Recovering My Mind

Mentally, I feel like I'm withering away...

The young Napoleon Bonaparte studying at the military academy at Brienne-le-Chateau, France, circa 1780. Litho by Job

I’ve lately been feeling a burning desire to learn and think. Learn something. Anything. Anything that will remind me that I do in fact have a brain that is capable of critical thought. Because mentally, I feel like I am withering away.

There are a few reasons why:

1. I find myself struggling to think deeply about something for more than 2 minutes. When I say it out loud it sounds ridiculous but unfortunately this is the reality. The moment I am in any transitory/waiting state (such as waiting for an elevator, stepping out of a social event, and even the moment after I finish writing a chunk of text) or required to think even somewhat deeply about a problem, I feel the urge to pick up my phone. And when I pick up my phone, I always end up waterboarding my mind with slop that is fed to me by an algorithm. This not only makes me blind to my own thoughts, it leaves no room whatsoever for my curiosity to emerge. Because of this, the idea of having an original, well-formulated thought seems incredibly far-fetched, and I find myself believing that I’m stupid and not creative. But I’m not stupid, I’ve just forgotten how to think. I’ve forgotten that I can think. There’s a lot of gold in my mind and I just need to allow it to surface.

2. I used to be able to read multiple books back to back in a single day. Now, I struggle to read 10 pages. I used to be curious about everything around me, because my mind had room to breathe. Now, I am told what to be interested in by my Explore Page. And when I was a software engineer, I was good at something tanglible. Now, as a pseudo-entrepreneur of sorts, I have neither a tanglible skill, nor am I exercising my mind anywhere near its limits.

   Granted, a part of that is due to the way my day-to-day is structured right now; I don’t really have a concrete business yet. But even when I do finally start the cafe, I don’t just want to be learning about things relevant to my cafe, I want to also learn about stuff beyond my direct line of work. And that requires conscious effort. Plus, I want to start building mental fortitude and capacity right now because I’m genuinely afraid that when I do actually “break ground” on the cafe, I’m not going to be able to fight the battles that come my way.

3. As a result of living in San Francisco, I am surrounded by people much more skilled and well read than I. It always feels like I’m playing catch up to stay relevant in conversations. I remember one conversation in particular - I forget exactly what it was about, but I remember the topic being something incredibly ridiculous yet intriguing - they were drawing parallels between the emergence of holistic healthcare models and the origins of the hitler youth. Or something weird like that. And you might think this was some kind of pretentious Ivy League flavored pissing contest to see who could sound smarter, but I assure you it was not. It was an earnest discussion driven by pure San Francisco curiosity that I would have loved to contribute to, or at the very least, understand. But I couldn’t, because I hadn’t read enough relevant material. And look, I’m not saying that I need to be able to be an active participant in every conversation, or even that every conversation I have is of this nature (that would be awful), but there are conversations I know I could contribute to if I was more well read and had more mental endurance to think critically. Maybe if I had immersed myself more in non-technical classes in college, I’d be able to draw parallels between healthcare and the Nazis or whatever.

So those are my reasons for wanting to get my mind back and wanting to use it for learning.

As an aside - I’m not going to pretend and say that this desire to learn is all for noble reasons. A lot of it is, but some of it comes from a place of fear and insecurity. As an ex software engineer turned barista who will soon own a coffee shop, I wouldn’t exactly call myself “wealthy”, nor do I expect to anytime in the near future. So, since money is out of the question, I need something else within my control to tie my worth to, like my knowledge. I know that this is a very unhealthy source of self-worth, but alas, I am not yet mature enough to detach my self worth from my utility to other people. There are most definitely other ways to fix this self-worth problem but I don’t feel like writing a book, so we’ll stick to a band-aid solution for now.

To sum all of this up, I feel like I’m living in a world that is designed to keep me sedated by dampening my curiosity and telling me what to consume, make me fickle by robbing me of my attention span, keep me ignorant by distracting me with an endless stream of bullshit, make me infertile by seducing me with pixels on a screen, and make me stupid by providing me with answers to all of my questions at the click of a button. I feel worthless and impotent.

In such a world, I wish to regain my ability to think (and by extension, my agency).

I want to feel the exhaustion you feel from dissecting an idea into its atomic elements and putting it back together again, not the fatigue that comes from bombarding my consciousness with brainrot. I want to hear the symphony again, the sweet melody of creative ideas flowing through my mind like wind through a flute. I want to weave a tapestry from the various threads in my head, pulling together disjoint concepts to create a new whole. I want to understand people, societies, and nations. I want to understand capital, computers, and cuisine. And I want to understand how they are all connected. I want to understand how other people see the world, how they used to see the world, and how the world works, so that I can shape a little bit of it to my will.

So, what’s the next course of action? Well, there are many to choose from, you can look at this problem from several different angles. I don’t know just yet the exact shape that this process is going to take, all I know is that I want to get the gears in my head turning again. A part of this involves creating, and a part of it involves learning & understanding. These are both slightly distinct but related processes, and I think the fuel for them is the same: to do both, you need to think, both actively and passively.

So to start, I want to focus on teaching myself how to think again. And I believe that will look something like this:

1. Learn how to understand things.

2. Design a curriculum of interesting things that require some amount of mental gymnastics in order to be fully understood.

3. Evaluate my understanding of the material by testing it in the real world.

Within the next few weeks, I’m going to dive deeper into the mechanisms of learning, thinking, and creating, which will hopefully define the shape of my course of action more precisely. I’ll be sure to share what I learn.

It’s easy to forget today that I am living my own life, of which I am the architect and the captain. My attention is limited, and I best use it on things that matter, as defined by me. Despite the fact that the Tech Overlords will spend billions of dollars to keep me addicted, ignorant, stimulated, and docile, the decision to surrender to them lies with me. And I have no intention of doing so.

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Big thanks to Kasra for proofreading <3