I Stopped Thinking

Brain Dulling Habits Were Taking Over My Life

Is it weird to admit that more and more I believe I am thinking less and less?

It’s a typical weekday. I carefully place my recently filled coffee mug on its coaster on my desk, move around the mouse to awaken my computer and within moments am staring at an inbox of emails. I immediately start deleting ones I have no intention of reading. Next, I scan through emails I might want to read. These are from email lists I have signed up for, believing at some point in time that the content would be useful and/or interesting.

Skimming the first few lines of each, the messages seem to run together — variations on marketing ideas, entrepreneurship, and writing. The messages are similar, the personalities sincere and helpful, but I’ve read so much in these areas over the years that I could have written many of them myself.

I click links in a few that intrigue me, find myself nodding in agreement with the information conveyed in their post or article. Not much new here. Nothing to get my neurons firing in excited abandon.

I go about my morning activities and realize as I scroll through social media, check the news, and read through some stories on Medium that everything is geared towards helping me not think. I’m being spoon-fed everything from how to make attention-grabbing videos on YouTube to how to start my day perfectly so I can become financially independent and successful. I can easily find hundreds of articles on any given topic, and most tend to say more or less the same things as if that compilation of ideas is The Answer.

I don’t begrudge anyone for writing such articles. I’ve done it myself. Creators want to help people solve problems and because so many have used the same methods, the same solutions get repeated over and over. It’s the sharing of “best practices,” and it makes sense. Learning to do something in the same way as others is not a problem. For the most part, that is how humans pass down knowledge — how to cook, how to drive, how to play the piano.

The Problem with Best Practices

The problem arises when we start acting as if there’s only one way to do a given thing — one way to make cookies, one way to draw a tree, one way to sell books — and stop looking for alternate answers. Or, even if we are looking, because of the way advertising and social media algorithms work, we get more of what we’ve already looked at, more of the same. We’ve been targeted as someone who likes X and Z, so we’ll be served lots of X and Z. It can seem like X and Z is all there is.

The easier it is to find out about something, and the more we see it repeated, the more like The Answer it seems. I find myself guilty of this and I’m not sure if the cause has more to do with habit or laziness.

The easy answers that are everywhere, sometimes to questions I didn’t even know I had, seep into my reality, and after time and repetition become solidified. They now represent knowledge I possess, but I haven’t had to think about, process, or make it my own. I unconsciously accept the gift (burden?) of someone else’s wisdom, no thinking required.

When I was in high school, our most popular history teacher used to constantly remind us to question everything and not become sheep. I thought I’d been doing fairly well, until recently. I’ve found myself accepting the theories and practices that the experts in my work and personal fields of interest offer. I can mimic them back like a true believer. What bothers me is that I drank the Kool-Aid without considering what was in it.

I’m now addicted to the easy answers. I’ve accepted best practices, and the constant marketing of them, as Truth and am having trouble seeing past the rhetoric. I’ve stopped questioning and seeking more to the extent that I am uncomfortable. I wrote about something similar a while back, Do You Have Enough Time to Think? but this goes beyond that into more feelings of frustration and listlessness.

How I’ve Started Thinking Again

The important part is that I noticed my discomfort and decided I needed a change. Over the past week or so, I have been more consciously moving through my days, making actual choices instead of following habits, and implementing small changes that will add up over time.

How am I doing this?

• I have unsubscribed from the email lists of experts and influencers that I have outgrown or whose messages no longer inspire me to do better.
• I subscribed to The New York Times rather than relying on social media headlines and hit and miss news sources.
• I have started reading and following Medium writers in areas that push me to think more and differently than I have been. I’ve signed up for a couple of their newsletters.
• I changed the categories of books that show up in my BookBub emails. (Bookbub is a great way to find free and discounted ebooks.)
• I’ve stepped away from social media, at least temporarily.

My actions towards more conscious consumption of information only recently started, but I already feel better. My life feels less cluttered and more filled with possibilities. Instead of reading slightly different versions of familiar information, I am learning about new fields of study. These are tangential to areas I’ve been involved with so are helping me think about them differently. I am starting to see patterns and groupings in these new areas that may lead to different areas of study for me.

Mainly, I feel like my brain is starting to kick in again. The neurons are firing up, helping me learn and see new connections, and who knows where that will lead? For now, it feels like a place where I can get comfortable with thinking for myself again.