Please Save Your Brain

Bonsai, Japanese Friendship Garden, San Diego.

Preface: Yes, you are very, very smart. 

 

But companies like Facebook, Google, Apple, TikTok, Netflix, OpenAI, etc. spend literally hundreds of billions of dollars every year and employ hundreds of thousands of the smartest people in the world to acquire, predict, rank, monetize, and retain human attention.  

 

It is simply irrational to count on your willpower to counter all that. 

As you know, I post a lot about why so many people are so unhappy (example). But what, exactly, to do about it? The tl;dr:

Don't let an algorithm determine what you see.

Don't have a "feed"* (think about it).
Don't scroll through Facebook or YouTube or Twitter or Reddit or Google News or even Substack.

Be entirely intentional about what receives your attention. 

If you are going to consume online content: 

Subscribe to people and outlets who produce interesting and useful content.

Go directly to their blog or Substack or Bluesky (etc.) page, rather than counting on coming across them amidst a sea of clickbait.

If you come across a post that makes you think, "YES," click away quickly. 
If you come across a post that makes you think in terms of "smart, moral us" vs "stupid and evil them," click away quickly.

For more, please check out this by Charles Duhigg.
And Noah Smith: Are you finally ready to admit it's the phones?

*Or very carefully and ruthlessly curate your feed so it is only planes, cat videos, and whiskey reviews.