Thinking Again, in 2025

Launching a quest for my pre-internet brain

Happy New Year, friends! I hope you had some outstanding moments in your holidays and are looking forward to what 2025 will bring. This intro note is to announce I have turned on the payments feature as I threatened in my last post, but of course all content remains free. I’ve not yet figured out how to create a tip jar link like I’ve seen on other Substacks, so I’ll have to wait till I have help to get that mystery solved. In the meantime, welcome back and read on!

During the holidays I started reading Rod Dreher’s new book, Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age. In the first chapter I came across this insight about the internet:

It is a truth well established, but not widely appreciated that our technologies change the way we perceive the world. Many people believe that the internet is nothing more than an information-delivery device. Not true. As media theorist Marshall McLuhan famously said: “The medium is the message.”

He means that the means by which we receive information matters more, on the whole, than the information received. Why? Because the medium determines “patterns of perception,” the mental framework with which we take in the information. The invention of mechanized printing, for example, trained the Western mind in linear ways of thinking that had both positive and negative effects over the centuries.

Dreher goes on:

McLuhan, who died in 1980, did not live to see the internet, though it is a fulfillment of his prophecies. In his classic 2010 book The Shallows, journalist Nicholas Carr observes that since he began relying on the internet, he has suffered a diminished ability to concentrate, an experience familiar to many of us. There are neuroscientific reasons for this, Carr found.

According to Dreher (per Carr), those reasons have to do with the neuroplasticity of the brain—it’s ability to adapt to environmental changes. Dreher uses the positive example of how the brain of a person who goes deaf develops heightened capacities in other senses to compensate. Then he says this, which is the part that really snagged my attention because it so resonates with my experience of myself today versus a couple decades ago [emphasis mine]:

Our brains were not made to function with internet technology, it renders the task of understanding what we perceive much more difficult. Writes Carr, “It takes patience and concentration to evaluate new information—to gauge its accuracy, to weigh its relevance and work, to put it into context—and the internet, by design, subverts patience and concentration. When the brain is overloaded by stimuli, as it usually is when we’re peering into a network-connected computer screen, attention splinters, thinking becomes superficial, and memory suffers. We become less reflective and more impulsive. Far from enhancing human intelligence . . . the internet degrades it.”

It’s not just the internet but the ubiquitous way most of us access it: through the smartphone. Neuroscientists have found that the constant bombardment of information coming through the black-mirrored devices blitzes the prefrontal cortex, where most of our reasoning, self-control, problem-solving, and ability to plan takes place. The brain’s overwhelmed frontal lobes wind down higher-order cognition and defer to its emotional centers, which spark a cascade of stress and pleasure hormones.

I think this is true. A profoundly real issue. I know I don’t think like I used to. Much of the time—certainly when I’m trying to think through complex or inter-related ideas—my mental processes feel fractured, my thoughts easily disrupted, my ability to concentrate corrupted. I’ve become frustratingly distractible. Also, I used to be a bookworm. I was able to sink into a novel and be absorbed for hours—yes, even when I had little kids (that’s what nap time was for—a daily sacred ritual). Today, I start reading and almost immediately my mind wanders . . . unless I’m scrolling social media or reading online. Then I’m easily absorbed and time slips away from me, so caught up am I in the web of information and ideas and opinions being culled for me by whatever algorithm is tracking and holding—and molding—my attention. Offering me link upon link upon link, ad infinitum.

My diminished ability to focus really bothers me. And it makes me want to leave the internet—take a really long break from all social media and just spend a bunch of months, maybe even years, reading books, not websites. Writing by hand, not typing. Re-learning to concentrate and think effectively again. It too often feels like I’m stuck in the shallows, mentally swimming in circles while I am longing to dive back below the surface of life and explore concepts and truths in depth and on demand.

To be clear, it’s not that I feel myself utterly incapable of reflection. It’s that it feels much harder than it used to. Like, so much harder. Very often when I’m trying to think through an idea, to flesh out a line of thought, it feels like I’m searching through a mental fog for strands of light, the connection between ideas. And they do appear, but more often than not only in brief flashes at inopportune moments when I’m not poised to write anything down . . . and then they disappear into the black hole of my memory. My memory that feels like a sieve where once it felt like a vault. In short, I used to have trouble keeping up with my thoughts; now I have a hard time gathering them, and an equally hard time organizing them to share.

For a long time I’ve been attributing this struggle to the inescapable fact of my brain aging. I’ll be sixty this year, so I’ve shrugged it off, albeit wistfully, as an unavoidable consequence of Time. But now I’m thinking there’s more to it than that. If Dreher’s (and Carr’s and McLuhan’s) information is anything to go by, there’s science to support my suspicion that the problem isn’t simply a factor of my decades of years on the planet. It’s my thousands of hours online, plugged into a neural-like network that is rewiring my mind, messing with my reward centers, and sabotaging my thought processes.

Speaking of sabotage, last week I also listened to an interview of Gregg Braden that I highly recommend. Honestly, it’s less of an interview than a compelling monologue by Braden with a few prompts from the host. (Full disclosure: the host of this channel is my wonderful neighbor, and its video editor is my youngest wonderful son.)

What they’re discussing in this episode dovetails with Dreher’s points above, in that Braden is looking at the impact of technology on us, where it is taking us, and how it is actually threatening to overtake us—to literally sabotage our ability to remain fully human. He says:

For the first time we have the technology available, not to just change the world around us, Curtis, to change the world within us. To replace our humanness with the technologies. Once we give our biology away, we cannot get it back. This isn’t like a little switch where you say “Let’s try computer chips in the brain for a year and if it doesn’t work, let’s go back to what we use to have.” Because the human body, the way we’re designed, we morph and adapt to the changes that are introduced into the body. And when we stop using some feature of our biology, those systems begin to atrophy, and eventually they no longer work. The science is very clear on this.
[…]
What the new science is showing is that we are creating new brain cells from a part of our brain—it’s the hippocampus—we’re creating those brain cells until the last breath that we take in take in this world. But there’s a catch. Because when the new cells emerge they must be engaged in a meaningful way within about a week, within about seven days, or they will atrophy and die, because the body feels they are not needed because they are not being used. That principle applies throughout the body. It applies to the immune system, to the circulatory, the reproductive, the cognitive systems—all of those things. So when we begin replacing our natural biology with these external technologies, that become internal technologies, we begin to atrophy our natural abilities. And in one generation that happens, epigenetics allow us to pass that down to the next generation, and pretty soon we are not capable of achieving the extraordinary potentials that were given to us as a species. . . .

Without naming it, Braden is addressing the Trojan Horse of transhumanism, that quasi-religious movement among many materialists and global elites which seeks to merge human beings with technology. Their quest is to use technology to enhance human bodies and capabilities, to “perfect” us and so pave the way for us to overcome time and death. To become immortals. I’m not even kidding. Look up Yuval Noah Harari, Klaus Schwab’s potential successor at the World Economic Forum and author of Sapiens and Homo Deus. Or learn about Martine (née Martin) Rothblatt, the creator of SiriusXM radio and a “founding father” of the gender ideology movement, for insight into their god-complex perspectives on humanity’s future.

For people like me, who have been paying attention in recent years to the agenda of globalist politicians and corporate and cultural elites—the so-called ruling class—the basic concern Braden outlines won’t be new. Agenda 2030 has hardly been a secret, much less a conspiracy theory. As Braden says in the interview, documents outlining their goals for advancing and managing our global population are abundant and available online. (Talk about a rabbit hole!) And integration of digital technology into every cranny of our lives, including our bodies, plays the lead, the central role. It is the lynchpin for their dreams of success.

The question is, will most people be awake enough to discern the climactic nature of the trade-offs being offered when only the upsides are being advertised? The hopeful answer is that the internet itself will be the means to spread the word, engage the debate, light the Resistance, to raise the awareness of those who might otherwise be enticed by the beguiling promises of the Machine. But to be honest, that offers me cold comfort because people don’t tend to heed warnings about new technologies until the harms become too obvious to ignore. And by then it will be too late.

So whether I’m pondering Braden’s insights into the potential human costs of transhumanist hubris, or Dreher’s into the mind-altering consequences of the digital medium, either way I am confounded by the extent to which technologies, even without being literally embedded into my biology, have changed me in ways that disadvantage and disorient me. And it presents a conundrum, because I’m not a total Luddite. There are aspects of being connected through digital technology that I do love and feel grateful for and would not want to forgo—primarily the ease with which I can communicate with my family and friends no matter how near or far. So even assuming it was feasible to forsake the digital world for an extended period, I’d be loathe to give up the text and chat features on my phone that keep me in close connection with people I love.

Additionally there is the matter of this blog. Its recent growth has been a blessing, Divine encouragement to share my light into the world rather than hide it under a bushel. Indeed, it has felt to me like a very clear Answer to a very specific prayer: How, Lord? Excising the internet from my life now would be to snuff out this little flame. It would be to throw His blessing back in His face—the ultimate act of hubris and doubt. Of faithlessness. I’d rather bend to meet the moment.

So then it becomes a question of how to navigate a partial moratorium. What will be the parameters in stepping back? What rules of engagement would provide the most pared-down usage, the most practical and sustainable habits? Dear Reader, if you have ideas please share in the comments. It’s a real dilemma because even when writing these essays, finding good links to embed for context will suck me down one rabbit hole after another. I can end up spending more time reading for supportive content than writing to share it. Do I just give that effort up? My exacting inner attorney flinches at the thought. (Which might be a sign I should, actually.) And given that political topics and current events are by far the most popular, yet require the most time online, scrolling, clicking, reading, verifying, rinse repeat, I wonder how I can dramatically reduce my internet use yet maintain a blog readers will incline to bother with . . . ?

I guess we’ll find out. And I’ll trust Providence to light the way.

Because if there is one thing I am determined to do in this year of our Lord 2025, it’s recover my ability to concentrate, to dive deep, to recall my thoughts and hold onto their connections.

I’m going to find my way back to thinking again.