The constant intake of information makes it more difficult to settle down, think critically, and come up with original ideas.PETER CZIBORRA/Reuters
Oren Weisfeld is the author of The Golden Generation: How Canada Became a Basketball Powerhouse.
I recently released my first book. The most difficult part of the process wasn’t the research or sourcing interviews all over the country or even eventually producing 288 pages worth of material. It was forcing myself to sit down and write. The same can be said about doing any kind of work, where sitting down to be productive, creative, or original has become an increasingly ephemeral experience.
“Right now a moment of time is fleeting by!” the French painter Paul Cézanne once wrote. “Capture its reality in paint! To do that we must put all else out of our minds. We must become that moment.”
To be fair, “becoming the moment” and doing the work was a lot easier during Cézanne’s day in the 1800s, when peace and quiet were easier to come by. These days, it feels nearly impossible to go an hour without ingesting some sort of brain-numbing content from our phones, TVs, computers, or other screens we encounter in our daily lives. This constant intake of information can literally reduce the grey matter in our brains, responsible for processing information, along with shortening our attention spans and weakening our memory.
By now, most people know that doom-scrolling is bad – they know that the more they run up their screen time, the worse off their mental health is going to be. (There is also growing evidence that it is making people dumber.) And most people have hobbies that they turn to when feeling overwhelmed, when the time for screens is over. But what does our downtime actually look like nowadays?
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It used to be a stroll in the park, reading a few pages of a good book, or maybe cooking a comforting meal. During those moments of quiet relaxation, we could ease up and reflect on the little things in life or its big questions.
Now, when we walk, read, drive, or cook, it’s rarely done in isolation. Instead, these hobbies are often done alongside some kind of audio guide: We listen to music while reading, put on a podcast while walking or driving, or consume an audiobook while cooking. These hobbies still feel relaxing. Plus, it doesn’t technically count toward our screen time.
But what are we missing when we avoid quiet at all costs?
“We don’t like boredom,” Harvard Professor Arthur C. Brooks says. “When you think about nothing, your mind wanders and thinks about, for example, big questions of meaning in your life: What does my life mean? You go to kind of uncomfortable, existential questions when you’re bored. That turns out to be incredibly important.”
Ever since I discovered Zach Lowe’s basketball podcast in 2015, I’ve developed the habit of listening to podcasts in my free time. Whether I’m walking around outside, driving, cooking, cleaning, biking, or even playing basketball, I listen to my favourite basketball podcasts because they keep me entertained and informed. The best ones make me feel like I’m in a room with a group of friends talking trash and making jokes. This is a big part of the appeal of the internet in general, and podcasts more specifically: they make people feel like they are being social without having to do the hard work that comes with in-person socialization.
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But what I came to realize throughout the process of writing my first book is that as I fill my spare time with podcasts and audiobooks – spending less time being completely present, offline, and bored – my brain no longer works the way it used to. I now feel like I’m in a constant state of brain fog, incapable of sitting down for long periods of time to do meaningful work without procrastinating by scrolling X. I believe these podcasts are ironically making me less smart, productive, creative and ambitious.
It’s not that podcasts or audiobooks are inherently bad. There are a lot of smart people making incredibly creative audio content. And that’s part of the issue: with podcasts and audiobooks – as opposed to doom-scrolling on X or TikTok – it feels like you’re not wasting time. But it’s not about the content: it’s about the context in which most people are listening to podcasts and audiobooks.
Most often we listen to audio when we are multitasking, passively ingesting information without working for it, which makes us less likely to absorb and retain it. Or, more problematically, it’s done as a “break” in between stints on our other devices, leading to an overstimulated mind that is constantly taking in new information, which eventually stops processing and not only becomes worthless, but actually hurts people‘s abilities to think. I learned this lesson while writing my book: that the constant intake of information actually makes it more difficult to settle down, think critically, and come up with original ideas.
The only solution is to take real, lasting breaks: to raw-dog life in a way that most people seem to be increasingly uncomfortable doing.
“Each generation has different things that force the generation to grow up,” David Foster Wallace once said. “For us, it’s gonna be that at, at a certain point, that we’re either gonna have to put away childish things and discipline ourself about how much time do I spend being passively entertained? And how much time do I spend doing stuff that actually isn’t all that much fun minute by minute, but that builds certain muscles in me as a grown-up and a human being?
“And if we don’t do that, then (a) as individuals, we’re gonna die, and (b) the culture’s gonna grind to a halt.”
In other words: how much time are we willing to spend being completely, unassailably present? It’s not a new question, but as we become more addicted to our devices while AI integrates itself into more of our everyday lives, it’s becoming a more difficult one to answer. “The present, Sparrow seemed to say, is all we have,” novelist Madeleine Thien writes in Do Not Say We Have Nothing. “Yet it is the one thing we will never learn to hold in our hands.”