The Human Brain in 2023
It's a mess. Many such cases!
It is a dangerous thing to hand millions of heedless and wildly distractible dunces a blank check on matters of internet worm-holing. People like this, which in this case is to include myself, will absolutely fill that check, cash it, and then blow the proceeds on hour after debauched hour on searching for Lord of the Ring memes, Pitchfork’s Top 100 Albums of the ‘90s, which NFL quarterback has thrown the most interceptions in a game, or endless troves of dog content. This is not so much a risk as it is a dorky certainty—Chekhov’s gun, more or less, but the gun in this case is a surprisingly detailed and comprehensive memory of the Cookie Monster singing Chocolate Rain.
Psychologists have repeatedly suggested that we cut down our overall screen time, but I won’t retire remembering stupid internet tidbits from my moment-to-moment praxis. Nothing on heaven or earth, in this life or the next, is going to stop me from thinking about THE JUGGERNAUT, BITCH! This is my right, and these are my values. I am categorically and completely dedicated to treating my mind as a lint roller collecting the vast and bottomless knowledge contained within the digital matrix, even if it is impossible to keep track of all the gratuitous heapings of What’s Going On. My brain sprints through a bombardment of world events and gets enraged about the sort of stuff that usually upsets me. In this instance, Steve Garvey’s hilariously misbegotten Senate run, somehow Elon Musk’s perplexing current state, Rudy Giuliani’s sozzled endgame, and what kind of medical interventions can cure being a Nervous Pisser. I am a piggy slurping content slop from the trough, and while I’ve dialed this compulsion back in recent years, I return out of a force of habit. The lifestyle endures. The, uh… cosmic ballet continues.
It is remarkable that the average human brain can make sense of anything in 2023. My lifespan has been reduced by at least a decade due to the amount of cortisol that has coursed through my veins in response to nearly a decade of YouTube debunk videos, Instagram influencers, Twitter reply guys, and red pill subreddits. Seriously, Beatles contrarianism is more infuriating to me than any political journalist could ever be: Oh, you think that other guy was a better drummer than Ringo—what a special and unique opinion!! I don’t mean to sound like Ted Kaczynski, but hyperstimuli is making us more brain-fried and less human. Tap this button. Unlock that new bright and shiny weapon skin. Watch this very important video about the everyday challenges of neurodivergent people in rural Oklahoma. The colors are brighter and the messages are simpler. We are soulless non-people and the most important thing about us is our right thumbs. People who graduated from the best universities on the planet, people on the cutting edge of technology, are paid six-figure salaries to nuke our attention spans, our imaginations, our curiosity, our sense of self.
This content has no mass or motion, and we consume it at a Mach 3 speed. The average person today has managed to watch more videos last week alone than someone born in the 1930s has seen their entire lifetime. Our brains are peppered with opinions and jokes and banal pseudo-philosophical insights and micro-aggressions all made in short, declarative sentences. Frantic little pulses and virtual bumfights about things we don’t care about, and the algorithms insist we are endlessly subjected to it. We are filled with limp gutless facts crammed like worms in a shoebox, and we have no idea how to interpret them or understand why they’re true. It’s easier than ever to cherry-pick information to retroactively justify whatever opinion we have. The internet is where we come to have people condescend to us about things they learned yesterday. My most commonly cited sources are an article I saw, this podcast I listened to, and my friend’s friend who I was talking to this past weekend.
Imagine being a blurry ghost, a vampiric entity, curled and twisted and snaking around hundreds of people in a bar, listening to them all at once, thinking you know them, thinking they enrich you, but actually, they give you less authentic human interaction than a random crackhead at the bus stop. Within an hour, the spectrum of human consciousness takes a formless form, grasping against the grit of my attention span inch by frictionless inch—the melting of the ice caps, the lack of decent affordable housing, the expropriation of surplus value, kindness content, the fact that all living things one day must die, the absence of an interventionist god, the short shelf life of organic groceries, aerial shots of LA rush hour traffic, what Grimes just said, the heat death of the Universe, whether the mole on your chin in cancerous, the hideous creature that squints at you from the reflection of your screen, opinions of opinions on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
I can’t focus at all and I don’t even have ADHD.
IN: The entire history of conflict in the Middle East.
OUT: My friend’s fiance’s name and what she does for a living.
IN: Golden Bachelor contestant names and ages.
OUT: Whatever medicine my girlfriend is allergic to.
IN: Travis Kelce’s stance on vaccines.
OUT: What is a safe PSI for my tires?
Even by the diminished standards of us in the I'll Keep Drinking That Garbage community, most of the content we ingest isn’t very good or particularly interesting. I slouch on a couch in my apartment living room next to my girlfriend, and I turn my witless head to look her in the eyes, and I am annihilated by something dystopian and bleak. There is nothing more hellish than listening to the sounds of someone scrolling through the videos on their newsfeed. And my friends will send me TikToks of two white guys on a podcast debating whether Drake is a actually good rapper, and the bottom half of that video is running footage of mobile gameplay. I’ve seen people get sucked into the TikTok chiropractor “cracking” videos or the genre of ear wax cleanings. When did we collectively decide that this uncanny, manufactured, lowest-common-denominator dreck was the baseline for capturing our attention?
We also know far too many people. Thirty years ago, the average guy knew maybe, like, nine motherfuckers. Now, I’m watching Instagram stories of someone I haven’t seen since high school, and for some reason, I know the name of their dog. My brain was racked with some weird dreams last week because I saw someone’s post about how their grandfather passed away, and then I remembered I only knew this person because we went on two dates four years ago. My thoughts are a mess and the filing cabinet of my head is full. It’s going to explode.
My default state is confused, ignorant, or mentally exhausted.
If you walk into a room and wonder why you even wandered in there, don’t beat yourself up and feel like you have some rare brain disease. You just watched 16 different Instagram stories in the time it took you to go to the bathroom. We should collectively log off and take up a hobby, but then we have to be careful with hobbies because we’ll Google something and it’ll send us to Reddit, then we’ll make a new account to ask questions about this hobby and get zero replies and two down votes in a day, and then give up on that hobby and be back online again.
I can’t wait to forget this essay 14 seconds after I hit publish.
And here I am, taking it all in through you, forming a human centipede of digital excrement.
You’ve got a tight handle on it, Brother.
I contend, the 21st century is far overrated. 🤷♂️😉