How to unf*ck your brain (you have about 36 months)
The cure for brainrot
Unrotting your brain is an emergency.
Brainrot is the equivalent of a well-respected doctor in a white lab coat saying, “Ma’am/sir, you have stage 4 colon cancer.”
I’ve been quiet about this epidemic for too long.
People are losing their freaking minds like no other time in history. Outrage culture has reached a new level.
The world has never been more polarizing. If a good-looking actor wears a nice outfit to an award ceremony, it can turn into outrage followed by “You N*zi-son-of a b*tch.”
The polarisation and outrage used to be contained like a virus to only certain parts of the internet or the comments section. Now, perfectly sane leaders and highly influential people are coming out of the closet.
Their brains are rotting, too, for the whole world to see.
A writer I follow attracted their millions of followers on the idea they would never talk about or engage with politics. Recently, they lost their mind too.
It was hard to watch.
I don’t judge them for it. Protecting your mind from brainrot is extremely hard to do. For the last 5 years, I’ve accidentally become an expert in it. I’ve helped those around me do the same.
Brainrot is what happens when you:
Spend too much time being served “content” via social media
Choose to ignore nuance, and divide up big issues into two sides
Embrace mainstream culture
Watch too much news
Drown in politics
Get into debates
Here’s how you know you’ve got brainrot: you can’t focus for more than 30 seconds, every conversation turns political, you refresh feeds compulsively, and your worldview feels black-and-white.
There’s extreme urgency to solve this problem.
In a recent talk from Tom Bilyeu to a room full of Youtube creators, he explained what’s going to happen in the next ~36 months.
Right now, brainrot is pervasive, but in about 36 months, AI will be so good that it can produce Hollywood-quality video in real-time.
What that means is our minds are going to be hit with 1000x more content that is psychologically engineered to make us watch like heroin addicts. That’s going to rapidly increase the speed of brainrot caused by algorithms.
The unlikely antidote to brainrot (that’ll bring you calmness and peace)
It’s time to go old school.
1. Go quiet
The noise right now is deafening. It’s hard to even think.
The solution is to do the opposite and be quiet. Embrace some time alone. Quiet your mind. Assume most of the noise is an overreaction. Keep your nose out of everyone else’s business. Don’t say stuff that’ll piss people off. Actually…
Try not to say much at all.
2. Controversial: Do hard things
Rotting your brain is the easy thing to do.
It takes zero skill or discipline. You just sit there and let influencers and cable news shout at you and tap into your deepest fears or desires.
Our brains are rotting because our worldview is becoming too easy, too simplistic. The simpler and dumber reality starts to look, the dumber our minds become.
This dumbing down hurts. Life feels boring and stressful in this state. The institutions that enable this dumbing down do it because it makes us want to numb the pain of brainrot.
The more we numb the mind the less reactive we become. It just ends up in complete hopelessness which is better than mass-protests in the streets.
The way to vaccinate yourself against easy is to do the opposite and do hard things. Choose a goal that feels utterly impossible.
Run a marathon
Shred until you’ve got a 6-pack
Launch a digital business
Build a newsletter
Pitch 101 VCs
…. the options are endless.
Not only does it feel great, but the struggles you’ll face toughen up your mind. You start to build a fortress around your mind that can’t be penetrated with an idea missile from CNN or Fox.
3. Hang out with small children who cry a lot
If you don’t have kids then hang out with someone else’s.
Small humans still have creativity and imagination. They can think in abstract terms without narrowing their mind into black and white opinions.
I asked my toddler yesterday what color daddy’s shirt was.
“Is it purple or yellow?”
She said rainbow. She likes to mess with my mind. She can joke around. She can see unicorns in the sky when others only see clouds. It’s a great way to detox the mind.
4. Curate your social media feeds like a psycho
The illuminati and conspiracy theory type people say we’re being programmed.
That AI is just here to control us. Obviously this is total horse sh*t. But there is one thing these people got right. Social media and content do program our minds, except we get to decide who and what programs us.
That’s why you should never open any social media app and just casually be served content like a zombie. Instead, curate the hell out of your social media.
Only follow high-quality people who don’t talk smack or engage in politics. Never visit the homepage or “for you” feed ever again.
Instead, create lists of people and only view their content. Spend most of your time reading content in your email inbox that you’ve chosen to subscribe to. And add filters to block keywords like politics, Andrew Hate, CNBC, Fox, etc.
What you’re left with is a beautifully tranquil experience that supports your goals and helps expand your thinking instead of shrinking your brain into a tiny pea that some politician can squash like a bug or take a piss on.
5. Quit politics cold turkey
To win elections politicians need to pit people against each other.
Once you become a mature adult and realize politics doesn’t solve problems (it creates them), then everything changes. Polarisation solves nothing. Treating every event in the world like a tribal event rots your mind.
Not everything has to become a form of religion.
You don’t need to subscribe to any ideology. For example, I’m an Aussie but embrace my wife’s Chinese culture and mix it with elements of Japanese Zen and even Buddhism.
I don’t have a race.
I’m made up of many races because all forms of race are just labels for one creature known as humans.
The fastest way to rot your brain is to drown in politics. Take a break.
As a matter of urgency, we need to reintroduce debating in schools - the kind where you are given a topic and told which side you will be speaking for, regardless of your personal beliefs.
All children need to grow up knowing that issues can be complex, there is nuance, and there are hard facts - and to listen, to think and to construct a valid argument, without recourse to personal abuse, let alone violence – Lucy Beney
6. Watch old TV shows
Modern TV fast-tracks brainrot.
Everything is optimised for attention. There has to be a “payoff” as it’s known in TV in every single episode. TV needs to help society get high on huge releases of dopamine or the actors lose their jobs and the season finale comes, fast.
Old TV shows didn’t have this problem.
They could f*ck around with a long, drawn out plot for 6 episodes and the audience wouldn’t care. Or have a scene of dialogue that lasted almost 30 mins without a single cut scene. Watch early episodes of Game of Thrones to see this.
There is one modern TV show that does this, too: The Bear. It’s slow AF.
Either way, go back in time. Watch old TV. Be inspired again by a good story that’s not constantly trying to ping your brain to death like the last Star Wars movie.
7. Go hang out in a park wearing a pair of Ray Ban sunnies
I never used to spend much time in parks. Found them boring.
Then I had a kid. She wants to hang there 24/7. I’m a sucker of a girl dad so I let her. That means I go too. The more time I spend in parks the more my brain starts to heal.
It’s not just the nature or the sun. It’s the mindset of other adults in the park.
They, too, are there for the same reason I am. We don’t talk about hot topic events. In fact, we don’t talk much at all. We just chill. We enjoy the sun. We watch our kids play. These moments are pure bliss.
Force yourself to hang in more parks. Go on the swings if you want to be a real badass.
8. Write a Substack to absolutely nobody
Writing is thinking.
Too many people’s brains are so rotten they’ve stopped thinking. The way to think again is to write. It’s better than journaling because it helps you interact with others and have people challenge your ideas.
The more you write the more you begin to pull apart your worldview. If you write for long enough, you realize everyone’s problems are basically the same. Gives you a sh*t load of compassion for other humans. Compassion relaxes the mind.
9. Read a good fiction book
What’s bizarre with fiction books is most of them represent reality.
Why? Because fiction authors are human and subconsciously base their made-up stories on events from history. No matter how hard they try and imagine a different worldview or a set of alien-like characters, the humanity will always be visible.
My go-to fiction book is something simple like Harry Potter. Dreaming of a world that has no constraints helps your mind shatter through the actual constraints we all face.
The way through the current chaos is to start dreaming again. Fiction helps the mind get to that state, fast.
10. Spend a lot less time on a phone
I’m down to less than 30 mins a day.
Looking at a tiny little screen every second of the day rots your brain. Between notifications and algorithms you lose all present-moment awareness.
Just go to a local gym. Look at all the people pretending to be there working out when they’re just there to look at their phone and do 2 minutes of actual exercise (without sweating).
Hack: turn your phone into a 1999 Nokia 5110 that can only call & text phone numbers.
Closing thought
World War 3 has already started.
It’s the war on your attention. If you don’t start to unrot your brain right now (we all have some rot), you’ll find yourself in 36 months unable to think clearly or hold two conflicting ideas in your mind at the same time.
That’ll lead to feeling tired, overwhelmed, stressed, depressed, etc. Big Pharma can then give you a bunch of pills to numb your mind further, but that’ll probably only accelerate the brainrot until you’re no more intelligent than a vegetable.
You wouldn’t be reading this if there were no hope. Go heal your mind.
What’s the biggest sign of brainrot you’ve noticed? Let me know in the comments below (I’ll read every reply).
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Social media polarizes like never before. So it makes sense to create more than to consume. My top 3 ways to stop brainrot: Exercising outside no matter the weather, writing, and talking to a therapist.
Hey Tim! Love your writing. In this instance, I think we humans need to stay in the game, but shift away from the firehose of rage and clickbait. Yes, we need to get outside, work out, meditate, socialize, and have more real-life fun, and take time away from screens, etc. AND, it's just as important that we go deeper into what's happening and seek better, more sane sources and educate ourselves and have the important conversations without all the BS and crazy. This means we need to learn greater discernment, meaning-making, sensemaking, and curation. We need to stop and think more deeply and carefully. In addition, we need to make our actions and relationships more purposeful, impactful, and meaningful. The accelerating metacrisis or polycrisis show us that we've been distracted and left the working of the world to others. It's time to invest ourselves in learning, growing, engaging, and fully participating in the healing, recovery and reorienting of democracy, of sanity, of our climate and ecology, of our communication and relationships. Time to reinvent ourselves, our communities, and our planet around the kind, the wise, the good, the true and the beautiful.