Hey bookish babes,
At fifteen, I wrote an entire novel at my family's dining room table, Microsoft Word open, TV playing in the background.
Now, in my thirties, I can barely write for thirty minutes without reaching for my phone.
What happened?
A weird amount of my personality can be traced back to a school fundraiser where students were recruited to hawk magazine subscriptions in exchange for trivial tat that was barely a step above arcade prize winnings.
I suppose the bookworm bit me before then, but it was certainly an inflection point.
I had no interest in convincing the adults in my life to buy magazines, but I flipped through the catalog anyway. Eventually, my eyes landed on Writer’s Digest, and a soft voice in the back of my mind compelled me to do what any thirteen-year-old would do… ask my mom if I could have it.
From about the time I could hold a pen and form my letters, I’d been writing stories. I went through a multi-year phase, probably starting when I was eight or nine, when I wrote murder-mystery short stories. Perhaps not the most age-appropriate content, but, hey, this was CSI’s heyday on television, and kid spies and sleuths were very en vogue in the oughts. Not to mention the Scholastic Book Fair’s Spy University series, which sent me monthly espionage books for a year and left me fully convinced of an inevitable career in the CIA.
Over time, my storytelling interests drifted away from shoddily executed murders and into speculative fiction, as video games and fantasy novels became my main sources of inspiration.
So, my mother saw no harm in getting me a subscription to Writer’s Digest. It was pretty cheap, and it was a magazine about writing. Surely other children had worse vices.
When that first issue arrived, it opened my eyes to a world I never knew existed. Such wild concepts as query letters, literary agents, craft, and writing conferences flooded into my brain, searing in visions of one day mingling with high-brow literati.
It also compelled me to take my writing more seriously and to tackle something big: writing an entire novel.
Almost nightly, with my family watching television in the background, I’d sit down at our dining room table with my secondhand Dell laptop, open Microsoft Word, and start writing.
What I produced was a sophomoric, meandering yarn with cookie-cutter characters that could be lifted directly from video game tropes set in a plot that was held together with the power of “oh, but… magic,” all on the backdrop of a setting with no real sense of geography, time, or culture. (No, seriously, how did the landscape go from desert to lake to forest to island to swamp and back again without really leaving a few square miles?)
But it was a novel. It was a complete draft. From my trusty WD magazines, I learned that you’re supposed to format your manuscript in Times New Roman, size 12, double-spaced, with 1-inch margins. Once printed with those specs, my family printer was low on paper and completely out of black ink, and I was holding nearly 200 pages in my hand. Pages I had written, painstakingly, over dozens upon dozens of hours.
Looking back now, I marvel at that kid’s gumption and determination. Moreso, I marvel at the ability I once had to sit and write without giving in to distraction.
Attention-Attrition and the Struggle to Write a Full Draft
Over the intervening years (I won’t care to admit how many years have passed since I was fifteen), I’ve continued to write, but the manner in which I do so has changed significantly.
Starting in college, I noticed something strange happening whenever I sat down to write. Somehow, I would start in Microsoft Word and end up on Facebook. Other times, I’d go to the coffee shop planning to write, but I'd end up thinking about all my assignments, class reading, and student organization obligations. The desire to write waned as I considered all the other things that I could be doing– probably should have been doing, I believed– instead of working on a novel that nobody had asked me to write.
But still I was writing. Not daily anymore. Not for hours at a time. But consistently.
Then came graduation and entering the workplace. Suddenly, as a working professional, I spent eight hours each day bouncing between emails, phone calls, chat messages from my favorite coworkers, desk-side chats with my less-favored coworkers, and a never-ending list of tasks I needed to knock out within a set time range.
(That first “real” job was awful, and I have a million stories about it. Spoiler: even if a university has a good reputation locally, if it’s for-profit, run.)
Five o’clock would eventually roll around, and I’d pack up my lunch box, clock out, and endure the grueling 0.25-mile journey back to my apartment, where I would… do virtually nothing. Cook dinner, play some video games, and then go to sleep just to repeat the process all over again the next day.
I still had a manuscript. I told myself I was writing a book. And on the weekends, I’d hammer out a few sentences here and there, but I’d stopped making meaningful progress.
My technical skills as a writer were significantly better than they’d ever been. I finally had a grasp on plot, structure, character, and setting. But I didn’t have the follow-through.
The older I’ve gotten and the more demanding my work has become, the worse I've seen these patterns play out in my life, but I don’t think the tedium or demand of adulthood can truly take the blame.
From Quiet Contemplation to Constant Mental Ricochets
Looking back, I can see two distinct patterns unfolding that made writing occupy a different place in my life.
Constant context switching. Starting in college, but really ramping up in the workplace, context switching became my norm. Phone call, email, meeting, DM, email, phone call, phone call, email, phone call. My brain learned to bounce from one activity to the next, constantly accompanied by some kind of noise.
Tech became pervasive and gratifying. I got my first iPhone in my sophomore year of college, and along with it, I got access to innumerable apps and features that I hadn’t experienced before. Everything from Instagram to Grindr to some silly point-and-click game about hatching dragon eggs was competing for my time and attention, accosting me with notifications and dings at every twist and turn.
What I didn’t understand at the time was that those two flavors of distraction also created a vicious self-reinforcing cycle.
The more I switched between contexts that frustrated me or bored me (somehow having someone else’s students shouting at you had the miraculous attribute of being both frustrating and boring), the more I gravitated toward novelty and amusement. If I had a gap between ridiculous phone calls, I could just reach for my phone and scroll for a few minutes, gaining something akin to a reprieve from the day’s tedium. But then important calls and emails became even more intrusive, so I “needed” even more reprieve and novelty as I scrolled.
Before long, I got to the point where I reached for my phone any time I didn’t want to deal with something remotely stressful.
Worried about the work day? Scroll through Twitter. Not sure how to handle a sensitive situation with a student? Oh, look… Instagram.
The downhill roll became an avalanche, and soon I was lying in bed scrolling as soon as I woke up, scrolling throughout the day to avoid stress, and then scrolling back in bed as I tried to quiet my mind and get ready to sleep.
Sitting down to write but feeling writer’s block or uncertainty about how a scene should play out? You guessed it. Scrolling.
Brainrot and Slop in the Shallows
I always knew that my plight was not unique, and virtually anybody with a smartphone could relate. Boomers and Gen X-ers made it clear that our dang phones and the boobtube (a name for the television I choose to still not understand) were rotting our brains, but we dismissed their concerns as another instance of the previous generations not understanding our generation’s culture and technology.
But diva… they were right about the phones.
In recent years, terms like slop and brainrot have become ubiquitous in online spaces. Brainrot has even started being used as a verb to describe intentionally unimportant or silly digital consumption. We’ve unquestioningly, passively accepted that yes, our devices are, in fact, rotting our brains, but it’s okay because oooh fun shiny.
I keep coming back to Nicholas Carr’s book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, and the way he describes this pattern of behavior as akin to a lab rat being trained to perform tasks for food.
“The Net’s interactivity gives us powerful new tools for finding information, expressing ourselves, and conversing with others. It also turns us into lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment.”
That vicious cycle I described before– stress > scroll > stress > scroll– trains us, as Carr points out, to become subconsciously programmed to reach for those quick bursts of dopamine in response to discomfort. And the outcome isn’t just that we’re wasting our time. It’s actually changing how our brains work. Carr goes on to write,
“What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I’m online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”
Considering what this distraction cycle has done to my own ability to focus and write, I can’t help but think Carr is right. Sure, my experience is anecdotal, but I imagine that you wouldn’t be here reading this newsletter if you didn’t feel similarly.
What I’m Trying to Rebuild My Brain
This mental Jet Ski-ing that Carr describes is contrasted against the act of quiet, focused reading.
“In the quiet spaces opened up by the prolonged, undistracted reading of a book, people made their own associations, drew their own inferences and analogies, fostered their own ideas. They thought deeply as they read deeply.”
Thinking deeply is exactly what I’m trying to get back to– what I’m trying to make as second-nature as mind-numbing scrolling.
I don’t like being a scroller. I don’t like feeling like my mind is withering away online. It feels like I’m wasting my potential and not living up to my own expectations of who I could be and all I could do.
Reading and writing do bring me joy. Yes, they are hard, but hard things are worth doing, especially when the outcome is a life well-lived– a life you can be proud of.
For the last two weeks, I’ve gotten into bed about thirty minutes earlier than normal and cracked open The Strength of the Few by James Islington. Before I start reading, I set my alarm for the morning and then use Brick to make my phone largely inaccessible (basically all but phone calls and text messages are blocked when I use my Brick), and then put it on the charger. I read until my eyes feel heavy and unfocused, and then I go to sleep.
When I wake up, I try to journal a few pages. Often it’s just a reflection of the dreams I had, how I’m feeling in my body, and what I hope for the day or what is stressing me about the coming day.
My hope is that by bookending my days with quiet, focused activity, I can set myself in motion to maintain quiet focus throughout the day. Work disrupts this quite a bit with an onslaught of Slack messages and Zoom meetings, but so far, it’s helpful. I feel less stressed throughout the day and spend less time on X or YouTube as I work, which ultimately leads to higher-quality work and a greater sense of confidence.
I’m going to keep this up. As far as experiments go, this one seems to be working, and I will never complain about reading more books or writing in my journal more (I have to justify my book and journal buying addictions somehow).
If you have a nighttime or morning routine for quieting your mind or setting yourself up to avoid scrolling and brainrotting, let me know! I’d love to hear from you. Reply to this newsletter or leave a comment on it if you’re reading online.
I'll see you next week with something that's been on my mind: why "I'm too tired" becomes permission to scroll ourselves into oblivion.
Until then,
Blake