Can You Reclaim Your Mind?

"Looking back over the columns I've written in 2025, I can see that a lot of them, broadly construed, have been about reclaiming one's mind. I wrote about living in the present, picturing the future, and exploring one's memories; about reading, learning, and making the most of one's spare time; and about whether artificial intelligence will end up expanding our thinking or limiting it. The shared subject was resistance to the forces, malevolent or inertial, that can render us mentally exhausted and scattered."

"We live in a heavily technologized culture, and so it's natural to pursue mental reclamation through digital purification. Like my colleague Jay Caspian Kang, I quit looking at almost all social media this year. (It was getting wrecked by A.I., anyway.) I considered replacing my smartphone with a dumbphone -a device with little or no internet connectivity-but instead hobbled it using various apps and devices."

"I largely replaced my laptop with an e-ink tablet, made by the Norwegian company reMarkable; it has no browser or e-mail, but lets me write and annotate with both a keyboard and a stylus. (Most of my columns now start life in longhand.) And, at home, I moved my computer out of my main workspace and into a separate room. Now, if I want to go online, I have to walk there."

People seek to reclaim mental energy by strengthening presence, imagining futures, and revisiting memories while cultivating reading, learning, and purposeful spare-time activities. Reclaiming the mind involves resisting forces that cause exhaustion and scattered attention. Digital purification strategies can support this, including abandoning most social media, crippling smartphones, adopting e-ink tablets without browsers or email, and relocating computers so online access requires a deliberate walk. Curating low-tech pleasures, favoring handwriting, and using slow interfaces encourage sustained attention and deeper engagement, fostering a stronger sense of being mentally alive rather than merely less distracted.

Read at The New Yorker