On the Precipice of Permanent Brain Rot
My New Year's Resolution, part 1
“Control of consciousness determines the quality of life.” ―Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
Dating apps almost broke my brain.
My job was what many people describe as “fun”: spending the working day on dating apps, swiping away, messaging matches on behalf of clients and hopefully sending them off into the sunset with the love of their life. It’s “fun” to be on dating apps because they, like many software companies, have gamified their apps. Getting a match had nothing to do with me or my life; so why did I physically feel my dopamine firing and my shoulders sinking and my heart pumping when I got a match for my clients? Why did I feel a physical sense of relief when I hit the end of a client’s swipes for the day?
I certainly felt that the job served some higher purpose, in a strange way. (One woman at SXSW, upon hearing about my job, looked into my eyes and said, “This is the most spiritual thing you can do for this world.” ) But aside from satisfying the arbitrary one-date-a-week goals for clients and my employer, I didn’t have any personal investment in getting matches. The “fun” feelings one gets from being on dating apps revealed itself as nothing more than a hit of dopamine that quickly became addictive. While I was swiping, I was listening to music or a podcast, answering texts from up to 25 clients wanting to know if Tim responded (he didn’t) or if they had a date a next day (it was being rescheduled to Wednesday.) My day was constant stimulation: Respond to all of the messages, respond to all of the bloops, go through 1,000 profiles a day. I tried to batch my work, properly adhering to each person’s voice and preferences as much as I could. And while I tried to shut my brain off at 5 p.m. (always too early,) 6 p.m., 7 p.m…
I was also consumed by my job. And I was losing control over what that consumption was doing to my brain.
The first time a Bumble profile—no, not a client, not a client’s match, a profile that repeatedly showed up in my client’s queues—appeared in my dreams. I had maybe seen this man’s profile four or five times. He was a nice-looking guy, not a fit for any of my clients, but I remember seeing the profile over and over and thinking, “Is this guy a bot? Is he gaming the algorithm to keep popping up?” I didn’t think much of it at the time.
I don’t remember what he was doing in the dream. Nothing nefarious, nothing scandalous. But he was there. That was enough to really freak me out.
There would be nights when I would wake up in a sweat thinking about a message I needed to check or a client who wasn’t getting any matches. In those hazy moments between wakefulness and sleep, my mind would be sucked into the vacuum of my job. The job was never “complete,” due to the volume of work I had in front of me and the nature of the job itself. It was up to me to set boundaries in terms of what I could do each day, and I felt like I was losing control of my ability to stay focused while going about my job.
I was very good at my job. By the beginning of 2024, I had set up close to 500 first dates, and one of those dates had already led to an engagement. And by the beginning of January 2024, I could barely function.
I remember responding to a match in early January—nothing deep or heavy, just a bit of boring small talk—and freezing. I physically couldn’t think. There was so much stress and overwhelm from messages, pressure, twice-a-week meetings, daily recaps, 1,000 profiles a day, bloops, beeps, rejections, I felt like a stovetop that was flickering but never catching a flame. Just leaking gas. And as I searched for any sort of creativity or motivation to respond to this message, my brain had already jumped to 10 other places. The only thing I could do to quiet the multiple threads in my head was to scream, cry, or doomscroll. For the first few months of 2024, as I addressed the burnout and asked for a reduced number of clients, I rotated through all three coping mechanisms. I needed the dopamine hit of a new TikTok or a like on a post.
When I expressed concerns about my growing inability to focus, I was told to “take a walk in the middle of the day.” Sure. That did help. But I knew that a daily walk away from my phone wasn’t enough. My brain, at that point, felt like a pile of sludge.
Recently, I was reading Deep Work by Cal Newport. He describes “deep work” and depth as the ability to focus on one task for an extended period of time. One line from the book’s introduction stopped me in my tracks: “To make matters worse for depth, there’s increasing evidence that this shift toward the shallow is not a choice that can be easily reversed.”
This has been my worst fear since January. Back when my brain was stalled by burnout, I worried I had reached a point of no return. Our minds are incredibly resilient, I think. I know about neuroplasticity, but I’m not a neuroscientist. I don’t know the ways that depression, burnout, focus, and memory tangle into themselves, but I know that triggering dopamine through gamified anything plays a significant role in messing the whole web up. I know that money comes and goes, but memory is priceless, and our ability to remember is very closely linked to our ability to focus. I mean, I think. The only thing that I’m confident in is that I have more trouble focusing now than I did in 2022, and I’m determined to regain what I had lost.
I told myself, for my mental health, I had to leave my job by 2025. I couldn’t take it anymore. In March, I took a copyediting class to force myself to focus and I started training for a half-marathon. In September, I quit. Since leaving my job, I ghostwrote two manuscripts for fantastic founders. I have noticed the effects of my job on my ability to complete all of these tasks, but I can still complete them.
If I had stayed in my job for another year, I don’t know if I would have had enough focus to write more than a Tinder message.
My fear, going into 2024, was that if I didn’t have a plan to leave my job, I would reach that point of no return. I managed to back away from the edge of the cliff. But where do I go from here?
To continue the metaphor, I’m turning around and am heading back into the forest. The upcoming year will be significant: my fiancee and I will begin wedding planning and my debut novel will be published. (Have you pre-ordered your copy?) So I am going to make some drastic changes to my social media consumption and technology use to help me regain my focus, concentration, and memory.
Follow along as I figure out how to recover from and resist the culprits of brain rot. In my next post, I will outline exactly how I’m going to change things up.