AI
The Year So Far: The State of AI & Attention Six months in, the relationship between AI and our attention has changed shape. Here is the state of things. From Offloading to Surrender: What the Research Revealed About Thinking With Machines The easy answer says AI assistance simply makes us
You end a "highly automated" workday expecting to feel more relaxed. After all, the AI tools did help in your day. Instead, you feel worn down. That feeling has a name: AI brain fry. And it makes complete sense once you understand what's actually happening. When
Reality
Digital Culture & Well-Being Every few months, you hear the same advice: delete the apps, quit the platforms, go analog. And while the frustration behind that impulse makes complete sense, you probably won't do it — and more importantly, you don't have to. The attention economy
Reality
Direction doesn't just guide your actions—it determines what you perceive as real. You've had this experience before, even if you've never named it. You decide you want a specific car. Suddenly, you see that car everywhere. On the highway. In parking lots. In
Reality
Modern digital platforms are built on a simple principle: keep you engaged, no matter the cost to your coherence. Here's how they do it: Infinite scroll. No natural stopping point. No signal that you've reached the end. Your brain never receives closure, so it keeps scanning
Energy
The Energetic Cost of Presence vs Fragmentation How attention configuration affects energy expenditure and nervous system state Presence: Unified Energy Flow Energy Efficiency High Coherence Level Stable Nervous System State Calm Recovery Rate Fast Fragmentation: Scattered Energy Energy Efficiency Low Coherence Level Unstable Nervous System State Alert Recovery Rate Slow
The Energetic Cost of Presence vs Fragmentation How attention configuration affects energy expenditure and nervous system state Presence: Unified Energy Flow Energy Efficiency High Coherence Level Stable Nervous System State Calm Recovery Rate Fast Fragmentation: Scattered Energy Energy Efficiency Low Coherence Level Unstable Nervous System State Alert Recovery Rate Slow
What Makes Us Irreplaceable? You wake up. Check your phone before your feet hit the floor. Scroll through notifications while your coffee brews. Answer emails during breakfast. Begin responding to demands before you've decided what actually matters today. By 10 AM, you've consumed more information than
What's friction-maxxing? Fair question. It describes the practice of intentionally adding inconvenience back into your life. Paying with cash instead of tapping your phone. Reading a physical book instead of watching YouTube. Calling a friend for advice instead of asking ChatGPT. The BBC recently explored why this
The Weekly Attention Reset Protocol
You stopped. You sat down. You closed the laptop, silenced the notifications, maybe even lay down for an hour. By every visible measure, you rested. And yet something didn't change. There was still a tightness in your chest. A mild restlessness you couldn't quite name. You&
What Makes Us Irreplaceable? You wake up. Check your phone before your feet hit the floor. Scroll through notifications while your coffee brews. Answer emails during breakfast. Begin responding to demands before you've decided what actually matters today. By 10 AM, you've consumed more information than
What If Consciousness Lives in Your Body, Not Your Mind? A new AI company called Conscium thinks it can build consciousness into machines. At first, that sounds like science fiction. Or hubris. Or both. But their approach reveals something about what we might have been missing all along about how
What's friction-maxxing? Fair question. It describes the practice of intentionally adding inconvenience back into your life. Paying with cash instead of tapping your phone. Reading a physical book instead of watching YouTube. Calling a friend for advice instead of asking ChatGPT. The BBC recently explored why this
Here's a way of thinking about reality that might change how you experience your day: Everything around you — your desk, your phone, the light coming through the window, even your own thoughts — can be described as information. Not metaphorically. Literally. Physics has shown us that information is physical.
We're the first generation living inside a system designed to operate faster than conscious awareness.
You've probably heard that social media is designed to be addictive. That algorithms are engineered to keep you scrolling. That your phone is a slot machine in your pocket. You've heard it. You believe it. And yet here you are, still feeling frayed, still losing hours
We have been sold a perfectionist’s myth about focus. The myth says that if you were truly productive, you would sit down at 9:00am and enter a state of "flow" that remains unbroken until lunch. It tells you that every time you check your phone, drift
A quiet look at invisible mental load. Often, the day appears ordinary when you look back on it. A few tasks handled, a few hours passed, nothing that would normally explain the depth of fatigue you now feel. And yet your body carries a heaviness that doesn’t quite match
The prevailing approach to a chaotic life is to increase discipline. We are told to try harder, force habits, and white-knuckle our focus. In a state of cognitive overload, this pressure creates internal friction. Discipline without direction is simply metabolic stress applied to a system that is already overdrawn.
Losing your focus is a thermodynamic reality. Your nervous system pays for every piece of information you encounter in real biochemical currency. Every notification, headline, and micro-decision redirects roughly 40 joules of glucose from long-term memory consolidation toward immediate threat scanning. Picture this: when this happens 120 times