anyone else

feeling thought-less?

I used to pride myself on stringing together words with an improvisational flair. Now, I fumble through, stumbling and unable to translate scattered thoughts into sentences that hold up when spoken aloud.

I tried to write a poem the other night, but nothing came out, at least nothing that felt real. Is it age? Apathy? AI? Instagram? I’ve been grasping for something to blame so I don’t have to admit the truth: I’ve been thinking less. Not less in quantity (👋🏽 hey, anxiety), but certainly less in quality.

A day or so ago, I came across this Opinion piece by Mary Harrington for the New York Times titled “Thinking Is Becoming a Luxury Good.” It actually made me think and made me curious about what you think, too.

It goes a bit deeper than just the topic of thinking less, but how thinking less is creating new opportunities for inequality to emerge.

Fast fashion, fast food, fast content. May this be your reminder to slow down when necessary and able. At the end of the day, shit is contextual.

Here’s a passage from the piece below: (Homies, hit me up for a gift link if you want to read the whole thing but don’t have access.)

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The idea that technology is altering our capacity not just to concentrate but also to read and to reason is catching on. The conversation no one is ready for, though, is how this may be creating yet another form of inequality.

Think of this by comparison with patterns of junk food consumption: As ultraprocessed snacks have grown more available and inventively addictive, developed societies have seen a gulf emerge between those with the social and economic resources to sustain a healthy lifestyle and those more vulnerable to the obesogenic food culture. This bifurcation is strongly class-inflected: Across the developed West, obesity has become strongly correlated with poverty. I fear that so, too, will be the tide of post-literacy.

Long-form literacy is not innate but learned, sometimes laboriously. As Maryanne Wolf, a literacy scholar, has illustrated, acquiring and perfecting a capacity for long-form “expert reading” is literally mind-altering. It rewires our brains, increasing vocabulary, shifting brain activity toward the analytic left hemisphere and honing our capacity for concentration, linear reasoning and deep thought. The presence of these traits at scale contributed to the emergence of free speech, modern science and liberal democracy, among other things.

The habits of thought formed by digital reading are very different. As Cal Newport, a productivity expert, shows in his 2016 book, “Deep Work,” the digital environment is optimized for distraction, as various systems compete for our attention with notifications and other demands. Social media platforms are designed to be addictive, and the sheer volume of material incentivizes intense cognitive “bites” of discourse calibrated for maximum compulsiveness over nuance or thoughtful reasoning. The resulting patterns of content consumption form us neurologically for skimming, pattern recognition and distracted hopping from text to text — if we use our phones to read at all.

Increasingly, the very act of reading scarcely seems necessary. Platforms such as TikTok and YouTube Shorts offer a bottomless supply of enthralling, short-form videos. These combine with visual memes, fake news, real news, clickbait, sometimes hostile misinformation and, increasingly, a torrent of A.I.-generated slop content. The result is a media environment that seems like the cognitive equivalent of the junk food aisle and is every bit as difficult to resist as those colorful, unhealthy packages.