theTangentSpace

YouTube recommended me a segment from Cal Newport’s podcast lately with five rules for combating brain rot.^[1] Here’s a quick summary with some comments, minus Newport’s overly nerdy procedures for doing these things.

1. Read long-form writing every day. Not on a screen (except e-readers). Fiction or non-fiction. Ideally a mix. Start small if necessary, but aim for integrating “hard” books into your rotation at least semi-regularly.
2. Write more, and don’t delegate writing to AI. As the cliche goes, “writing is thinking”. Even small writing tasks — such as an email — will help to prevent that skill from atrophying.
3. Go for “thinking walks”. I think any walk without your phone (or with your phone tucked away in a bag) is fine; it doesn’t have to be a “thinking walk”. You’ll do that naturally anyway. And if not, it’s probably quite a meditative walk and good for you anyway.
4. Leave your phone plugged in. Have a place in the home where you phone lives, so you have to get up and walk to it if you need to use it. It’s not that the phone is inaccessible or unusable. It’s about breaking the “always on/always on you” cycle that leads to twitchy phone anxiety or mindless media consumption.
5. Get a skill or hobby that requires focus and discipline. Could be a sport, a craft, an instrument, etc. As well as retraining one’s focus, it also gives you something fun to do that’s not looking at your phone.

I like these rules because they’re simple, obvious, and accessible. Other than “read every day”, there’s no demand to follow a particular daily routine. There’s no rule for quitting certain apps or devices. You don’t have to buy a dumb phone.

I’m pretty good at 1 and 2. I could do 3 more often; too often I have a podcast or something while walking. 4 is the big one I’d like to make a habit. On days where I do this, my phone time is right down.^[2] But even on days that start well, it only takes one slip up to end up with business-as-usual, such as pocketing the phone to leave the house or using it as a music player and then not replacing it.

These five simple rules are better than a lot of Newport’s previous offerings on this topic, which were typically too full of systems and rules that just weren’t practical for a lot of people. I’m going to see how far these get me in my quest to stop stroking my phone so much, not least because I want to set a good example to my children.