The Shock Of The Constantly New

I continue to be impressed enough by my reMarkable tablet that I remain subscribed to their newsletter, although not so much that I have any intention of upgrading until mine breaks.

I rarely do more than glance at newsletters unless there's something especially interesting, and this "newsletter fatigue" is probably something the good people at reMarkable want to think about a bit more carefully. Still, they really do seem goal-oriented with their products far more than they are profit-motivated. They genuinely want you to not only like but actually benefit from their pricey yet highly effective digital notebooks.

This rather short but interesting offering* goes into a bit more detail about some of the thinking strategies they suggest employing. While some of their newsletter content is, as to be expected, advertising in the guise of research, this one isn't. The title "Thinking in the Age of AI" is a complete misnomer, as AI doesn't factor into anything here. It's much more focused on thinking in the age of distractions, which has been a problem for a good while longer.

* It's an 18 page PDF that's probably about two pages of actual content, but it is good content, to be fair.

Instead of being a simple article, this is actually an exercise book designed to help concentration (on your trusty digital notebook, of course). I've not tried this, and I honestly don't see the point of writing down how I feel about my innermost mental states for the sake of my own reflection, but the advice seems sensible enough.

Anyway, they say there are three failures of the modern mind :

1 : Cognitive overload. Self-explanatory, really... when there's too much to process and it all comes at once, nothing gets processed well. Nuance is lost and the response is anxiety, tunnel vision, and even a threat-response style of thinking.

2 : Attentional fragmentation. Closely related, a stream of endless novelty. Even if you could process everything in sequence, constantly switching from topic to topic inevitably means a loss of focus. Worse, and I think here is much their most interesting point, is that modern devices train the brain to expect distraction. The unspoken comment here is that we become dependent on it, because that's what we expect our phones to do... if they stop doing it, we go looking for extra simulation. Turn off notifications and we end up scrolling. And this is bloody exhausting and unproductive.

3 : Meaning drift. If we have constant short-term distractions, then on the longer term we're also having to deal with constant, bigger changes. Change outpaces the brain’s ability to build coherence. Which means that even when we do make sense of things and make progress, the ground keeps shifting from under our feet.

A long time ago I remember having a discussion about why the world feels so politically inept, with one of the main proposals being that the pace of technological change is just too rapid for everyone to keep up with. I was rather skeptical at the time, but now I'm not so sure. Is this because I've gotten older and my thinking less flexible, or have the notifications just been ramped up to 11 ?

I'd like to think it's more the latter than the former. I don't feel any less tech-savvy than I did a decade ago; I've always hated techno-socialising so I can appear more backward than I actually am. I hated Facebook then I hate Tik Tok now. I didn't want to constantly check everyone's status in my PhD days and I don't want a single more WhatsApp alert today than is absolutely necessary. I do, however, very much enjoy writing Python code (with and without AI) and getting most of my exercise in VR games. Safe to say I want more technology in my life, not less.

But what I don't want is the unfocused kind of alert swarm that plagues social media like a ravening horde of locusts. I don't want to subscribe to some website's shitty notifications. I don't want to feel compelled to respond to messages instantly instead of within 24–72 hours. I'm trying to get stuff done here : I can't stop for a few minutes without losing my whole train of thought. It does my head in. Sometimes it almost physically hurts.

So maybe this kind of technological "progress" does have a role to play in the explaining the broader political narratives after all. Not through misinformation, but undermining cognitive capabilities in a far more insidious way : overwhelming the brain's capacity for rational thinking by a constant demand for attention, attention, attention. 

In fairness, I can imagine that the larger technological developments may feel like they undermine our basis for how we go about our daily lives, because as we all know...

Lord Vetinari represented stability. It was a cold and clinical kind of stability, but part of his genius was the discovery that stability was what people wanted more than anything else. He’d said it to Vimes once, in this very room, standing at this very window: “They think they want good government and justice for all, Vimes, yet what is it they really crave, deep in their hearts? Only that things go on as normal and tomorrow is pretty much like today.”

... but I think the kind of things which undermine that feeling of desirable, predictable stability is not nearly so much technological as political. And rather than just the clichéd view of childhood as being a golden era and everything went downhill since then, I'll point to the 2008 credit crunch as the point where things started to go very much awry. Then of course we have Brexit, Trump, Covid, Ukraine, the ongoing pointless conflict in the Middle East... it's all of these things, I think, that undermine people's basic world view. 

These are the sorts of things that cause people to lose hope and confidence, not the mere existence of smartphones and virtual reality headsets. The fact that energy supplies are shifting to renewables is not in itself a source of anxiety : if it's a factor at all (except for those who'll need to shift employment) then this comes about only from sensationalised reporting in the fascist side of the press, not because everyone is low-level scared of windmills.

No, the technological aspect does feed into all this but only thanks to its extreme commercialisation. The need to constantly keep aware of pointless developments on a wide variety of topics we're not really interested in from people we've never met... that feeds into the general malaise. And I don't think it even needs to do anything so direct as to decrease out attention spans : being addicted to this kind of crap can simply be fucking depressing.

So what can we do about it ? Well, I don't propose to Put The World To Rights today, and anyway, this all seems like a second-order effect on the grand scheme of things anyway. But the article does at least offer some good ideas for getting one's shit together. And this doesn't involve shutting everything down completely, but rather in managing things in a more structured way :

1 : Calm down and choose one thing to do next. Breathing and stretching exercises to get your brain to shut up for a minute, and then carefully think about a single thing you could do to meaningfully progress in your task. And then just get on with that for at least ten minutes.

2 : Deep work for 90 minutes. I hear various claims that human attention span is actually much shorter than this, but I don't believe them. In my experience, when in a good state of flow, 90 minutes does sound about right. This is as much time as it takes to really get to grips with a complex problem and make some useful progress before fatigue begins to sit in. Turn off all distractions during this block, they say, and it's hard to argue with that. The compulsion to check on the latest alert is just too overwhelming.

3 : Decompress for 20 minutes. Take a break to do some housework or whatnot. Change your mental input so that your brain can properly consolidate what it just learned.

4 : Open attention for 30 minutes. Turn on the notifications again, check those messages, allow more free-flowing, unstructured, unfocused attention. Deliberately taking in new input can help in refreshing thinking and even fostering creativity.

5 : Review. Try to keep track of what specifically works for you and what does. How much time do you really need in each block ? Which distractions do you need to take the most care to avoid ? Do you need to work like this every day or maybe just once per week ? Try to schedule this approach ahead of time.

I will add just a few things that help me manage the hellscape that is modernity. First, to-do lists are absolutely essential. I use a combination of simple notepad files (for the more complex descriptions) and the Microsoft ToDo app, which is useful because it allows scheduling, multiple items in lists, lists of lists, and has a very satisfying "ding" sound every time you mark a task for completion. It's also a handy way to jot down all those facts you need semi-frequently (I have a dedicated list "Things to Remember"), for which it has a search function. I also try and be both realistic and flexible here. I try not to schedule more for a day than I can actually do, but if I don't get something done, I just move it to the next day and don't let this become just another thing to worry about.

Second, one aspect where I do record my inner mental state is when I can't avoid having to stop. Writing down the key part of what I was thinking – what I was suspecting might be going on and what I want to try next – helps enormously in getting back into the flow state much faster. If I have to stop for a longer period, like going on holiday, I right a lengthier description, including where all the files are and a short description of what led me to this point in the process (sometimes my "What You're Working On Right Now" file might be a page or two in length). I've long since given up on the fool notion that "I'll just remember it", because I bloody well won't. 

And third, I go for a walk. Sometimes I continue thinking about what I was working on, sometimes I use it as a dedicated break. Either way, the different environment is mentally stimulating without being overwhelming, and even when I think I've had a great idea (Microsoft's app is again good for recording these), the enforced inability to try it out right there and then prevents my brain from over-focusing on the problem. Forcing a temporary shutdown is important, as while it is possible to maintain flow for longer than 90 minutes, I doubt most people can do much longer very often. In my experience, if you try this, you get a sort of false flow : something that can feel like you're making progress but rarely accomplishes anything productive. Forcing myself to stop is by far the best way to avoid this.

Well, that's what mostly works for me, anyway. It doesn't make the world a better place, but it makes my small corner of it a bit more manageable.