The Lost Art of Thinking: How Work, Screens, and Distraction Reshape Intelligence

It was George Santayana who said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” World War II had unified a fractious US, and those good “vibes” continued to play out over the next 10 to 15 years, a period just barely within my earliest recollections. Societal trust was far, far greater than today, so it is perhaps worth Santayana’s remembering. Think of it as a public health announcement. From the Atlantic, a picture book. 

Corporate jobs mystify me. My father-in-law worked his entire career for one company, and there was an evident loyalty between him and his workmates. Today, that loyalty is no longer present. Similarly, I have a problem when talking to millennials about what they actually do at work, as well as what seems to me to be an overconcern with titles.

“Last week, I had coffee with someone who works at a big consulting firm. She spent twenty minutes explaining her role to me. Not because it was complex, but because she was trying to convince herself it existed. "I facilitate stakeholder alignment across cross-functional workstreams," she said. Then laughed. "I genuinely don't know what that means anymore." She's not alone. I keep meeting people who describe their jobs using words they'd never use in normal conversation. They attend meetings about meetings. They create PowerPoints that no one reads, which get shared in emails no one opens, which generate tasks that don't need doing.”

Evidently, my mystification is shared with others. From the subStack, Still Wandering, The death of the corporate job

In a prescient book, The Goddess and the Alphabet, surgeon Leonard Shlain discusses the flip from images to text and the ensuing cultural changes. Today, we are experiencing the “flop,” as the Internet favors images over text, and TikTok over X over websites. Are the cultural changes, the battlegrounds of the “culture wars,” the result?

“Print requires us to make a logical case for a subject. A really significant feature of books is that if you make a case in print, you have to make it logically add up. You can’t just assert things in the way you can on TikTok or on YouTube…print privileges a whole way of thinking and a whole way of processing the world that is logical, that is more rational, that is more dense information, that is more intellectually challenging. If you lose these things in our culture, which I think we really are in the process of losing them, it’s not surprising that people are getting stupider…and that we seem to find that IQ is declining.”

Cal Newport believes it may have to do with social media, On the Reverse Flynn Effect

Having grown up in Los Angeles, my first experience with trains came when I moved to New Jersey at 22. Perhaps that is why I still enjoy them and see them as something more than a means to commute. Living on the “East End” of Long Island means the LIRR is often the easiest link to NYC, and it makes the following particularly pertinent.

“This raises a question: how do you connect a town of such a small population with non-car transportation? How do you build mass transit, especially intercity mass transit, for a town of such little mass?

You engage with them on their own scale: small.”

The Dream of the Countryside Railway, by Alex Wolford, discusses trains. Not the latest Acela, that looks great but performs no better than the previous version, but more like a supersized trolley. If we had such a system where I live, it might be a more viable option for commuting to NYC. Of course, the NIMBY group would grouse about the interlopers while at the same time not recognizing the added tax revenue they would bring, forestalling a tax hike. But I digress.