Welcome to this new format of the newsletter! Like I said in the last post, every week I will release an issue with three sections: what I’m thinking, what I’ve been reading and a final section on a photograph I took that week. If this is your first time reading my writing, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to receive these posts in your inbox weekly. Thank you for your support. :)
(For new readers: this is the section where I share what I’ve been thinking about this week)
I’ve been thinking about this idea of Brain Rot a lot lately, especially after coming out of an intense period of writing a thesis. Some might say the opposite of Brain Rot is deep engagement with difficult material for an extended period. Still, from my experience, if we go too far in the other direction it’ll simply result in another form Brain Rot, just in a different font. In other words, if we’re stuck too deep in something too narrow (over-specialization), it’ll give way to another dysfunctional way of dealing with the world around us.
Before we dive into this problem, let’s define Brain Rot. In short, it’s slang for that dread we feel after scrolling on our phones for too long. Wiktionary defined it as:
The degradation of mental faculties, intelligence, common sense, or moral character.
I’m not entirely interested in having an opinion on the effects of social media on our brains (since other people here have certainly written about them extensively). However, I am interested in applying the same Brain Rot idea to the dangers of being too specialized in a specific domain.
A few months ago, I wrote about the nutty professor syndrome and observed that people (especially academics) who are too deep in their professions tend to have an aloof quality about them. They’re not entirely with us in the world, and sometimes they struggle to make sense of anything outside their immediate specialization. While this is a trope that we find endearing in the media, the symptoms in real life aren’t that pretty. Just like how prolonged engagement with short, rapid and entertaining content might give people that out-of-sorts feel, prolonged engagement with a field that is way too specialized sometimes detaches us from common sense and everyday intelligence in the same way.
And here’s the thing: no one ever planned to rot their brains. It’s an accumulative process where one day you’d wake up humming a TikTok song while thinking: Man, my brain was hijacked. Similarly, no sensible student ever enters research to get lost in obscurity. The original intention is usually noble: we want to contribute to scholarship in a meaningful way. To advance human knowledge, so to speak. But there’ll come a point where specialization becomes the default current, slowly but surely pushing us in the direction of being too smart for our good, to the point where we struggle to articulate what exactly we’re researching to people around us.
I reached this terrifying conclusion when I was at a party organised by my partner’s close friend K. One of the guests there (a mural painter if my memory serves me right) asked about what I was working on over drinks. When I said I was writing a research thesis, he said:
“Oh! So, what’s your topic?”
I froze because the only thing that came to mind was a mixture of jargon, references and theorists that I’ve engaged with deeply. In short, I started to sound like a tongue-tied academic at a university open day who struggles to explain what their class is all about. And that’s when I realized that specializing is relatively easy, but it takes extraordinary effort to zoom back out and apply what we’ve learned to life.
This hyper-specialization also impacts how we consume information. Sometimes academic pride could cut us straight off from reading and consuming anything in good faith. After all, we’re the ones who have studied all this stuff in-depth, right? We find ourselves projecting our specialty onto everything we see and hear, slowly moving away from common joys and pleasure. But at the same time, if we lose touch with the world, who are we but glorified stamp-lickers, collecting obscure knowledge without linking it to life around us?
This is why, even though I’m grateful for my education and specialization, I’m more invested in the art of translating obscurity into useful insights that everyone can understand. And weirdly, my videos on YouTube and my writing here really are my moments of respite from being too specialized, because I’m forced to frame my fascinations to real-life experience.
At the end of the day, it’s all about balance because just as uninformed opinions might lead us astray, perspectives that are over-informed paralyses themselves from ever reaching the people who need them.
(This is the section where I share what I’ve been working on and consuming)
After my thesis writing period, I took a break from reading anything dense. Here are some pieces that I’ve been consuming.
Energy, And How To Get It from The New Yorker. A hilarious exploration of why we feel tired all the time and how to fix it.
Sontag: Her Life and Work by Benjamin Moser. A long biography that I read before I head to bed.
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen. I bought the book after hearing the author speak at the Melbourne Writers Festival, flicked through it and now I’m having a blast with the HBO series.
Besides catching up with some reading, I recently concluded a huge project with the team over at SkillShare on a class that I’m super excited to share with you guys. What started as an idea in a chain of emails turned into a 30-minute class on how to organize ideas and build a commonplace book. I’m very happy with how it turned out, and if you want to learn how I organize my ideas into writing and video scripts, you can now take the class for free here:
(This is the section where I share a photograph with a story from the week)
Workspaces fascinate me a lot because they tend to emerge from chaos, gradually taking shape into a place where we find stability and comfort to continue our work. This is a snapshot of my workspace where I spent most of my time compiling my research and citations. So, what does a workspace mean for you?
And that concludes this week’s newsletter, and I will check back in next time.
Take care, and goodbye!
Robin
Your musings on academic brain rot and how being hyper-specialized in a field, and not engaging enough with the outside world made me think of a strange interaction I had at university, years ago. I asked this person who was pursuing a PhD in a narrow branch of engineering what they were writing their thesis on, only to be given a long and incomprehensible (at least to me, a Humanities student) reply, and a smirk of "you must think I'm so smart." Needless to say, I didn't think they were smart, I thought they cared more about *looking* smart than actually conveying a clear thought. Unless I understand what the hell you study, I can't judge whether that's "cool" or not.
You might think it unfortunate but I don't really have a specific workplace. I'd do my work on the dining table even. I know it's not really that healthy but I guess I'm gonna invest in a good table the next time I think of buying a shi- ton of books. Btw, loved the ideas here.