I wrote Defragging Your Mind to be helpful. Read it if you have a minute; it’s under 40 pages and high-yield. But the fundamental premise is that you want to improve your focus/cognition in the first place. And not just for improvement’s sake. I imagine you want to actually do something with being more able to focus: like write or start a company or just think more deeply about ideas you are interested in. No auto-complete-to-do-the-hard-parts for you. The hard part is the valuable part. With a calculator, the answer is the important part, not the steps of the calculation -- so use a tool. With ideas, the process is just as important as the output, mostly because you are “coming up” with something; you aren’t multiplying two six-digit numbers where you know the answer is known beforehand. Creating is fundamentally going into the abyss and hoping to emerge with a prize.

You can’t go into the abyss with a fragmented mind. And I suppose I assume every human mind has an urge on some level to create. But this really may not be the case. 

If you can’t first sit quietly without a screen in front of you dazzling you with novelty, you probably can’t wait long enough to feel the spark that just happens spontaneously telling you what you want. Even after you feel the spark, you then have to come up with a plan, execute the plan, stick with the plan when obstacles inevitably arise, and not lose hope/momentum when the path is temporarily blocked. None of this can happen if you don’t make space for it in your mind -- and fragmentation leads to exactly this disorganized cluttering where the space is occupied by detritus not useful in helping you move toward your goals.

Fragmentation is the perfect set-up for advertising. There is a body of psych literature that demonstrates you are more convincible when exposed to multiple, rapid context shifts.[1] It's as if you don’t have time to rebut arguments in your mind and if left unchallenged they enter your mind and set up residence as if they were fully accepted, rather than actually being accepted by your mind. This certainly has far-reaching implications both for advertising but also for radicalizing ideology, for tribalizing, for idiotizing society. Make the clips short enough and polarizing enough and you can bend people’s basic self-beliefs to a wild extent -- and maybe sell them some graphic t-shirts!

So again, why Defrag? To stop this enfeebling and manipulating of our minds, first; then second, to allow us the mental space to discover our genuine wants/needs, and the means by which to obtain them. I assume we all want this. We must all want this, correct?

Is there a portion of our populace that prefers fragmentation? That, knowing the consequences, takes the blue pill and just glugs this garbage down, letting the mercenary multimedia forces just turn their minds into mush? Those who welcome a TikTok-brained oblivion? I didn’t believe so when I started thinking about this, but now I am unconvinced. I think some people prefer fragmentation. Some prefer digital lobotomies. Especially when it can come with the bizarre, completely unfounded belief in your own if-not-intellectual-at-least-moral superiority. In the process of fragmenting, one becomes more certain of one’s rightness (and righteousness) all while the foundation for those beliefs becomes so unsteady as to be built on ball bearings.

Fragmentation offers freedom from self-examination. It is a delightful semi-anesthetized bliss where there isn’t enough central coherence to critically appraise your own belief system. You get to feel superior without any of the work it takes to actually achieve it.

I’m not in any way claiming Defragging can undo what SFV and the internet writ large is doing to our minds. For the people who already sense some perverse, pervasive force is working to paralyze their autonomy of thought, Defragging can help. But for those all-in on meme culture, it’s not doing anything to forcibly pull them out of that quicksand. So I’m less optimistic than when I first started Goldmind Health and believed people felt what was happening but lacked a map to get them out of this dark forest.

I’ve realized that for many, the forest is now home. Perhaps it always was. And that’s not a problem I want to address or even think I’m suited for. It is so obviously not my home or my place that to even venture a guess as to what should be done feels way out of scope. Goldmind, Defragging, all of this is for the people who want it. Who remember what it used to feel like to think. To be bored. To sit on the couch and have to wonder about what life was for. Defragging is for them. To get back to actual basics of pre-perma technology. When 12 hours of screen time would have sounded like a punishment worse than solitary confinement instead of the preferred way to spend a Saturday. It’s dystopian how quickly we’ve been hijacked. How easy it was to completely overwhelm and erase the way things were even 20 years ago. Some things are unequivocally better now. But our minds are worse.  I have no hesitation in saying this; there is no hedge. It just is. I believe it’s fixable but not without effort—which Defragging and Goldmind are the start of for me.

References

[1] Keating, J. P., & Brock, T. C. (1974). Acceptance of persuasion and the inhibition of counterargumentation under various distraction tasks. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 10(4), 301–309.