How to Take Your Mind Back
The internet turned us into lemmings
It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
The internet was going to usher in a new era of creative self-expression and idea abundance. Every blog post and social media hot take could be a vehicle for individuality. Think up an idea and let it fly!
But now we’re drowning in an idea monoculture, struggling to maintain intellectual sovereignty as everyone marches in polarized lockstep. We may be more predictable, herdable, and less unique than any time in history.
As far back as the 1850s, the Utilitarian philosopher John Stewart Mill despaired over this trend:
“That so few now dare be eccentric marks the chief danger of our time,1” he wrote.
He observed the wildfire spread of a few perspectives via newly-affordable newspapers and books. The past was filled with freethinkers charting their own intellectual paths, he thought, but watched his generation’s best minds dominated by a narrow range of predigested ideas promoted by print media.
Now we’ve got the sociological and psychological research to understand his observations, and it’s clear the internet made the status quo worse — much worse.
It’s time to do something about it.
Spotlights Only Grow Brighter:
Meditators observe a phenomenon — what we put our attention on increases in intensity and seeming relevance until it fully absorbs us. If we sit with closed eyes and pay attention to an itch, it becomes really itchy and hard not to scratch.
On the other hand, athletes, soldiers, and car-crash survivors might find — when the rush of surviving or competing subsides — that they’ve been wounded without noticing because their mind was absorbed elsewhere.
This is “focusing illusion bias”, a quirk of the mind causing us to upgrade the significance of what we’re paying attention to and downgrade everything else.
The Spread:
Once we notice something and deem it important via sustained attention, we often talk or write about it. Those sharing our labels focus on our ideas due to “social proof” effect. Even when people have their own opinions, hearing different ones voiced by someone with their labels often causes them to toss them aside2.
The result is group think and information cascades — people discuss what others find important to discuss, causing even more people to discuss them. Other ideas wither on the vine, overlooked, though they may have great worth.
The spread of newspapers and books boosted the impact and reach of these biases, with fewer ideas taking more and more of the mindshare.
What the Internet Does to Ideas:
The internet poured gasoline on the fire. By ranking ideas via inbound links, likes, and shares — and boosting the winners — algorithms became active participants in our biased, winner-takes-all idea virality.
Pareto principle-like idea distributions (80/20) have emerged over large swaths of the earth.
So now, just as 80% of all the wealth (or more) is held by 20% (or less) of the people and 20% of US medical patients generate 80% of healthcare costs…
8% of domain names accounted for 80% of the shared content on Twitter that contained the #MeToo hashtag.
3% of Youtube channels post 20% of the videos and receive 90% of the views.
From forums to Facebook, variations of this skew are found everywhere online.
Booktok and bestseller lists promote the books everyone will read. We’re all talking about the small number of (often shoddy) research papers. A 2024 analysis of arXiv submissions showed a 20% drop in "high-risk" scientific papers being submitted (those challenging consensus) since 2015, while studies building on popular ideas ballooned.
This isn’t survival of the fittest. We’re stuck in attentional bubbles that eventually pop. When the smoke clears, we’re all a bit more the same.
Taking Our Minds Back:
Thinking well in an internet-saturated world is like eating moderately while being force-fed from a firehouse. How can we think or have our own ideas while our minds drown in everyone else’s cliches?
We need to take back our minds.
First: Go Where the Air Is Clear
First, we need to turn down the firehose. It’s probably neither realistic nor beneficial to abandon the internet completely, but we can keep it from enslaving us.
There are several ways to do this:
Finding reliable masts to chain ourselves while using the internet to keep our brains from being manipulated via dopamine and pleasure.
Creating nightly voids where the internet can’t reach us and we can take up the human pursuits so many of us have left behind.
Going for rambling walks without earbuds/phones so we can think our own thoughts.
Our minds feel clearer without idea bombardments constantly assaulting us. This alone is a victory, but we can go further.
Second: Step Out of Time:
Whatever’s hot on the internet is unlikely to give you an edge; the movers and shakers in your field have seen what’s hot too.
But there’s a place where almost no one goes anymore — the past. When you’ve entered a void and are looking for fuel for your thinking, that’s where you should go. It’s so vast that even if your competitors go there too, you’re unlikely to bump into each other.
We bizarrely think the past is filled with people who don’t understand our modern problems. We think they’re morally despicable anachronisms. But the more realistic take is that modern problems are variations of those that plagued our ancestors. The problems underwent a costume change, but are substantially the same.
Everyone complains of focusing difficulties, but monks were struggling with attention and writing guides to staying focused in the Middle Ages. Different particulars, same issue.
When COVID dropped, everyone went online and freaked out. I went into the past and read old news articles and two books about the 1918 bird flu pandemic. Specifics varied, but pandemic-era human folly doesn’t change much from age to age. I saw little in 2020-2023 that didn’t fit in the historical pandemic playbook I found in the past. I felt pretty grounded as the world freaked out.
Emotions are hard. Life is hard. But surviving the past was harder. Ancient self-help books are often better than modern stuff for this reason. Ancients also perpetually dwelled on the edge of disaster, and so had less room for ideology and dogma to cloud their responses.
So we can start with reading old forgotten books: anything from 30 to 4,000 years ago will do. Trawl the cobwebbed corners of the internet. Read blogs from 2005 on Internet Archive.
“Right,” or “wrong” isn’t how I’d label the ideas found in the past. They’re simply a breath of uncontaminated air helping us sidestep the bifurcated hot take du jour and the forever freak outs of modern discourse. The past is a series of nonsequiturious conversation partners who can push us in ways few modern thinkers can.
When we stop letting ourselves be focused by algorithms and start focusing ourselves, good things happen. It’s not a matter of pride or sovereignty, but strength. True strength isn’t the “right,” ideas or labels, but the ability to iterate our way to solutions in ways uniquely suited to us and our circumstances.
With space to think and old voices as our companions, we might rediscover something powerful, resilient, and fulfilling that so many of us have lost sight of — ourselves.
I’ll see you in the void.
Thanks for reading Socratic State of Mind.
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From his essay, “On Liberty.” Weirdly enough, this was my high school yearbook quote. I don’t remember how I came across it, but it struck me as the truth.
Sherif, M (1935). "A study of some social factors in perception". Archives of Psychology. 27: 187.
Loved reading this
I'm going to guess that 80% of people don't have the bandwidth to form nuanced ideas and roll with whatever their headlines say for the sake of social status and order. That sounds about right. And it was TV before the internet. Newspapers before that. Nothing is new. Just faster.
Im so naive that I thought having all the worlds information in our pockets at all times would have made us smarter. But humans value social games much more than truth.