Each week, I share one example or timeless piece of advice to help creators make their best work and thrive.
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Lift Heavy Thoughts: Cognitive Fitness in the Age of AI
Published about 1 month ago • 3 min read
You’ve probably heard by now that we’re all getting dumber.
Our ability to focus is slipping away. We hear in the news that the IQ of young people today is, for the first time on record, lower than their parents’ IQ. AI is waiting with open arms to offload all of your boring, laborious thoughts, like AUTO, the destruction-bent autopilot in WALL-E.
Our phones are sucking away our life force like the Petrova Line sucks away the heat of the sun.
brace yourself the onslaught will only get worse
Our decline has been documented, and discussed, and explained. The end of humanity is near.
But is all this actually true? When abstracted to the level of the population, much of the warnings have high probability windows. But that only tells part of the story.
What that overarching narrative leaves out is, well, You.
You are not a trend. You’re not a point on a graph. You are a person with tendencies, characteristics, personality, and creativity.
You may not control the forces of the world and fate, but you can control your response to them. It’s your response-ability.*
So how should you respond to the new forces that buffet our thoughts? I want to propose two ideas. First, lift heavy thoughts. Second, create daily.
Lift heavy thoughts. I recently got an email from Derek Sivers, one of my favorite creators. He explained to his readers that he has just moved to a new place in the woods and is offline 23 hours a day. The silence and self-sufficiency has been restorative for him, and he was reflecting on this when he said: I want to make sure that I can still “lift heavy thoughts.”
This phrase resonated with me because I’ve been thinking about how the technological revolution removes cognitive work similarly to the way industrial technologies historically removed physical work.
Just as practices around exercise and physical fitness have developed since the mid-twentieth-century (aerobics, calisthenics, the Thigh Master), I think similar practices and industries will emerge around cognitive fitness.
Challenging and nuanced games, puzzles, and (I hope) physical books will be some of the ways that we keep our cognitive fitness.
Starting a journaling practice (or a newsletter 😉) is still one of the best ways to regularly lift heavy thoughts.
Create daily. Along with the mind, though, we need to animate our soul. It will come as no surprise to you that I believe creating in all its forms to be an essential way to explore and express your soul, emotions, mind, and body.
As a musicologist, I am a part of a discipline called the “humanities.”
The humanities has traditionally been concerned with understanding what humans have made: poetry, art, music, film.
But if the humanities are to survive, we are going to have to take seriously not only what humans have made, but what making does to humans.
Creating makes us human.
Creating is not an activity set aside for an artistic class (”painters,” “musicians,” or “poets”). It is also not an activity solely to produce “content,” to extract value from the marketplace.
Creating can and should be an activity that all humans are expected to consciously do on a daily basis.
There is a future universe in which humans wake up thinking about how to get their steps in and their creative reps in.
Here is my question for you:
What activities make you feel most human?
Hit reply and let me know. Even a one sentence answer would mean a lot.
*For the record, I’m not against AI tools. I’m not against all social media nor do I think that tech is inherently negative. I have leaned heavily into exploring AI tools over the past few years, and since I’m teaching Arts Entrepreneurship again this term, I’m posting on Instagram again.
Many creatives—writers, musicians, artists, filmmakers—face huge struggles in their creative and business lives.
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