Do I Need a “Brain Gym”? | Monday Advice

Someone recently sent me one of those long-form idea articles that you you post on X and hope that it does well. This one was titled, Your Brain is About to Need a Gym. Now, at a high level, this new piece is responding to my own New York Times op-ed that came out in March, in which I argued that we need a cognitive fitness revolution to save our increasingly fried brains. much in the same way that in the 20th century we needed a physical fitness revolution to save our increasingly unhealthy bodies. Now this new article takes that proposal and follows it through to all of its implications.

Here I want to read a quote from it. I also think cognitive fitness becomes a market, a big one. Imagine the cognitive equivalent of what the fitness industry built between 1980 and 2020. Apps that force you to think slowly, coaches who train your attention the way trainers train your hamstrings, schools that reteach deep reading after generation lost at the scrolling, corporate programs that audit and report your team's cognitive endurance the way they currently audit lines of code, insurance discounts for verified daily reading habits, a strava for hours spent away from a screen, the peloton of writing by hand. I'm half joking.

and half not. All right, so this new article, in other words, is asking a fascinating question. Fitness is a $100 billion industry. What would our commitment to cognitive fitness look like if we got equally serious about it? Well, it's Monday, which means it's time for an advice episode of this show, which is the perfect opportunity to explore some answers.

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