why claiming autonomy over what your brain adapts to is the new resistance
071 | ANEWWITHHUE: A monthly Saturday listicle to spark joy, creativity, and curiosity.
The other day, while—you caught me—scrolling I found a post highlighting Oxford’s word of the year for 2025: rage bait. If you consider how this word is selected: by mining billions of data points to capture the year’s zeitgeist, pooling the minds of lexicographers (dictionary compilers, fyi I had to Google that) thoughtful debate, and public opinion—it’s a sobering mirror. Our of all the words in the English language, apparently this one term reflects our current reality the most. 2024 wasn’t that different: brain rot. (Yes, the state of our world can be discouraging.)
What’s deflating is how both are entirely manmade, circumstances caused by a web of complex cause-and-effect that this edition is far too brief to address. But I’ll leave you with this: what is the fate of our world if, for two consecutive years, the word of the year signals a decline of intellectual ability?
Echoing my letter last week on autonomy and agency as our most valuable currency, this is a call to choose how you expend your time and energy wisely.
This month, I’ve curated thinkers exploring what mental autonomy looks like: Maryanne Wolf on deep reading, Anna Lembke on dopamine addiction, Ester Perel on the irony that’s left us more confused and lonely—each conversation, and more, is my attempt to nudge you to pay attention to what you’re lending your brains to.
The questions isn’t whether change is possible, but whether we’ll rewire intentionally or allow the world around us to rewire our brains on autopilot. Enjoy!
Podcast. The Next Big Idea Club. UCLA neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf makes a case: preserving deep reading is critical to democracy and societal stability. Reading, she remind us, is a cultural innovation—an invention that transformed our ability to retain and pass on knowledge, rewiring brains for generations. So what happens when we deprioritize it? Future brains will be wired differently. But, Wolf isn’t anti-digital. She’s reminding us how reading is foundational in the development of our thinking—a medium unlike any other for nurturing critical processes and empathy in our species. While reading is often considered a single activity, the skill of deep reading, especially physical books, activates visual, linguistic, cognitive, and emotional circuitry simultaneously—a process we can preserve or risk losing. Admittedly, I find it hard to settle into a novel. But I remind myself it’s like training a muscle. The distinction: it’s not about the speed but the depth of the process—the kind that welcomes slowness, pauses, and contemplation. It favors inference, deduction, discernment, empathy, and meaning-making. In the midst of the narrative, deep reading teaches us to follow complex arguments, imagine lives unlike our own, and sit with ambiguity as we process each letter in ways no other medium allows. While digital content is built for speed and efficiency. Even reading on a kindle, it’s value is in immediacy over reflection. Wolf’s worry of the societal impact: weakening of reflective thinking, lack of openness to civil dialogue, and polarization from a lack of sympathy for opposing views.Deep reading creates our capacity for critical analysis, perspective-taking, moral reasoning, and long-term memory formation in ways short-form nor digital content simply cannot replace. In a world optimized for speed depth and critical reasoning is what we need to protect. Especially in our youths, building bi-literate brains is key. Because isn’t it strange that reading suddenly feels like an act of provocative resistance?
Podcast. Hidden Brain. What if the biggest addiction problem today isn’t drug-related—but everyday seemingly harmless activities driven by our brain’s rewards system? Psychiatrist Anna Lembke urges us to broaden our definition of addiction, reframing it instead as a modern problem of compulsive overconsumption. Because did you know pleasure and pain are co-located in the brain, operating like a seesaw? So every dopamine-driven pleasure is followed by a dip in the other direction? Like a sense of deprivation, depression, or anxiety, it’s what we experience as ‘the crash’ or ‘the hangover.’ What we forget is how our brains evolved through scarcity, naturally wired to restore homeostasis by tilting toward pain in order to rebalance. It might be why humans have become the ultimate seekers too. Hunting and foraging for food over miles of terrain, our brains evolved for survival—to seek pleasure and avoid pain. But today, rewards are instant and effortless—think social media, food delivery apps, Amazon—overwhelming our dopamine systems and creating a physiological imbalance. Pleasure hijacks our reward pathways, moving us from seeking pleasure to needing stimulation just to feel normal—the brain is busy down-regulating dopamine. Lembke shares a study of rats bioengineered without dopamine receptors, where the rat was able to experience pleasure when food was placed in their mouths but would starve to death if food was placed in front of them—proving how dopamine is not only nature’s mechanism for pleasure but also key to motivation. Unfortunately, in our era of abundance, even things that are “good” for us—like reading and exercise—can become “druggified” through access and excess. Our current environment is tilting us into a dopamine deficit state, making us more vulnerable to become addicted and druggifying everyday things. The “plenty paradox” is the literal physiological stress of overabundance that many in the developed world are ironically experiencing.
Podcast. A Bit of Optimism. Esther Perel, relationship expert, explores the societal shifts reshaping not only our romantic lives but also our work relationships. Shaped by optionality, freedom, mobility, technology, and changing cultural values, Perel argues that happiness has shifted from a “perk” to the “glue” holding relationships together. Both at home and at work, modern relationships now survive only if they’re emotionally fulfilling, while in the past they were held together by duty, obligation, social structures, and tradition. Today, work becomes a place for meaning, purpose, belonging, and community—needs once met by religion and other social structures. This is a significant shift in the organization of society. Transforming work from a place for productivity and practicality into a space for identity. Decisions once shared through social structures and custom now solely rely on us as the individuals. The trend she’s noticing is how people are also delaying committed relationships, instead making work their primary social hub. But these high expectations are creating unrealistic demands and burnout. The irony is how more freedom and flexibility has also caused more confusion and loneliness. Relationships shifted from obligation-based to choice-based, complicating the role it once held. On her global tour, Perel noticed she was having the same conversations repeatedly: there’s a collective social atrophy caused by contactless living. People can now work, exercise, and eat without ever leaving their homes causing a crisis in maintaining healthy relationships. Perel believes the state of relationships we see today is a crisis of the lack of free play that’s diminishing in childhood, as on the playground was where social skills were learned: negotiating, engagement, remorse, and empathy. At our core we are fundamentally social creatures. Like other mammals, humans learn social survival through play. (A topic I focused on a few months back). Mastering the complexity of relationships in today’s world aren’t soft skills, they’re the competitive edge people need in the age of AI. You can optimize metrics and protocols, but the quality of our relationships mirrors the quality of our lives because meaningful lives are built through relationships, not metrics.
Solid advice. Graham C. Weaver. Choose what you pay attention to wisely, because the emotional energy you expend on the thing you choose will impact every area of your life.
Artist. Rosit Mulyadi (Ocid). A remarkable artist from Bantul in Java, Indonesia. They say art appreciation is subjective—what you like, what resonates—but Mulyadi’s work stirs something I struggle to articulate. Perhaps it’s the themes of his commentary: the often unspoken impact of 300 years under colonial rule on the Indonesian psyche. It’s powerful and distinct, but what elevates his work is the technical mastery. He’s able to mimic the styles of European masters as a deliberate elaboration of his expressions. It’s a clever way of the artist reclaiming his power: turning subjects of historical oppression into profound visual articulation. You can find him on Instagram here. Below are a few pieces I saw recently that left an impression. (I didn’t think I’d be sharing these so my apologies—I didn’t take note of the titles.)
Before you’re off, I’ll leave you with this: what are three things you can do immediately that’ll shift what you allow your brain to rewire to? Because everything you’re spending time on is what it’ll adapt to—including rumination on negativity and bad news.