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Discussion (148 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
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.
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
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?
As Bo Burnham put it, "apathy's a tragedy and boredom is a crime".
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".
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 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.
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
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.
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 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?
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.
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 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?
In the 1950s, many doctors were convinced that exercise was actively harmful and running was dangerous.
We know already what's happening with optional thinking.
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_.
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.
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.
Another pretty universal thing is that we compare to younger versions of ourselves. That might explain the gap.
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.
Certainly we will have mental gyms in the future.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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 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).
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.
And don’t bother finishing 1Q84, you could read like four better Murakami books for the same time investment
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.”
Have had a similar experience, fixed by curing depression and taking vyvanse for adhd, then learning to manage being on vyvanse
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".
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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 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.
Spam https://www.miriamsuzanne.com/2022/06/09/the-spam/
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.
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 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.
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.
Oh, it's just the blog's theme...
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Will add this to my reading backlog! Was looking for something exactly like this.
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!
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.
Music-making and musicianship in general is great de-brainrot.
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.
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...
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
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.