The enduring value of a notebook and "long thinking"

""There's a deeply human satisfaction to retreating to an exotic location and wrestling with your own mind, scratching a record of your battle on paper," Cal writes. "The innovations and insights produced by this long thinking are deeper and more subversive than the artificially cheery bullet points of a chatbot.""

""The problem facing knowledge work in our current moment is not that we're lacking sufficiently powerful technologies. It's instead that we're already distracted by so many digital tools that there's no time left to really open the throttle on our brains. And this is a shame. Few satisfactions are more uniquely human than the slow extraction of new understanding, illuminated through the steady attention of your mind's eye.""

""So, grab a notebook and head somewhere scenic to work on a hard problem. Give yourself enough time, and the enthusiastic clamor about a world of AI agents and super-charged productivity will dissipate to a quiet hum.""

Enormous technological and social change coexists with the enduring power of solitary, analog thinking. A simple spiral notebook and uninterrupted hours enable deep cognitive work and the slow extraction of new understanding. The main obstacle is not insufficient technology but pervasive digital distraction that prevents the brain from opening its throttle. Long, focused thinking in scenic or isolated settings produces innovations and insights that surpass superficial, AI-generated bullet points. Practicing sustained attention and retreating to concentrated, offline spaces can quiet the clamor about AI productivity and foster genuinely novel ideas. Small, deliberate rituals amplify creative depth.

Read at Big Think