The Internet is Killing my Brain

I'm writing this short post simply because I need to write it, to write something, to use words in a creative way, because the internet is killing my brain.  I have recently noticed that my attention span has slipped below the threshold of a 4 year old's.  I can think of something to say or look up, turn my chair around or open a new browser tab, and find that in that split second my mind has gone blank.  Totally, irrecoverably blank.  Many times my brain feels fuzzy and dull inside my head.  I recall feeling this way occasionally when I was writing my thesis from info overload, or from working on the same thing too long, but it's never been accompanied by dementia-like memory loss.

I'm worried.

It seems clear to me that spending too much time on the internet is a bad thing.  I happen to have time, often, to hang out on the internet when I'm at work.  Even when it's for legitimate project-related research spending time reading things on the internet gives a different feeling than, say, looking at books from a library like I did in previous research endeavours.  Despite the fact that I like the non-tree-harming side of electronic information, there's something better for the brain about reading words on a piece of paper than on a screen all day. Maybe for me it's connected to the physical activity of underlining and making notes in margins.  I have no idea.  But this screen-time is killing me.  Slowly, silently.  It's killing my brain.

It's reached the point now where I find the internet to be largely boring.  Boring?  The internet has everything on it.  Want to know something?  Curious about a country or a person or current events or nature?  The internet has information that you can learn about all these things, and more.  But now I find it boring, and I open new tabs and stare at my most visited pages in Chrome (Windows work PC, ugh) and can't think of a single thing that I want to know about.  I'm over-saturated by internet material.

This calls for radical change.  I'm not sure what that means exactly, but change is needed, and change there shall be.  Mark my words!