Some (most?) days it seems as though the entire world is getting dumber. We’re filling our brains with meaningless content that teaches us nothing, and which we won’t remember in a month. We’re turning our back on proven science and lessons from the past in favor of “vibes,” “gut feelings,” and conspiracy-laden thinking. We are happily turning over our thinking to AI models. We gobble down whatever information nugget our “platform” of choice chooses to sell us, without looking any deeper or wider. Many of us no longer have the patience or attention span to think critically, research anything, or plan long-term.
And that’s before you throw all of our conflicted emotions onto the pile of things that are dumbing us down. We’re angrier than ever. We don’t exactly know why, but the whole world just has us reacting instead of acting. We’re more depressed than ever; sad for reasons we can’t fully articulate. Many of us are living life baseline terrified, be it of war, climate change, our crazy neighbors, or our own governments. It’s impossible to think clearly and intelligently when our brains are swimming in such a toxic stew.
And we’re tired. God, are we tired. Multiple jobs just to get by. Always on call for work. Family obligations that seem to bloom out of nowhere. Poor sleep from all the anxiety. Doom news 24/7 that keeps us up at night. No vacations thanks to having to work and employers who’d rather you exhaust yourself than offer PTO. Constant noise and stimulation that we can’t seem to drown out or escape. No time to just relax and be.
All in all, it’s a perfect storm of things that are making us all just a little bit dumber.
And I’m certainly not preaching down to anyone. I feel it, too. While I’m older than many (not most, I’m not that old) and perhaps a bit more insulated from the effects of the digital world, owing to a largely analog childhood and young adulthood, I still feel my brain going mushy some days.
Gather round, young ‘un’s while I tell you a story. (Isn’t that how all us older people start out a story?) I remember being the queen of the deep dive. I loved to learn and I could immerse myself in a subject for months at a time. Even if it wasn’t required for school! I’d find something I wanted to know and go all in with total focus. As a result, I know a lot of random stuff. None of it’s terribly useful day to day (I’d be great on Jeopardy, though!), but I know my brain benefitted from the reading, information processing, critical thinking, research, and comparing/contrasting competing perspectives.
Life used to be filled with opportunities to learn and grow. Reading was abundant. Even if you didn’t go for books, there were plenty of newspapers and magazines to lose an afternoon with. Debating people with opposing viewpoints without it devolving into name-calling and tribalism just happened when you were hanging out with people. You could travel to place and learn new things instead of passing out on a beach chair, too exhausted to do anything but stare at the sand. You could sign up for courses just to learn or do something with friends, and the courses were cheap or free.
It feels like it has gotten much harder to learn. Which is ironic given that we have much more information at our fingertips. The problem is that while the information is out there, the time to absorb it, the money to afford it, and the ability to cut through all the crap, is lacking.
Courses are expensive. Thanks to budget cuts, it’s harder to find extension classes or cheap community college courses. Libraries are underfunded and if you want to buy your own materials, you need a well-paying job. A good debate is almost impossible to find. If you want to have an honest conversation with someone of opposing views, good luck. You’re likely to get into a shouting match, if it doesn’t devolve into violence. Newspapers and magazines don’t exist in any meaningful form. Sure, you can read them online, but most are nothing more than advertising. Or they’re paywalled and your library no longer carries them, so good luck reading anything for free. AI means you can’t know what was written by a human, and what is some vomit barfed up by a model fed on all the crap (real or fiction, who knows) ever posted on the internet.
And if you can find materials that are true and comprehensive, who has the time to learn? Or the energy? It’s exhausting enough to try to take in new information. Now it’s compounded by all the crap you have to sift through. Advertising. Pop-ups. Videos with ads every minute. Click-bait and rage-bait. Sites and materials loaded with bias. “News” that is brought to you by oligarchs and corporate overlords who want to sell you things.
I still want to be that deep dive girl, but it’s just gotten so hard. And I’m lucky. Lucky to have a good library system nearby. Lucky to have money to buy my own materials when I need to. Lucky to have only one job so I have a a little spare time. Lucky to have developed reasonably good critical thinking skills that can weed out scams, lies, AI slop, and general bullshit. Lucky to have lived life before screens so I am not nearly as dependent on them as some.
But even being this lucky isn’t enough. If I want to be the deep dive queen again, I have to overcome all the obstacles mentioned above. Back in the day, I only had to deal with my responsibilities and then I still had plenty of time and energy to learn stuff. Today, I still have to get through my adult responsibilities (work, basic housecleaning, feeding myself and others, hygiene and exercise, spending time with my partner, fixing what needs repair, etc., etc.) but then I have to find the energy and mental focus to actually learn something.
It’s challenging. I have to schedule time. Then I have to protect that time from things that want to steal me away. TV and movies, my phone, sitting and staring vacantly at the wall as a try to recover from the day’s nastiness. All of it has to be managed before I can even think about sitting down to learn. And it isn’t enough to take in information anymore. I have to constantly cross-check and fact-check to make sure that what I’m learning is true and not some lie or hallucination cooked up by a bot or someone with an agenda.
But I do it. Why? Why do I make the time and effort to keep learning?
Because the alternative is becoming dumber and letting AI take over my brain. And while I certainly don’t want to be dumb, and I definitely don’t want dementia because I let my brain rot, I definitely don’t want my thinking and learning co-opted by a plagiarism machine that doesn’t understand the difference between fact and fiction.
If a computer model is going to run my brain, and if I’m going to give up thinking for myself and let algorithms determine what I see and know, what’s the point of being human?
That’s why I keep learning and challenging what I already know, despite all the obstacles. I want to stay human. I encourage you to stay human, too, and keep learning. Don’t fall into the trap of dumb. Keep your brain humming and, most of all, keep it yours.
