Cognitive Overload
January 8, 2025
3-Item Status
Current Location: Milwaukee, WI
Reading: What If We Get It Right? by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
Listening: Katana by Samara Cyn
If you have a moment, reply with your own 3-Item Status.
Quick Notes
New Work: This week’s Let’s Know Things is about Lone Wolves, and yesterday’s Brain Lenses essay was about the Complainer’s Dilemma. Also, I’ll be trying out a weekly publishing cadence over at Writing & Such beginning this Friday, if you want to pop over there and sign up to receive those missives when I send them.
2025: Hot dang, new year. Rearranging some stuff, trying some things out (as per the usual). Pardon the mess and thanks for bearing with me :)
Cognitive Overload
When there’s a lot happening all at once, it’s not uncommon to experience cognitive overload: a nonstop feeling of overwhelm, memory problems, difficulties with focus, and an inability to healthily (and thoughtfully) deal with any volume of complexity.
“A lot” is a relative term, of course, and there will be moments in which near-tornadic levels of chaos swirl around us, but we’re in exactly the right mindset to wrangle those eddies into order (or in some cases to join in on the action, embracing the disorder and making it our own).
In other cases, though, these these anarchic variables and unforeseen happenings will disrupt our plans and disarray our thinking, which can be uncomfortable and anxiety-inducing, while also leaving us with a muddled sense of how things work and who we are within the new reality in which we’ve found ourselves.
In such moments, I find it can be helpful to step back and recommit to the things over which I have control: getting enough sleep, investing in my relationships, rebalancing my habits so that I feel healthy and strong, and tweaking my efforts and spending so that my economic fundamentals are stable, come what may.
It’s also often beneficial to refocus on the big picture, recontextualizing contemporary happenings through the (often less emotionally volatile and stressing) lens of historical and global scope.
Said another way, ensuring our fundamentals are sound and thinking in broader terms can make the stressors of the moment, and the myriad unknowns evoked by such stressors, seem more survivable and addressable—and in some cases even fascinating, educational, and harnessable.
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Interesting Links
Grandma with chunky sunglasses becomes unlikely fashion icon
Letter to My Teenage Self: An Incarcerated Man Interrogates the Person He Once Was
If you want more links to interesting things, consider subscribing to Aspiring Generalist.
What Else
Well wow, here we are in the sci-fi-esque year of 2025. And now we have to figure out what to do with ourselves.
I’m back in Milwaukee, reapplying nose to grindstone after visiting family in Seattle for the holidays—which was its own grindstone, but of a very different coarseness (and with 100% more pets and toddlers).
I started writing a new piece of fiction (a book, sci-fi, intended to be the first of a trilogy) just a few days ago (after many months of organizing ideas and mapping them into something usable), so that’ll be taking up a fair bit of my (not already claimed) time the first half of this new year.
Also, on that subject: if you’re in the position to do so, please consider becoming a paid subscriber of this newsletter, or one of my other projects (like Let’s Know Things, Aspiring Generalist, or Brain Lenses).
For the cost of a cup of coffee each month, those subscriptions allow me to invest in longer-term projects, and last year was pretty bad (money-wise) for a lot of creators, myself included. So it’s a great moment to help support folks making work you enjoy and in which you find value (again, if you’re in the position to do so), and generally you also glean a little something extra for your support, which is nice.
Also: a huge, huge thanks to everyone who’s already supporting me and my work. That support means the world to me, is the only really I’m able to do what I do, and I appreciate you :)
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