De-Brainrot Vacations (devz.cl)

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.

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 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

- regular exercise has incredible benefits for the body+ mind (and the attitude that directs it). Biggest impact of everything on this list.

- Side projects that involve actual doing and not just study. e.g. I spent some money on gear for embedded development and am doing things that involve physical things and using my hands and making gadgets … phone is out of the picture while in the lab.

- Ironically, using LLMs for reviewing and refreshing knowledge you once had but now has gaps is amazing. I spend a bunch of my phone time now having in-depth chats where I know what I’m talking about to a large degree, but the LLM is helping me fill in gaps and then quizzing me on concepts and I know that the things it’s telling me are solid due to my background, then I go check, etc. A really good way to do super focused study to reload a field back into your brain. Might as well take advantage of the fact that they stole all of the world books.

- Write things down! After reviewing, do some problems with pencil and pad. After studying, doing a problem on pencil and paper is actually daunting, but then grooving through a few problems actually makes you realize you know the stuff again! And using an expensive Ampad notebook and nice mech pencil is a great sensory experience.

I 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).

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.

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.

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 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 think the brainrot is less noticeable when I fill my schedule, but when I have time off my brain atrophies IFF I emable brainrot.

Reading books, picking solid podcasts, or journaling leaves my brain feeling refreshed.

I feel this is the next wave of 'clean your processed diet up' or 'mind the tobacco'

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.

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.

I felt this too recently and I linked it to excessive passive information grazing exacerbated by AI. Symptoms of this are being in a daze or mental fog, and not being in touch with the feeling of curiosity. Reading doesnt help since for me, reading is passive process of meme gathering. What helps in my view is effortful creation in the form of writing code, hand writing essays, creating music etc.

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.

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.

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.