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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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 is the anti-intellectualism I'm talking about. You're disagreeing based on vibes and not facts. Disagreement shouldn't even come into the conversation; falsify the net positive effects.
The research is clear that most of the negative effects that most expect cash payment UBI to have don't ever actually appear. Employment goes up (except where recipients use the flexibility to return to school), productivity goes up; the money doesn't get "wasted" on drugs, and it doesn't pump landlord pockets. Giving people the money necessary to participate in the economy increases participation in the economy.
I know what the common objections are, and I actually addressed the one you mention: in actual UBI pilot programs, there was no resultant inflation.
If you have objections that weren't among the ones stated earlier, you can state them now. If you think that there are better examples of the results likely to be produced by a non-pilot UBI program, you should detail their circumstances and how they're more applicable than the pilot programs, instead of waving vaguely at instances where "many have attempted to 'give people money' before", as if that's a panacea. Because it's not; it's precisely the vibes-based anti-intellectualism I spoke of.
The issue is that you probably can't, because UBI's efficacious nature has been proven rigorously. It would be nice if we could just get on with implementing it.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
There's nothing extreme about my statement. People have just adapted themselves into extinction, which is what happens to you when you don't have children.
Food is cheap and plentiful, which is why people are still denying that it is the worst economic depression in history.
So you're saying the complete lack of evidence of economic depression is a mere distraction from the reality that the evidence is just hiding? Is the depression in the room with us now? Can I speak to it?
The collapsed birth rates is the evidence. The enormous disparity between worker productivity and worker compensation is the evidence. Economic recession doesn't always spell hunger, it can have other consequences.
But seeing the way you are talking, I think you will be uninterested in any and all evidence and more interested in blowing off steam on the internet.
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".
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).
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 (outgoing landline, only), and 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.
> 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?
My favorite full-time schedule was four-10s, ten hour days Monday-Tuesday, then Thursday-Friday.
This MT_RF schedule meant I never had to work a "Wednesday", and my Tuesdays became additional "almost Fridays".
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The only thing I lack in my self-induced retirement is healthcare (so a big thing for this American boo)... which within the decade might require me to work some minimal job just to get benefits – I dread this day enough to avoid the topic, furtherly.
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.
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
I don’t remember my dreams most nights and that’s always been the case. When I do it’s fairly disconnected and random vignettes without discernible meaning. So I’m missing one of the most important aspects of my life? I guess it’s possible but it’s hard to feel that way without having experienced profound dreams.
Sometimes the meaning doesn't come from you to the dream. It can be how you decide to act in the dream that will shape your subconscious and in turn have influence in your state when awake.
For example, if you have a nightmare and decide to attack the threat instead of trying to flee, then almost all fear evaporates from your subconscious.
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.
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.
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.
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 boredom.
I will often experience something I call "feeling addled" when I haven't taken this kind of downtime for too long, usually after about two days. It presents as a difficulty in thinking clearly, a compulsion for easy dopamine, and feeling kind of like I've taken too much caffeine. It is disturbing to imagine that this is the constant default for many people now.
This concept of lack of boreness along with mention of studies was covered in a book called The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter (2021) that made me think about it a lot since I came across it. Amazing to see someone organically mention their experience about something similar.
Walter Benjamin basically predicted this in The Storyteller (1936) — nearly a century before smartphones:
> "If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away."
>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 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 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.
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'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 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
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.
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.
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.
But historically, I don't think people engaged as much intellectually or mentally as much as we do today. And I'm not just talking about people who need to do it at work, but even "mundane" things like watching TV or Film.
Heck, I have non-stem friends for which "pop culture" activities like wordle, pub quizzes, and film/TV are the most engaging thing intellectually. I'm not sure what they would have done if they live in the past. Would they find something else?
I'm pretty sure you can get your brain back. You just have to stop having Internet at home/on your phone.
2003-04 I moved into student housing that didn't have Internet access provided. My first hard cutoff after years of being basically constantly online. Getting it hooked up would have cost me €130 plus a per-minute charge, and I declined. I got bored enough to play through Diablo II with a melee-only sorceress, and then I started buying/borrowing and reading books. Hadn't read in years; couldn't focus on the book long enough when Computer With Internet was there calling to me. Computer Without Internet wasn't nearly so enticing. 2 years later I moved into an apartment, got broadband, and reverted to my netbrained zombieism. I once again no longer remember how to read. I bet I could rediscover the skill a second time, but how could I convince my wife to let me get rid of the Internet at our house?
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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 detective fiction, but there are a lot of modern writers that fit the same bill. Harlan Coban 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
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.
>You might just need something more concrete to hold your attention rather than fictitious characters in imaginary scenarios.
For me this is the opposite! Those imaginary scenarios are often designed with a certain pull in mind. Dramatic tension and all that. Reading non-fiction about fringe mushroom foraging is super interesting, but when i eventually put the book down for the day, that lingering pull isn't there... who knows when i'll get back to it.
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 did read a lot as a kid, "between sunrises" too as you so beautifully put it, then dropped off. When wanting to start again, much later, it took me a while to find what kind of books elicited that response. As an adult, turns out to be... romance? I would not have bet any money on that, lol.
I do read pretty slowly now, as in, reading some paragraphs multiple times, going back to double check things, looking up some words maybe. Still, as long as i never put the book down i make decent progress in a day...
I think this easily could have been me if I didn't have a gnawing hunger to find weird niche books that seem interesting to me and have very few "opinions" about them online. I think it was at 19 that I discovered I just hate reading anything that is saturated with opinions and reviews, even if "complex" "challenging", a "cult favorite", which was my precursor to this (and I did enjoy that phase while it lasted). Sometimes I go to the library and carry a stack of books, read the first page, and put it back if I don't want to go on. Every once in a while, I get a random interest in something that is indeed saturated, and I do read it, but also drop it when I lose interest without guilt. Doing anything because everyone else who is similar to me is doing it never worked for me, don't see a reason why it should work in reading, and finding something good to read can be as simple as going in a rabbit hole of search. For reference, I'd say I completed over a thousand "serious" (non Harry Potter/YA/"easy read") books, including nonfiction, and I'd say there is almost an equal number of books I did not finish.
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.
Looking for mental stimulation and a salary at the same time is going the way of the dodo.
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...
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.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 15.2 ms ] threadSpam https://www.miriamsuzanne.com/2022/06/09/the-spam/
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'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.
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 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.
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.
Music-making and musicianship in general is great de-brainrot.
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.
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.
Surely that much ought to be clear if you give it a little more thought, no pun intended.
The research is clear that most of the negative effects that most expect cash payment UBI to have don't ever actually appear. Employment goes up (except where recipients use the flexibility to return to school), productivity goes up; the money doesn't get "wasted" on drugs, and it doesn't pump landlord pockets. Giving people the money necessary to participate in the economy increases participation in the economy.
If you have objections that weren't among the ones stated earlier, you can state them now. If you think that there are better examples of the results likely to be produced by a non-pilot UBI program, you should detail their circumstances and how they're more applicable than the pilot programs, instead of waving vaguely at instances where "many have attempted to 'give people money' before", as if that's a panacea. Because it's not; it's precisely the vibes-based anti-intellectualism I spoke of.
The issue is that you probably can't, because UBI's efficacious nature has been proven rigorously. It would be nice if we could just get on with implementing it.
The rest of us dolts are grateful for your attention to this matter.
Now can you focus some expert thinking on world peace?
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.
In the 1950s, many doctors were convinced that exercise was actively harmful and running was dangerous.
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.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/software-engineer-steve-yegg...
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?
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.
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
You need to touch grass, friend. I am as concerned with the direction of things as anyone, but this is extreme hyperbole.
Food is cheap and plentiful, which is why people are still denying that it is the worst economic depression in history.
But seeing the way you are talking, I think you will be uninterested in any and all evidence and more interested in blowing off steam on the internet.
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).
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 (outgoing landline, only), and 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.
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?
This MT_RF schedule meant I never had to work a "Wednesday", and my Tuesdays became additional "almost Fridays".
----
The only thing I lack in my self-induced retirement is healthcare (so a big thing for this American boo)... which within the decade might require me to work some minimal job just to get benefits – I dread this day enough to avoid the topic, furtherly.
It isn't me 'profiting' from having more free time, it's usually companies managing to find new things for me to fill my free time with.
Time spent vacuuming or washing dishes is time spent not scrolling.
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
For example, if you have a nightmare and decide to attack the threat instead of trying to flee, then almost all fear evaporates from your subconscious.
> "If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away."
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.
And often it's also just "compared to 5 or 10 years ago" not 20s vs 40s or 50s.
Certainly we will have mental gyms in the future.
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.
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
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 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?
More recently Google Maps has the same functionality and it will work in many cities across the world.
We know already what's happening with optional thinking.
Heck, I have non-stem friends for which "pop culture" activities like wordle, pub quizzes, and film/TV are the most engaging thing intellectually. I'm not sure what they would have done if they live in the past. Would they find something else?
2003-04 I moved into student housing that didn't have Internet access provided. My first hard cutoff after years of being basically constantly online. Getting it hooked up would have cost me €130 plus a per-minute charge, and I declined. I got bored enough to play through Diablo II with a melee-only sorceress, and then I started buying/borrowing and reading books. Hadn't read in years; couldn't focus on the book long enough when Computer With Internet was there calling to me. Computer Without Internet wasn't nearly so enticing. 2 years later I moved into an apartment, got broadband, and reverted to my netbrained zombieism. I once again no longer remember how to read. I bet I could rediscover the skill a second time, but how could I convince my wife to let me get rid of the Internet at our house?
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.
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.
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 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).
Have had a similar experience, fixed by curing depression and taking vyvanse for adhd, then learning to manage being on vyvanse
Personally this usually means detective fiction, but there are a lot of modern writers that fit the same bill. Harlan Coban is a good example, if a bit “generic thriller.”
And don’t bother finishing 1Q84, you could read like four better Murakami books for the same time investment
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.
For me this is the opposite! Those imaginary scenarios are often designed with a certain pull in mind. Dramatic tension and all that. Reading non-fiction about fringe mushroom foraging is super interesting, but when i eventually put the book down for the day, that lingering pull isn't there... who knows when i'll get back to it.
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 do read pretty slowly now, as in, reading some paragraphs multiple times, going back to double check things, looking up some words maybe. Still, as long as i never put the book down i make decent progress in a day...
Looking for mental stimulation and a salary at the same time is going the way of the dodo.
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...
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.