so what's all this then?

I don't want to introduce this blog as though I have a vision. I need to let it take its own shape if it lives long enough to become anything other than an amorphous, mushy idea in the back of my head.

That's part what I'm trying to fix, anyways. My head. I've started talking to friends about how we can feel our brains getting older (we're in our early/mid 30s for the most part.) There's something particularly horrifying about that first little sensation of cognitive decline. A lot of us work from home, so giving our screen-fatigued eyes a break and getting some fresh air during a commute is not built into every day. A few of us have suffered concussions (myself included, from falling off a wet picnic table getting in a high-stakes boxing match with a rabid gorilla), and several felt like they lost some of their intellectual or memorious edge after multiple rounds of COVID.

I've spent a lot of time lately trying to identify times when my brain felt sharper. I didn't pursue care for my concussion for almost a year, blowing off symptoms even though I fell multiple times and rolled both my ankles just a few weeks apart. It wasn't until I stood on a boat for the first time since the incident and realized, "oh, this is just how the ground feels for me all the time now!" before I finally (immediately) sought out care. I completed significant physical therapy for "unilateral vestibular hypofunction," which is a fancy term that means that the balance system in my ears needed very serious recalibration, but very specific issues with my eyes and memory have hung around years after the concussion happened.

Over the same period, as we all fuggin know by now, a great cultural shift has occurred in the last few years. Americans are all being cognitively crushed to death under the oppressive weight of the AI industry that is begging, begging, begging for us to read less, study less, interact with each other less, think less, and willingly allow our brains to shrivel away into the vestigial organ category. Nothing like a cognition-shocking bodyweight slam on the back of your head will make you realize that the brain is not an organ to be taken for granted.

Like many others, I spent several years compulsively tweeting and writing articles about the industry that I work in before becoming massively disillusioned with microblogging and the like. I went functionally offline for a while. After a few cycles of working through Big Life Things, I started a little art shop on the side, began pursuing my Master's degree, and realized that my life (and brain) was a little worse without writing.

While taking a semester off for rest, I've come to feel that writing research papers and literature reviews for school was a cognitive lifeline for me. Being away from it for a few months makes me feel like I am drifting, unfocused, unchallenged. The exercise diving into scientific papers or long articles then making my own connections across different ideas is exactly the type of thought activity that AI takes away from us. Percolating on something new, synthesizing ideas, coming up with our own criticisms or deconstructions, getting stuck and unstuck, and drawing new conclusions isn't just a clinical, scientific process. It's part of the human experience.

So I'm doing this as an experiment. Maybe it's a tiny fugg-you to the big-tech cognitive convenience culture sold to us as a solution for decision-fatigue under late-stage capitalism, maybe it's my brain trying to rebuild some thinking skills, maybe it's me trying to figure out if I poisoned the writing well for myself when I was a careerist, or maybe it's a good old-fashioned cry for help. Who's to say! Perhaps I'm overblowing the effects of my brain injury, and my slipping attention span is just part of getting a little older, but I do know that writing makes my brain feel real good.

I don't use AI. My thought process is messy and nonlinear, and that's how you know it's human. Some of my drafts are structured and educational, others are sloppy rambles about whatever is on my mind. I don't really know what this is yet. If you want to find out with me, subscribe to get an occasional email in your inbox. Thanks for checking it out.