out you don't realize how much time it's costing you without the benefits that you signed up for at the beginning.
Going on social media to talk about not going on social media. It's at least 50% as effective as actually not going on social media.
Actually it’s about -100%, in fact. Given that talking about not being on social media is just another excuse for you to go on social media. Self-defeating and, honestly, quite dishonest.
In fact, doing this might be even worse than just doomscrolling, given that all you’re doing is massaging your own ego while doing absolutely nothing in favour of actualising what you are preaching.
Come on HN is not social media, it doesn't even show cat memes
SVG pelicans count
This is something I've felt very deeply intuitively. (It's also something that it feels like my life actively optimizes against to prevent me being able to do it.)
Just want to say hello fellow culinary -> software engineer migrator.
Now you two just need to figure out the eventual transition into woodworking and you've officially done the lot ;)
A couple of times now I have walked a stretch of the Camino de Santiago (each time it was just a small bit near the end; sadly don't have the time off to do a full route which can take a month or longer). I find the simplicity of it super rewarding and enjoyable compared to my busy life back home. Just, for the most part, miles and miles of peaceful countryside.
It's kind of the opposite of what is described in the article, where the author is using his time off to improve his knowledge in other areas. Personally, I find that back home I am constantly thinking, both at work and in my time off, so much so that I forget what the end goal of all that thinking actually is. So doing these long walks helps me take a break from that and put it in perspective. No laptop, as little smartphone use as possible, I will maybe read a book or two in the evenings but nothing too heavy, etc.
As an aside, I am in a non-tech field, and programming is my hobby (and nothing like my day job). I enjoy it and I think it helps me stay sharp, but it has its drawbacks as a hobby. Being a solo hobby, and not one that many people in my field are into, it's not really something I can easily bond with others over (unlike, say, golf or chess). And sometimes it can be the opposite of relaxing when you encounter a bug that you can't seem to diagnose or fix.
Programming doesn't have to be a solo hobby.
Chess for me is not a social hobby, I've tried, but I can either have a conversation or play chess. I'm pretty sure the limited ability I had to do both has waned over the years too.
I used to read fairly voraciously as a child; nothing like the kids who could devour a Harry Potter book between sunrises, but a respectable "novel every 2-3 weeks", somewhat above my grade level.
I can remember almost the exact instant I fell off: being dissatisfied with a particular turn in a YA novel in 9th grade, and the odd moments that had been filled with page-turning suddenly became designated for sketching and doodling (at the height of deviantArt's power).
I don't think I finished a single class-read novel in high school; hated Wuthering Heights and beloved (on vibes) L'Etranger alike are a blur. (Still aced the AP exams.) I knew it was really over when I had to drop a classical literature course in college because I couldn't keep up with the readings.
I've a few dozen unfinished books in the ~15 years since, and less than a dozen finished ones. 1Q84 has been a multi-year odyssey.
I've introspected about what's gone "wrong". My reading speed is quite slow, and has never progressed, which I think is a major part of it. I often become distracted, stopping a little too frequently to mull things over - really, squaring the reading with my preconceived notions, which was not as much of an issue when I was younger and had fewer of them.
I also stress over finding time to begin reading in the first place, and about being disconnected from reality when I'm in a book's headspace.
I'd love to know if anyone's had a similar experience and can boast a "recovery" (and how they managed).
I had a similar drop off in high school. For me it happened when the volume of assigned reading, particularly summer reading, crowded out all of the reading for pleasure. I just never started back up after that, despite fits and starts over the years.
I decided that I wanted to change about three years ago.
The first thing that helped was finding a book that I really wanted to finish and that I saw as a challenge. I tend to be motivated by challenges. Instead of “I want to get back to regular reading”, it was “I want to finish this one book no matter what”.
Second, I bought an e-reader that let me set the margins and text size to old man settings, such that there are only a few lines per screen. My mind wanders easily, especially when it feels like there’s an ocean of text on a page, so less text and frequent page turns helped me keep my momentum up and avoid constant wandering and re-reading.
As much as we all hate commutes here, getting a job that has me back in the office has had a silver lining in that time on the train is scheduled, routine time where I can’t do something else. I made the decision that it would not be dead time, so I religiously put my phone in my bag, get my book out, and focus on it for the 40 minutes until my destination.
I am a relatively slow reader like you, but much like exercise, sticking to a routine has meant slow but noticeable improvement. I think of myself as a book reader again, and I’ve made it over the hump where sustained concentration feels effortful. You can do it!
I noticed you listed all fiction here. Do you ever try reading nonfiction? You might just need something more concrete to hold your attention rather than fictitious characters in imaginary scenarios.
Another thing I suggest to lots of people is to try audiobooks. It's not the same as traditional reading, but it's way better than not reading at all. Sometimes I use a screen reader on my laptop and follow along with my eyes. I've noticed this allows me to read something for much longer and the comprehension feels stronger.
Also, I wouldn't worry about finishing books if that's hard for some people. If something doesn't hold your interest, there's no point in slogging through it just so you can earn your imaginary 'finished' trophy. Especially for fiction.
I read a ton so I can’t really relate directly; but I will say to try out thrillers. Most are written to keep you reading, because you want to see what happens next.
Personally this usually means 20th century detective fiction (Chandler, Hammett, etc.) but there are a lot of modern writers that fit the same bill. Harlan Coben is a good example, if a bit “generic thriller.”
I made a “recovery” and unfortunately the method I used is the boring one - discipline. I found that I was using social media to distract myself from anxiety, so I started going for a half hour run first thing in the morning, followed by an hour of reading. This required me to get up very early, but I found that the leftover endorphins from running helped me focus on the book and not the anxiety.
And don’t bother finishing 1Q84, you could read like four better Murakami books for the same time investment
re; last paragraph
Have had a similar experience, fixed by curing depression and taking vyvanse for adhd, then learning to manage being on vyvanse
Thanks for this post, I can truly relate. Some thoughts from a 50+ year old genx guy (EE/CS) who’s worked to stay current and keep a sharp mind in the face of these challenges plus the inevitable age-related decline:
- regular exercise has incredible benefits for the body+ mind (and the attitude that directs it). Biggest impact of everything on this list.
- Side projects that involve actual doing and not just study. e.g. I spent some money on gear for embedded development and am doing things that involve physical things and using my hands and making gadgets … phone is out of the picture while in the lab.
- Ironically, using LLMs for reviewing and refreshing knowledge you once had but now has gaps is amazing. I spend a bunch of my phone time now having in-depth chats where I know what I’m talking about to a large degree, but the LLM is helping me fill in gaps and then quizzing me on concepts and I know that the things it’s telling me are solid due to my background, then I go check, etc. A really good way to do super focused study to reload a field back into your brain. Might as well take advantage of the fact that they stole all of the world books.
- Write things down! After reviewing, do some problems with pencil and pad. After studying, doing a problem on pencil and paper is actually daunting, but then grooving through a few problems actually makes you realize you know the stuff again! And using an expensive Ampad notebook and nice mech pencil is a great sensory experience.
I spend a big chunk of my summers in nowhere cow-ville France (la Creuse). No Michelin star restaurants, no art galleries, no shopping worth note. Just landscapes, hiking, lakes and slower life. BUT what surprises me most is how often I describe this to people, even the French, and they’re like “why / pourquoi ?!” Is it not obvious? There’s a reason people say they need a vacation after their vacation. I think it’s that people are expecting too much of their vacations.
> vacation after their vacation
Having a family, the best rest for me is the 2-3 days when I'm back at work after vacation. No kids running around, no need to plan anything, just slowly going through hundreds of already irrelevant emails, pretending to do something productive, sipping coffee while telling everyone that I'm "catching up, sorry, can't help ya".
Sounds like there's two kinds of vacations, the one to relax, decompress, slow down and go offline for a bit, and the one where you explore the world and experience new things. Both are valid, and combining the two is great.
I'm now thinking of USAmericans taking a eurotrip and visiting a different city every day. I hope some of them mix it up and stay in cowville, France for a few days.
> Both are valid, and combining the two is great.
I'm a big fan of combining the two.
When I spent 3 weeks in Türkiye solo traveling (from the US) I tried to have a few home bases. For example 5 full days of hiking 15-20 km in Cappadocia, 3 days near Selçuk and the rest in Istanbul.
You wouldn't think a massive city like Istanbul would be relaxing but it is when you're out of your hotel for 15 hours a day on foot with nothing but a list of bullet points that don't depend on planning anything ahead of time other than to make sure the thing you want to see is open when you're near the area.
Everyone is different but for me, I like not needing to be at X location at Y time a bunch of times in a row. A few of those are fine, but it can't be a majority of the trip. I try to treat road trips the same, 3-4 nights per stop (maybe 2 nights if it's a smaller place).
Time to decompress and explore is important IMO. Walking around while seeing new things is the ultimate form of decompression for me.
Was lucky enough to spend a week in Rome this summer, and even that was not enough time (and I've been before, still not enough combined time). It's wild when I hear about people hitting 4 different EU cities in the same time period, sounds exhausting.
I quit paris to work on the coast to sail at least every two weekends (and took up foiling for the evenings), I'd say I now need way, way less vacations than I used to.
For a more truly "web-native" treatment of math, see https://www.mathacademy.com/. I've also heard good stuff about https://physicsgraph.com/ for physics.
I was a university student around the time the iPhone came out. I stuck with a motorola razor until I graduated. I think back on the DAILY grind of university amd the consistent context switching between challenging studies that were so varied: analog circuits, aeronautical engineering, practicing foreign language, along with the other demands of working and ask how did I manage that cognitive load?
I think the brainrot is less noticeable when I fill my schedule, but when I have time off my brain atrophies IFF I emable brainrot.
Reading books, picking solid podcasts, or journaling leaves my brain feeling refreshed.
I feel this is the next wave of 'clean your processed diet up' or 'mind the tobacco'
I’m married and have kids so there’s always something going on in my life and I don’t get many opportunities for “peace and quiet”.
What works wonders for me is swimming. I only do front crawl so I’m basically staring at the bottom of the pool for the entire duration of the swim. It’s incredibly boring. But something happens in my head, I can just think better. I will often take a problem from work and mull it over in the water, and very often I come up with either a solution or otherwise put it in perspective or some other strategy to deal with it.
Highly recommend. Also at my age (mid-40s), some form of movement that is gentle on the joints is appreciated.
Just take Baby Rudin and a serious stack of paper with you on these holidays and you should be set.
My two experiences of de-brainrotting:
1. Doing a pilgrimage walk in Japan with a cleared phone home screen. Only the Gaia GPS app on there with the route, and some other local weather and mapping applications. No consumption of anything external during the day. Just steady walking and eating and looking around. It was excellent. You can probably do this anywhere given the right context and commitment.
2. We slept several nights in a hut at 2100m altitude in the Austrian Alps just out of range of cell reception so the icon on my phone was "satellite" all the time. It turns out that without the possibility of communication or fresh input, you can read a bit on your kindle in the evening and then go KO at around 22:00 sleeping like a rock until 06:30. Such an amazing amount of rest and refreshment just from a simple accident of geography.
When I got fired a few months ago—which I'd somewhat anticipated since the CTO was becoming ever more temperamental—I took the money I'd aggressively not spent and decided to spend the summer doing things I enjoyed, letting the stages of grief subside, and letting myself get bored, instead of trying to force myself to AI this or that or even apply to more than a few jobs. I turned off my website that I wasn't doing anything with anyway, and I've been letting my brain churn on the prospect of leaving software entirely. I still don't feel confident that if I do spend the time trying to land another contract, that it'll be a fruitful endeavor, nor if I pursue something else, but I've got some great hiking done, spent lots of time with family and friends, and I'm glad I haven't wasted it while being mired in the swamp of anxiety that I presume a more Type A person would. It was cheap to buy this time, and it's better to buy it back when it can be spent doing physically adventurous things.
I may go back to applying for the few jobs around, or I might decide it's such an unlikely venture that I'll just see if I can meet someone on a hiring team at a climbing gym or something. Either way, I don't really care to spend much of it behind a screen until winter rolls around.
My suggestion is to get a plain old bicycle (not an electric or stationary bike). One hour outdoors on a bike clears away at least a day’s worth of mental detritus for me.
This is the first time I see webmention used anywhere. Idea seems to be good, but it is not used for some reason https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webmention
> not used for some reason
Spam https://www.miriamsuzanne.com/2022/06/09/the-spam/
And also readers not using it. So far I’ve gotten no legit webmention on any post. But I keep it hoping that some day someone will make a reply post and it will be magical
There’s a lot of folks doing their own thing over at https://indieweb.org/ if you want to dig in further.
> Nothing is that novel anymore, and solving day to day problems, more than requiring mental exhaustion, mostly require spending some time at them
I felt this too recently and I linked it to excessive passive information grazing exacerbated by AI. Symptoms of this are being in a daze or mental fog, and not being in touch with the feeling of curiosity. Reading doesnt help since for me, reading is passive process of meme gathering. What helps in my view is effortful creation in the form of writing code, hand writing essays, creating music etc.
I don’t and never have particularly enjoyed reading. I am a fast consumer of information and data, as that has tickled my brain ever since I was a small child which looking back, completely explains my career path.
That said, I enjoy going deep on things by learning and playing around, a very much hands on learner. My other issue I have is that with hobbies or interests, because I strive to become an “expert” in terms of knowledge as quickly as possible and am very good at it, I often lose interest in hobbies as I quickly realize that the difference between an expert in something and a Master in that thing is usually simply time/decades and I don’t have that kind of patience.
Two hobbies that I’ve found in the past few years that have been extremely beneficial to helping me decompress while still holding my attention.
1/ Deciding to finally learn Guitar. It’s a common one for sure, but I approach it from a pure enjoyment standpoint and put zero pressure on actually getting better. It’s something I usually pick up a couple of times a week and play, I’ll find videos of tutorials and give them a try, just kind of random exploring while getting slowly better. It’s been nice
2) Growing rare Cacti, Succulents and Caudex plants in my basement. They require very little attention, most needing water every 2 weeks or so and leaving them for vacations or other activities is of zero concern. After only a year or two I only grow from seed, focusing on extremely rare, newly discovered, or under researched species as that scratches my itch of continuing to learn. Though again, I keep it purely an enjoyment activity and find myself just sitting there looking at my plants, enjoying them and appreciating their weird nature.
> I don’t and never have particularly enjoyed reading. I am a fast consumer of information and data, as that has tickled my brain ever since I was a small child which looking back, completely explains my career path.
I thought I was the same way until I decided to buy a book on a whim from a guy slinging books from the back of a Japanese kei truck two years ago. Cheesecake by Mark Kurlansky. I love Cheesecake; how could I not read a book about it.
Haven't stopped reading since.
I suggest things such as building an "offline room" like an 80s/90s living room setup complete with a thrifted CRT TV, old game consoles, VCRs, shag carpets, old lamps, woodgrain walls, physical books, instruction manuals, etc.
Yeah, I have a room like that but I never stay in it. No screens.
Never go full Philip J. Fry.
The best de-brain rot vacation I had so far was on a remote island in Raja Ampat: it wasn't about the island being remote, but about spotty internet access. It was just the correct amount of spotty: enough for text to load and IMs to go through, but not enough for any serious photo or video content. I was able to get YouTube to download videos in 240p on one end of the island, but I had to be picky about what I select. After two weeks I felt like my old self again, but unfortunately, it popped like a bubble after just a few days.
Yes. This is my favorite way to vacation, and I'm glad someone has found a better name for it. I do not enjoy simply sitting around idle and occasionally going on a trip, I end my time off feeling drained and need a vacation from my vacation. One year, I had an itch to try my hand at Godot and game programming, and I saved it for my next vacation. I'd never felt more relaxed after a vacation, it's the same as what the author describes: I like being intellectually stimulated, I just needed a break from work, not from trying new things.
This article has helped me figure out some of what made that work, and has given me some ideas of how to try to capture that again.
Staycations are another name for this, but for these vacations I didn't stay home so idk if it applies here.
I find staycations to be the same thing as a vacation but at home. Especially if you liv in more touristy places (NYC for instance), there's plenty of vacationy things you can take while not leaving more than 10 miles from your house. I like going to the beach or to my parents or what not (even going on trips), but I still need something to keep my mind busy. I hope that sums up the difference well.
> Add to that videogames, comics/manga, TV shows, etc, and I literally just can’t get bored anymore.
It's a bit strange to me (and I figure I'm just unusual in this respect), but all of those things lead me quickly to boredom these days. It's the brain rottenness of it all that leads me to be bored, and in a way I'm thankful for it. I find that even compared to my childhood, I'm more bored today than I've ever been.
Wipes screen
Oh, it's just the blog's theme...
I recognize myself in the first paragraph (except being totally exhausted to the point having to sleep). And I started working as a SWE 4 years ago (so full dopamine brainrot access). Maybe it is because I have a reasonable usage of LLMs?
> Add to that the usage of AI. While I know I’m way more productive than during those first months, my thoughts are getting slower, less profound, lazier.
I have mostly stayed away from LLM usage, I think I am better for it. I use it just to offload things I wouldn't have had time for. I get more stuff done, but I am still doing what I did before.
> Plus, dopamine is available at just a tap on my phone. There’s a ton of content in shorts that interest me and require little to no investment on my end, both time and effort-wise.
If you have and Android phone, enable Developer Options and flick through to Simulated Color Space - set it to Monochrome. I only wish it was possible to automate colour space switching based on time, like is done for redshift.
You can do the same on iOS in the Accessibility settings. I have my phone set up so that I can toggle the monochrome filter by double tapping the back of the device. I keep it in black and white but can switch back to colour easily if I need to show someone a photo.
If you have an iPhone, you can configure it as an Accessibility shortcut (triple-press side button to switch to monochrome ans back).
for the time-based monochrome setting, check out DetoxDroid on F-Droid!
Last year I took my parents' caravan and put it in bumfuck retirement home nowhere, spent a week just riding my motorcycle through that section of the country, reading, listening to music, and painting Warhammer figurines. Little human contact. It was boring and unstimulating, but also almost the opposite of my usual daily grind.
> Nothing is that novel anymore, and solving day to day problems, more than requiring mental exhaustion, mostly require spending some time at them.
You're the largest fish in your bowl, time to move to a larger bowl. It's OK to be comfortable but if you're unhappy there's always another level to aim for.
Thankfully I'm happy where I am for now. Bigger bowls would require life choices that not only would affect me, but also my family. I'm really grateful for the position I'm in currently.
I think it’s great that we’re discussing this more often as time goes on. This is not the first post I’ve read this month about this topic, and that’s a good sign.
I also think it takes a certain level of intelligence to be able to _notice_ these shifts in mental load.
A lot of people are going through this same thing, but their response isn’t “i need to unplug, slow down, and let my mind reset,” it’s quite literally the opposite - they scroll more, binge more, swipe more. Mostly because they aren’t aware of why they feel the way they do.
The more we discuss this issue, openly, the more likely it is we’ll bring attention to it to those people who are currently unaware of why they feel so empty all the time, despite never being more occupied.
And it is a massive problem. The complete overflow of impressions you get from mindless scrolling is really not talked about enough. Before you realize it, you begin forgetting important tasks, rationalizing wasting your time and showing up late to things. Please take back your life
I’m no expert on self improvement, but my ambitions tend to be a lot lower on vacation. Instead of trying to cultivate better habits, I mostly just try to interrupt the old dumb ones. Instead of phone in bed, it’s a huge win if I’m in a hammock with a fun book. Instead of checking email over coffee, maybe I can sit outside with that coffee and listen to birds. Etc etc.
Similar to OP’s new hobby of math and physics, I recently started scratching a long standing itch to teach myself electrical engineering. I’m using books, YouTube and my brain to learn, and it feels like such a breath of fresh air compared to what my day job as a SWE has become since AI took it over. Because I’m not trying to build anything in particular — and since the learning _is_ the goal — I don’t hear that nagging voice saying, “AI could do this so much faster,” that pops in my head when I write code by hand these days.
The intro paragraphs talking about the mental disengagement or decline or whatever we want to call it really resonated with me. It's something I've also taken measures to counter. In fact I'm on vacation right now to Basque Country. I read "A Basque History of the World" to prepare for the trip and that act reassured me I'm not getting less capable of engaging intellectually, I just have different intellectual interests now than the most intimate details of making websites for and serving them to customers at varying scales.
I’ll assume the complaint is that the desktop is his space and shouldn’t be real estate for ads.
Around 2005 it became obvious that consumer software licensing for operating systems was no longer profitable. Nothing like Windows 95 sold again. Apple coupled the OS cost with the high margin hardware. The “profitable” Linux distros catered to high margin enterprise contracts. Windows pivoted toward ads.
When consumers complain about ads on software products, are they offering a viable alternative? Would you pay $250 for Windows Pro Ads Free? To Microsoft’s credit they’ve tried many different ways to package the software, and settled on the ads model.
A refreshing read. While not in the same lane as the author re maths/physics/SWE, I empathise.
I think on one hand, things are simply less novel as we get older and more expert in a given lane. That’s age old.
But the dopamine hit/attention deficit issue is altogether new, and it’s troubling from a societal perspective. I suspect it’s fairly universal that adults in 2026 aren’t reading nearly as much as they aspire to, or claim to be.
I wouldn’t say altogether new as much as no longer nearly as optional.
Can someone please recommend a good English version of "De Newton a Einstein y algo más eBook" (the book mentioned in the blog post) or a similar book?
Same happening for me. The fog clears when I do breath meditation - I think (hope) going deeper into mindfullness will be even more effective than reading at clearing the mind and breaking the dopamine addiction.
I struggle w my advanced learning in that much of it I will Never use due to my retirement status. I attempt screenplays; reading classical electrodynamics by Jackson; studying chess; and learning Spanish. I love to write code but that sucks me back to the computer. Cooking is always fun.
What do you think about doing LeetCode as an hobby? i really didn't like these type of exercise before, but after the advent of AI i'm more prone to do them. and actually started to enjoy them.
I wonder if the author is missing an opportunity to step further away by learning physics on this vacation. I usually follow the same playbook- little phone use, slow vacation, hiking in nature, phyical books (carefully selected beforehand- nothing work related, nothing technical), even used to spend a fair bit of time selecting the music i was going to listen to while driving to avoid radio or incar spotify. If lucky, i get these moments of inspiration. if not i return refreshed with slightly altered goals. Like everyone i have a chimp on my shoulder questioning me: could i have been more productive, maybe learn something useful?
One of those rare HN occasions when I can safely drive-by upvote every single commenter :)
I’ve experienced it more as dramatically shorter attention span rather than brain fog.
Leaving the phone charging out of the bedroom (or unreachable without getting up) during night and having a kindle in bed did the 80% Pareto De-Brainroting me every day and changed my life
my idea of de-brainrot is by going to destinations where everything is new and experiencing everything there physically & mentally. either going to a new city or drive to a new place. i'm not sure if it's anecdotal but there's a feeling of astonishment when experiencing a new place. i find that when you go back you have this new perspective and you feel refreshed.
I have experienced a similar feeling. Often I will dream of the newly "mapped" area once I arrive home (with cartoonish/dreamlike elements that are far from perfect). After I awake from this dream I feel likewise refreshed.
A couple of books and a cabine in the woods for a few days sound like the dream right now.
Something I noticed from this post is that the immediate go-to hobby for the author when forgoing time-swallowing brainrot is learning. This has been the exact same for me. After I actively started reducing my screen time, I have seen an almost unconscious kneejerk reaction consisting in me simply learning new things. Learning for fun is awesome. Never stop.
Just this this weekend got a cabin on the Mississippi and went totally no phones or tv. Wife and I spent the weekend reading, doing yoga and playing checkers.
I have no idea how I didn't get sucked into doomscroll culture.
Facebook was the center of my life back in college (2005-2009) and for a few years after graduating. What is now my diary started its life in Facebook Notes! I had Snapchat and Instagram accounts when those came out and used MySpace and even Friendster (a bit) prior.
All of those accounts have been deleted within the last three years. Aside from me arriving to closed businesses sometimes because they announced a change of hours on Instagram instead of Google Maps or (gasp!) a website, I miss nothing.
Maybe it was me trying to build a "things to do" service and seeing how locked down, not-open and not user friendly Facebook's Graph API was (in 2014).
Or maybe it's me having grown up a sort-of computer addict (on my computer all of the time when I wasn't in school) then, during college, seeing people get sucked all the way into World of Warcraft when that was new and connecting the dots.
What I do know is that these apps are extremely good --- casino-level good --- at sucking people into their portals and keeping them there.
Consequently, this has made going about my day in modern life difficult in some ways.
Playing music off of phones used to be verboten and socially enforced. These days, blasting 1, 2, 5, 10 second blips of nonsense every few seconds is "normal."
Walking around pretty much anywhere knowing that at any moment I can get hit by someone who overran the crosswalk so they could whip out their phone and scroll is a real possibility.
Driving around --- when I choose to do so --- is equally frustrating since people will tailgate me or cut me off so they can park 30 seconds faster and spend 5, 10, 15, 20 minutes FUCKING SCROLLING.
I keep my email inbox empty, thus turning it into a to-do list of sorts. But because most people have surrendered to their 90k unread email inboxes, doing things via email can be slow and frustrating.
Then there's the double standard of criticizing AI services while (sometimes within the same breath!) citing Google AI Answers as fact or spending hours and hours building whatever with Claude or Codex or whatever, whose web crawlers continue to descend on the web like ants onto a piece of bread and make everything I used to love using (Reddit, random blogs, this fucking site) increasingly inaccessible.
i've spent this summer vacation in portugal with no news websites & no socials.
As I never plan to read but know on some point i will want to read - I took the e-reader.
I ended up reading two books.
The result: I feel much more balanced and my opinion on topics and discussion habits calmed down a lot.
I hope I can keep the detox of those every more present redical views up for longer, it is really relaxing.
i've moved away from smartphones. i carry a burner keypad phone with essential contacts everywhere, and my screen time is at most an hour a day.
now, when i'm tired from work or need some recreation, i read books.
i used to scroll on my phone, and it was really hard for me to find even a few minutes to read books.
Brain fog? This might be a legitimate symptom worth seeing a doctor for
Good post!
I spent my vacation reading From Third World to First by Lee Kuan Yew.
And I have a couple of university textbooks (Physics and Biology) lying about, waiting for me to keep working on them.
I concur with the general feeling of it being difficult to plan much ahead. I think that learning and reading is good, and has been good basically always (just because someone else knows something doesn't mean that you shouldn't learn it too, even if this someone else is an LLM).
Anyway, I enjoyed your post and mostly feel the same (and funnily I have similar interests).
> I spent my vacation reading From Third World to First by Lee Kuan Yew.
Will add this to my reading backlog! Was looking for something exactly like this.
Thirty five upvotes, only one comment. It's like everybody read it, and immediately got off HN. Which sounds like people really took it to heart.
Plenty of places to de-brainrot in Chile. I miss it very dearly tbqh
I'm sure nature is awesome anywhere, but there's something about spending time in nature with the Andes in the background that's magical.
Personally, I've removed all apps that feature algorithmic short form video from my phone and used an extension to block shorts from YouTube.
I also made it a point to read more books agan instead of random articles and blogs online.
I can feel my attention span getting longer and my anxiety decreasing. I'd highly recommend trying it out if you've been experiencing similar issues!
Reflecting on my life, I think there is a mind body connection. And your brain doesn't work properly unless you also exercise. The best shape (post university) and sharpest I felt is when I played tennis daily. It just seems to be a sport that improves everything; reflexes, strength, cardio, speed. And I just felt very sharp physically and mentally during period. Hiking, and especially kayaking are like the antidote to brain rot for me now. Sitting in a kayak, watching a sunset on lake, surrounded by birds and wildlife and nature, it just kind clears your mind. Kayaking seems to have just the right amount of effort (you can go at your pace) and relaxation (provided you're in calm water) and nature and novelty, that it seems to connect you back to the world. Interestingly, many of the former US presidents where also big fitness buffs.
Indulging in musicianship works very well, too. As in, learning a musical instrument, say classical piano, with some external guidance.
You'll have to activate parts of brain you might never had to previously, it's quite some mental gymnastics but also an immersive mind + body + aural connection. You may feel exhausted after an intensive practice session but in a very rewarding way. You'll have to learn to learn differently.
My daily de-brainrot vacation is .. playing with synthesizers. Nothing gets the webs cleared out faster than a quick jam, maybe laying down a couple loops, getting some ideas fleashed out into a bigger structure.
Music-making and musicianship in general is great de-brainrot.
Starting to learn to play the keyboard was an awesome experience for me. Unfortunately I was learning on my brother's and I don't have it anymore. I think I'll gift myself one on christmas.
One thing that is working for me is simply getting a handheld and playing good old video games like in old days.
It is something I look forward to everyday because I can be anywhere and play anytime.
It is simply best hack I came up with.
Any games with "online" element is slop and avoid that toxicity.
When I'm on vacation I like nothing more than reading history books; it really helps transport you to another time and place, helping you to disconnect from the present and immerse yourself in your vacation.
Closer to home, surely there are work books that can teach you something new? I just picked up a fantastic academic tome called Experimental Economics by John List, to learn more about running experiments. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/E/bo250610...
I need De-Brainrot Vacation.
For a second I thought this was another Dutch last name like De Bruijn.
For fuck sake nerds why do you overcomplicated everything.
Go to the hardware store, buy some tools and fix something on your car or house, or build a new wall or stairs or something... Or even simpler. Get a shovel Go dig a ditch and plant some trees...
Brainrot solved
Yeah, we're watching AI obsolete intellectual work in real time. Human brains simply won't be able to compete. We're not going to have to toil, we just ask for results.
This is no longer skilled labor. It's massively more productive when machines take over the thinking, but you need to look elsewhere for intellectual stimulation.