Reclaim The Brain

My attention is shot. I’d like to have another go. Things about focus, the ruination of focus, ADHD, and paying attention.

David Pennington

humans talking like machines

Big Think • Mechanized Minds: AI’s Hidden Impact on Human Thought

With LLMs all but conversing with their userbase, the variations between human and “talking like machines” is thinner by the day. I think we also see this across movies and modern books and social media. Maybe it started with the listicle format of content being all the rage, or content experts saying there is a specific way to set up content on the page for maximum human engagement.

This phrase suggests a blurring of boundaries between human communication and machine-like processing, highlighting how AI influences us to adopt more mechanical, perhaps less spontaneous ways of thinking and talking.

Attention is first philosophy—

Philosophy is not only a system of thought but a mode of attentiveness, an exercised openness to what exceeds us yet calls us to deeper participation. Its systematic aspects are downstream of this attentiveness, and can certainly become a scaffolding by which others can train their own attention, but it is at its root... See more

Adam Robbert • Attention is First Philosophy

“Faith is better understood as a verb than as a noun, as a process than as a possession,” wrote Frederick Buechner. ”It is on-again-off-again rather than once-and-for-all. Faith is not being sure where you're going, but going anyway. A journey without maps.”

Sticking with it

But solitude and loneliness are not one and the same. “It is actually a very healthy emotional response to feel some loneliness,” the NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg told me. “That cue is the thing that pushes you off the couch and into face-to-face interaction.” The real problem here, the nature of America’s social crisis, is that most Americans... See more

archive.ph

The point Klinenberg wanted to make was this: If there was no such thing as a library, and someone proposed it today, there's a 99.9% chance they and their “radical and crazy idea” would be laughed out of the room.

But, as we know, it’s not a crazy idea.

Andy Olin • Public libraries are the crazy, radical ideas that might save society | Kinder Institute for Urban Research

I set an intention for 2025: fewer things, fewer tabs open at once - on my laptop and in my mind - but doing things well, present and mindful. Less, but better.

Tom Greenwood • What if the Key to Better Business Was… Less?

A High-Level Introduction to Idleism

Not to be confused with idealism. Although, I wouldn’t mind making the argument that idle is the ideal. Some principles of Idleism, in no particular order:

You are more than an hourly rate.
- You will never get paid “what you are worth” by an employer. The entire precept of capitalism is that they make more from your

Most of us have a hard limit on the number of focused sessions we can do each day.

Chris Guillebeau • Executive Functioning and the Limits of Hyperfocus

I think of writing a lot like walking. It’s rarely the most popular, the most effective, or the most efficient way of getting to your destination. I don’t always want to do it, and it’s not always technically enjoyable; sometimes it’s boring or slow, sometimes it’s tiring and pointless, sometimes it’s cold or wet or windy and I’m retracing the same... See more