I gave in.
I got overwhelmed with the news, the geopolitical turmoil, the markets, tech releases… to the point that for the last two months that I haven’t written here, I felt like whatever I was going to write would already be yesterday’s news. Asking myself if it is even worth the pain of sitting down for hours to scramble something that – chances are – will go unnoticed?
But I can’t think this way. People have been recording their ordinary thoughts and small revelations since the dawn of time. We have this intrinsic need to pass our knowledge and wisdom to the next generations (unfortunately, the same holds true for spreading stupidity, when it would be better for humanity to keep those mouths shut).
That’s my digital trail, something that – I hope – someone will keep paying for the blog server and upgrades, long after I’m gone from this physical world. Scary thought. Maybe it will inspire someone to go create, start a business, become more vocal and visible, or simply entertain them with my cheesy jokes and improper language. Or maybe it will all be irrelevant, because people won’t be able to read anymore.
It’s easy to find excuses not to do something like me not committing to write weekly, especially when a direction is unclear and outcomes not guaranteed. Can somebody tell me what this newsletter is about, anyway? Besides my mumbling, of course.
Mayday, mayday
These days we’re casually having AI write our emails, generate our pimped up images, pretty realistic videos and summarise our meetings. Six months ago, I thought I was clever asking Claude to help me analyse and predict supply chain levels for my ecommerce business Oishya. Today, that feels embarrassingly basic, with all the self-reflecting, (quasi-reasoning) AI agents that cross execute tasks to platforms with UI and API tools, and I lost the feeling that I’m on top of all the AI-related updates. I read The Neuron, Semafor, HackerNews and I’m friends with people like Mike Butcher from TechCrunch who share all the latest tech news, yet, I don’t have time to comprehend or worse – experiment with it all.
With your expertise, you can go deep or you can go wide and shallow. There is no time nor energy to do both.
But I know it’s not just me who is feeling overwhelmed —everything is accelerating at a pace that makes yesterday’s innovation today’s obsolescence.
Recently, I spent a good couple of weeks day-trading stocks. Worst mental state of my life. My productivity would pretty much stop at 2:30pm (UK time). Every notification made my heart rate spike. Not sure what’s so addictive about constantly changing numbers, but it is bad. I existed in perpetual emergency mode—muscles tense, attention fragmented, pretty unable to focus on conversations happening right in front of me or write something deeper and well-thought.
I since then switched to long positions (I don’t dare doing shorts although in this aggressive Grizzly market I probably should) but I wasn’t really able to quit that ‘survival mode’. I don’t own a TV, but the headlines screaming crisis still manage to leak in via LinkedIn or other media into my mind. Trump tweets something inflammatory. Markets react. Tech CEOs announce layoffs. Elections threaten democracy. Climate disasters intensify. War spreads. Each such notification triggers our fight-or-flight response, keeping us in a constant state of low-grade panic. It gets even me, an eternal optimist that loves life, people, and always finds reason to smile.
It seems we’re all day-traders now, but instead of monitoring stock prices, we’re trading our attention for a stream of emergencies we can neither predict nor control.
Our brains weren’t designed for this. They evolved to handle occasional threats—a predator Simba, a storm, a rival tribe—not the perpetual emergency broadcast system we’ve installed in our pockets and are eye-ball glued to constantly. Not the fucking infinite tsunami.
The reactive existence
Ever notice how the most consequential changes often happen while we’re distracted by the ridiculously outrageous?
While we’re busy debating Elon Musk’s latest provocative tweet or Trump’s outlandish statement, strong shifts in power structures quietly advance in the background with minimal to no scrutiny. A magician’s trick—keep watching the right hand while the left does the real work. We know it’s all smoke and mirrors, yet we keep falling for it.
This isn’t just happenstance. In our attention economy, distraction serves power. The loudest voices draw our focus while the most significant changes often happen quietly, technically, systematically—in regulatory frameworks and corporate governance, that seem too boring to capture public interest. We don’t pay attention to the important stuff. Just like in this movie Don’t look up.
bottom: Clip from DO not look up movie.
Instead, we only look far left or far right, and only in our own bubble. Social media did an amazing job on dividing us. We don’t fight ‘for’ a cause. We fight against everything and everyone, regressing qualities of our lives and destroying what communities used to be about.
Jon Sneider wrote about this phenomenon, noting how tech elites understand that “distraction and chaos prevent public resistance.”
I’m the last one to believe some grand conspiracy—just that our reactive, distraction-prone information environment naturally benefits those making long-term, systematic changes. They understand that our collective attention is finite and easily hijacked.
How do you destroy innovation? Exactly like that. When people are in survival mode, creativity can’t flow.
The tab hopper
We’re over stimulated and plain tired, so we resort to cognitive laziness. Worst still, we’re wired to find shortcuts. Ok, this drive toward efficiency has allowed us to make it this far. I’m grateful for it, as I can’t imagine myself scrubbing clothes in a river like our great, great grandmothers used to do. Instead, I throw them in the washing machine and still complain that I need to take the laundry out and hang it out.
In a way, laziness is the foundation of technological advancement. We create systems to handle repetitive tasks, develop frameworks others can build upon, and design tools that save everyone time.
I remember life pre-Internet where if you wanted to meet with your friend, you needed to agree on the exact time and place. And if you dialled someone in on their local phone after 9-10pm, it was considered rude. Now, we’re available and ON all the time, and I’m aware that technological gains come with hidden costs. Each convenience we embrace means something else atrophies. Like our attention span. Complex skills become simplified, automated, instantly accessible – and within a generation, capabilities that were once commonplace start to vanish.
“Why memorise anything when you can Perplexity it?” sounds reasonable until you realise that critical thinking requires a foundation of knowledge actually stored in your brain. You can’t make creative connections between ideas if those ideas only exist in the cloud, not in your head.
We’re simultaneously outsourcing our cognitive functions while overwhelming our attention with non-stop stimulation. We’re losing our ability to think deeply precisely when deep thinking is most needed to navigate our complex world. The constant switching between tasks, apps, and alerts fragments our attention. It’s like social media has taken a Texas Chainsaw Massacre approach to our consciousness, turning our once-coherent thoughts into brain tartar. I read somewhere that it takes an average of 23 minutes to fully refocus after an interruption (but don’t quote me on that). So how on earth you can get back to what you were doing if you can’t finish a 5 min long article without tabs hopping in between. I struggle with writing these newsletters even while on the plane, with no internet. There is always something to check, delete or reorganise.
I really wonder if people pre-computers were more productive than us. Or they were still numbing themselves with alcohol, acid, wild parties and daylight gossiping.
At least back then we had Rolling Stones, Pearl Jam or Nirvana with their wicked lyrics sung with a full spectrum of raw human emotions. Musicians who captured existential angst and societal discontent in ways that made you feel understood. Now we have the Milkshake Man and algorithmically perfected pop hits designed by AI to maximise ‘engagement’ rather than meaning. Songs crafted to be catchy enough for TikTok but forgotten by next month, consumed like fast food rather than savoured like a meal. We listen passively while scrolling, rarely experiencing that spine-tingling moment when a lyric cuts straight to your soul. And soon, we may be recommended ghost songwriters entirely fabricated by AI, pushed by Spotify and others to maximise profits and avoid paying actual human artists. The good, real stuff will be buried so deep you’ll need to seriously sweat to find it.
The pressure to always be “on”
Even when I’m not at my desk, I’m thinking about what to create next. The mental machinery never stops—ideas for the next newsletter, strategies for growth, researching new podcast guests, responses to comments, potential collaborations. My brain has been trained to believe that any moment not producing is a moment wasted. And when you see all those headlines of overnight successes or reaching $B valuations within 2 years of inception (how did they do that with all those distractions!?), you’re feeling like a loser wasting your life on writing silly newsletters. Time to focus on the important stuff.
But what is important? What exactly should I be doing? Measuring my worth through revenue metrics? Chasing engagement for the sake of some abstract digital scoreboard? Keeping up with an accelerating pace for… what, exactly? Our minds have been colonised by productivity culture to the point where rest feels like failure and reflection seems like indulgence. It’s pretty ironic, since as we try to keep up with all those changes, we’ve made ourselves more machine-like, don’t you feel?
Get lost in boredom
The neuroscientist Dr. Nancy Andreasen found something fascinating among history’s most creative minds—they all deliberately carved out time for ‘free-floating periods of thought.’ Da Vinci would stare at an unfinished painting for half a day. Einstein would aimlessly drift at sea in his ‘Tinef’ sailboat, getting so lost in thought that the Coast Guard repeatedly rescued him.
When Andreasen studied these ‘boredom’ periods, she discovered the ‘resting’ brain isn’t passive at all. It’s highly active in different regions than our task-focused brain, particularly in the association cortex that connects thoughts and experiences. She called this REST (‘random episodic silent thinking’)—our default creativity mode.
This isn’t just historical. Quentin Tarantino doesn’t brainstorm with productivity apps—he floats in his pool:
I just kind of float around…and then a lot of shit will come to me. I get out, make notes…that will be my work for tomorrow.
I’m not suggesting we abandon technology for a David Beckham-style chicken and bee farm (he can afford to). I just think we should let our brain occasionally do what it was designed to do – roam and think critically.
Welcome the mental struggle
Let’s be realistic. The tools that fracture our attention aren’t going away. AI will only get better and more personalised, learning our weak points as we trade mental autonomy for convenience. Technophobia or fantasising about some digital-free utopia isn’t a solution. Many tried to slow down the progress (remember the AI ‘freeze’ letter?) and as many have failed.
What we need is a more intentional how we want our relationship with tech to be. When did you last allow yourself to be truly bored, with no external stimulation? Many fight to reclaim our mental autonomy (i.e check brilliant book: The Battle for Your Brain by my podcast guest Nita Farahany) in an age that’s increasingly hostile to it.
Our parents’ generation had to adapt to one or two major technological shifts in their lifetimes. We’re facing a new one every few months. That won’t change. But we can change how we respond to it.
