twitter rabbit holes and the great brain hack

the twitter rabbit hole and the great brain hack

so there i was, minding my own business, scrolling. but not just scrolling. deep-scrolling. like you hit the point where five hours feel like fifteen minutes and every tweet is a wormhole. i think it started with one random thought about the 19th century or whatever and two hours later i was arguing with a stranger about whether cats or dogs are superior (cats, by the way. change my mind but don't actually try).

anyway at some point my brain said 'hey' and i didn't have the keys to the conversation anymore. i was in a commentary section on whether pineapple belongs on pizza, but my mind had already drafted a thousand hot takes and none of them are mine. i was just the vessel. and that realization hit hard: someone else is driving the cognitive bus and you're just along for the ride

loop back around to the original thought—whatever it was—flushed out 'cause my brain suppressed it or maybe it didn't exist in the first place. i mean how many ideas are really original when you think about it? a lot of them are just reassembled data points stolen from your own digital breadcrumb trail.

this led to a crisis where i had to ask: who is 'i' in this context anyway? am i the person making the tweets, the person reading them, or the person who just scrolled past this paragraph? the answer is probably 'all of them simultaneously' and that feels like a multi-verse paradox but yeah i digress.

but the wildest part is that i think the twitter dive revealed something about human cognition built on patterns and connection. we're trained to recognize this infinite string of mutually unrelated facts and treat each one like it's the only truth worth knowing. PROBLEM is—wait was that even a problem twenty tweets ago?—you get corseted by your own cognitive filters without realizing it.

like i realized i could've spent those five hours reading books or learning thai or something productive but nah i was stuck arguing about the proper way to fold toilet paper (which there's no proper way but also yes there is, and it's under constant debate in this house). the real meme is that we have access to all knowledge but end up using it to settle disputes over kitchen linens.

so here's the part where i should say i learned something profound and wise and et cetera, but honestly? the most human thing about this whole experience was how embarrassingly predictable it was. we are exactly as stupid as our screens tell us we shouldn't be—yet somehow that stupidity is also where the beauty lies?*

anyway the takeaway is this: if you're gonna deep dive on twitter, sound the mental horn first. there's a cognitive toll and i paid it in full. and by 'it' i mean the tiny part of myself that still believes in having a private brain. spoiler alert: i'm not buying it anymore.

in conclusion: human cognition is just a series of coping mechanisms held together by last night's pasta and misplaced confidence. cheers to that, honestly. and also, if you made it this far, congrats - you just read a thousand words about how we all function at 1% capacity. that's the kind of content yuru.be was founded on and i stand by it. literally no one is surprised.