What's the Opposite of Brain Rot?

This month I’ve been thinking about brain rot. Perhaps, though, what really interests me is brain rot's opposite.

This is It Takes A Village, a monthly conversation about reading, writing, and community-building.

“Brain rot” is the Oxford University Press 2024 word of the year, a phrase used to describe the deterioration of a person’s mental state brought on by overconsumption of trivial online content. Could brain rot’s opposite be a process like this winter season: moving from darkness to light?

Happy New Year! Welcome, lovely subscribers, lurkers, readers, and writers! So happy to have you here! A special welcome to our new subscribers—we’re so glad you’ve joined our village.

In this issue:

• On the Farm

• Writer’s Life

• Book of the Month

• Bonus: Writing Prompt

On the Farm

Winter on our tiny farm is a completely different experience from other, more temperate seasons. To be blunt, it’s a lot more work—cold, wet work that can be miserable. Sure, it’s quieter. The tourists are gone from the lake and the wineries, and with a blanket of snow, there’s no prettier winter scene. But spigots freeze and hoses become useless. Last week, the dogs and I got caught far from home in an unexpected ice storm, after which it was time to prepare the ducks and chickens for evening. This involves hauling numerous buckets of water to their heated bowls and wired-for-warmth pool. When all the outdoor chores were complete, I’d spent an hour and a half sweating while being pelted with stinging ice pellets.

Predators get more desperate in winter when food is scarce. A large Coopers hawk got one of our chickens on Thanksgiving weekend. He swooped in, pinned Hennie to the ground, and made a meal of her while her horrified flock-mates watched. The remaining chickens are still traumatized and unwilling to spend much time foraging in the fenced yard, opting to stay inside the covered run. Hennie, a beautiful, shy girl, is the sole animal we’ve lost to a predator in four years. Her absence has affected everyone, especially her sister, Penny, to whom she was bonded.

Hennie

This morning around 7:30, I filled nine buckets to haul into the duck yard. This is an extremely slow process, as the water comes from a five-hundred-gallon above-ground tank with a laughably small spigot. (That’s if it’s above 20 degrees. Below that, water must be toted from inside the house.) Though there’s a ton of clean-up at the Quack Shack each morning, it’s impossible to do anything else as the buckets sloooowly fill, so I stand outside the fenced area and watch the ducks and chickens wake to the day, great one another, and begin their grooming and preening. I observe the behavioral manifestations of their curiosity as they peck here and there, peek under the pine tree, test the frozen mud’s likelihood of offering worms. I was aware this morning that such necessary single-minded slowness resulted in close observation, which resulted, surprisingly, in twenty-degree, pure, communal joy.

Perhaps it’s my age—I’m sixty-six—or the fact that in the four years we’ve been on this farm, we’ve lost several people close to us: both our mothers, my brother, and Sam’s cousin. Perhaps it’s that I’ve finally found the life I was meant to live, writing on this land. Whatever it is, I find myself hyper-aware of time’s passage. This morning, as I filled the water buckets, time perceptibly slowed. Scientists say the more information the brain is processing, the slower time seems to pass; when we process less information, time seems to pass quickly. That’s why novelty, when we’re forced to learn new things, makes time expand. Recall the seemingly endless afternoons of childhood.

Even though a lot of information comes at us via social media, we aren’t truly processing it. Add to that the jolts of dopamine released into our systems. Scientists say this is why, when we spend time on social media, time seems to accelerate and we lose track of how long we’ve been scrolling.

Since I got off Facebook, Instagram, and Threads in November, I’ve halved my screen time. This morning notwithstanding, I haven’t experienced time slowing down. I’m guessing that has more to do with the fact that I don’t often pay close attention the way I did this morning. I’m not exactly wild about the idea of slowing winter down, but maybe by the time spring rolls around, I’ll be adept at slowing time—and at just the right season for savoring.

Have you experienced time slowing down? What brought that perception about? Do you consciously try to slow time, to pay attention? If so, what do you notice about that? I’d love to hear from you.

Writer’s Life

I’m settling into my writing life in the absence of Facebook and Instagram. (I never really used Threads much, so I find its loss irrelevant.)

On the down side, I miss the way Instagram made me feel I had my ear to the ground regarding literary journals, publishers, books, and authors. I notice a tinge of FOMO. I also miss the wisdom of my Binders writing group on Facebook, though not necessarily the frenzied energy there of other people expressing FOMO, or the envy and self-recrimination I feel when other writers score book deals.

On the plus side, I like not being jerked around by the mental interruption of these platforms or the surveillance capitalism they practice. I’m extremely pleased not to be offering my eyeballs to a billionaire who’s cozying up to the future president.

Most importantly though, without social media, I’m becoming more familiar with my inner voice, the place my creativity lives. My inner life is quieter, so I hear the words more easily as they arrive. In the past month, I’ve written a preface to and reworked the focus of my memoir. I’ve written a new short piece and sent it out. It’s fiction, something I’ve never tackled before. I’ve read three books. And—here’s the best part— I have a new idea for my next book. With all that said, I still sense I could be using my writing time with more attention and focus, the kind of rapt focus that slows time. I suspect it’s not enough to turn away from social media. I’m realizing the importance of turning toward the writing in a way that honors the practice.

A note about attention and writing: This month I found the Apple Journal app on my phone and started using it to record the words as they arrive, which tends to happen on long dog walks or drives into town. The voice to text works well and while I don’t always carry my faux leather writing journal and am often not in a position to use it in the moment, I do more often than not have my phone. The app even has an automatic word count feature, in case you’re one of those people who has a daily word count goal.

So far, my official report on leaving social media is that I’m overwhelmingly glad I did it. At the moment, I can’t imagine going back. I’m actually wondering if I might be part of a larger, growing movement in that direction. I read recently in the New York Times about a viral TikTok trend called “winter arc,” a health and wellness challenge people undertake in the last three months of the year (although it doesn’t have to happen then) that involves self-care routines such as eating well, exercise, and focusing on other healthy goals. A lot of winter arc practitioners also give up social media or otherwise isolate to improve their mental health and increase their ability to focus. Other people are attempting a social-medialess February, akin to a dry January.

Have you taken a break from social media or thought about doing so? If so, how did it go or how is it going?

Book of the Month

Maria Ressa is a journalist, the CEO, cofounder, and president of Rappler, the Philippine’s top digital-only news site. But to say she’s a journalist does little to capture who and what she really is. Ressa won the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize for reporting on and standing up to Rodrigo Duterte’s regime. Her research and reporting revealed how social media platforms (particularly Facebook) weaponize the internet to promote division and ultimately grow fascism at the expense of truth-based journalism.

In Ressa’s book, How to Stand Up to a Dictator, I read how within six months of Duterte’s taking power in the Philippines, the checks and balances of the three branches of government—executive, legislative, and judicial—collapsed through a system of patronage and blind loyalty. (The Philippines once belonged to the U.S., and their constitution is like our own.) As I read the book, in real time TV news reported Donald Trump’s unorthodox and dangerous appointments of loyalist cronies that will surround him come January.

“Social media has destroyed our shared reality, the place where democracy happens,” writes Ressa. By increasing the dopamine levels in our brains, social media conditions us to prefer sensationalism over objectivity. Furthermore, tech companies welcome an alliance with power, which guarantees market access and growth because their incentive systems are based on power and money. Ressa writes, “I believe that Facebook represents one of the gravest threats to democracies around the world, and I am amazed that we have allowed our freedoms to be taken away by technology companies’ greed for growth and revenues.”

Ressa warns us that staying silent, or compliant, makes us complicit. Like an actor abruptly breaking the fourth wall, she asks the reader, “What are you willing to sacrifice for the truth?”

How to Stand Up to a Dictator reads like a memoir, or sometimes a spy novel, as Duterte’s regime chases down Ressa and throws her in jail. Ressa lays out the evidence against Facebook and, even though I’d already left the platform, I felt embarrassed by having been played by surveillance capitalists. I recommend this book highly, not just as a blueprint for how authoritarianism happens, but because it’s full of hope in these dark times, documenting courageous work by good people who aim to protect democracy and provide solutions.

Bonus: Writing Prompt

As Amal Clooney points out in her introduction to Maria Ressa’s book, Maria is an unlikely superhero: a five-foot-two-inch woman with a pen in her hand. Maria repeats again and again in her book that her guiding aphorism is The Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

What if you were a superhero with a pen in your hand? What is your guiding aphorism and how would you use it?

Make a list of aphorisms or principles that guide you or that you would like to have guide you. You can make these up, they don’t have to be anything anyone’s ever heard before. They can even be outlandish or funny. “Try to be a bubble in the orange juice.” “All you need is love.” “Do unto others until they laugh and squirt milk out their nose.” Give yourself enough time at this to reach and be creative.

Then make a list of things you care about, or even think you should care about but don’t—changes inside yourself, your life, the world. These can be serious or fanciful. Do you want to feed the hungry, make flower gardens mandatory, teach every school child to whistle?

Now smash your two lists together, picking one item from each list. Explain who you are (the aphorism) and why that leads you to aspire to the particular change you’d like to see. Let the aphorism drive the voice of the piece, whether it’s funny, ironic, serious. (It can be interesting to pair a serious aphorism with a funny, outlandish goal, or a funny aphorism with a very serious goal.)

Perhaps this exercise will lead to an unexpected, creative New Years resolution! I’d love for you to share your results, or even just items from your lists.

Thanks for spending time here with me. I truly appreciate it. Feel free to recommend It Takes A Village to other readers and writers and to send along your suggestions, questions, and thoughts.

--Jillian