I read something the other day that unsettled me. An article about a woman who had lost the ability to read novels, something she once loved deeply. She picked up Watership Down, a book she had devoured as a child, and found herself struggling, distracted, unable to focus. The immersion was gone.
What struck me wasn’t just her experience. It was the explanation.
Neuroscientists confirmed that the brain rewires itself around how we use it. We haven’t stopped reading—but we now read in fragments. We skim. We scan. We extract. And over time, that becomes our default mode of thinking. When we return to something slow, something deep, something that requires sustained attention, we struggle, not because we’re lazy, but because we’ve trained our brains not to do it.
I closed the article and thought, that’s not me. Then I sat down to write.
Flip-Flopping
I’ve been thinking about photography a lot recently. It’s something I used to do a lot of. As a young man, I was convinced I was going to be a wildly successful artist, and I did a degree in Fine Art focusing on photography. I consciously gave it up a few years ago. It was just one distraction too many, and I wanted to focus on writing. Recently though, it’s been an itch again, something I can feel myself wanting to return to.
Within seconds of starting to write, a thought creeps in. Stop what you’re doing. Just check the price of that camera. Then I think I should journal about that thought, and of course the app is right there, so easy to switch and just jot it down. Then I wonder if my payslip has come in. I bounce off to the HR portal, authenticate a 2FA code, and another five minutes is gone. Back to writing? No, not yet. I’ve just had an idea for a game I might build one day, so I need to update my ideas list before it vanishes—and it will vanish. So another switch. So quick. So easy. Then I think I should check Teams before I get back to it.
This isn’t thinking. It’s a relentless flip-flopping from one thing to another
And suddenly, the article comes back to me. The woman who couldn’t read anymore. The idea that the brain adapts to fragments. The quiet, creeping shift. I still read a lot, but something about it has changed. I don’t read like I used to. Not all the time. It used to be immersion, and sometimes it still is. But occasionally now, it feels like effort, like exercise—something I feel I should do, not something I crave.
And my writing is a bit like that too. Sometimes it clicks and I can settle into a good four or five hour session—something I used to be able to do day after day. But other times, the world seems to tug at my brain until I admit defeat.
This Isn’t Just Me
That was the other thing the article made clear. This isn’t a personal failing. It’s a cultural shift. We live inside systems designed to interrupt us, to fragment our attention, to keep us moving. There’s always something else to check, always something else to do, always something more useful. And so the brain adapts.
Reading a novel, writing fiction, thinking deeply, these things are, in a modern sense, pointless. They don’t optimise anything. They don’t give immediate returns. They don’t tick a box. And so the brain resists them. It seeks the quick hit instead: the notification, the task, the micro-win.
I Thought It Was the Book
I have been labouring with the sequel to Karma’s Burden. For a while, I blamed the novel itself. Maybe the project wasn’t working. Maybe the characters weren’t clicking. Maybe I had just lost interest. But sitting there, watching my mind jump from thought to thought, I realised something deeper. It’s not the work. It’s me, or more specifically, what I’ve allowed my brain to become.
Existence has become exhausting, and the strangest part is that this constant switching feels productive. But it’s an illusion. After twenty minutes of activity, I returned to my novel. I had left mid-word, half a sentence, a thought interrupted, and I had to reconstruct where I was, not because the work was hard, but because my attention had been shattered.
The Uncomfortable Truth
This isn’t an attention problem. It’s an environment problem. We’ve become used to thinking with interruption baked in. We’ve lost the ability to treat a book or a task as a space we can disappear into, because we’re always expecting something else to pull us away, and usually it does.
The article ended with something hopeful. The brain is plastic. It can change. It can recover, but only if we change how we use it. One neuroscientist forced herself to read for just 20 minutes a day, with no phone and no distractions. At first it felt impossible. Then slowly it came back, the rhythm, the immersion, the ability to stay.
I used to think focus was a personality trait, something you either had or didn’t. Now I think it’s something far more fragile, something shaped quietly, daily, by the tools we use. And if that’s true, then the question isn’t why can’t I concentrate, it’s what have I trained my brain to do instead?
Don’t get me wrong, I understand the benefits technology gives us. In my other life, I’m a CTO, and I spend my days thinking about how software can make things faster, smarter, and more efficient. I’ve seen first-hand how the right tools can remove friction, unlock creativity, and solve problems that would have been impossible a decade ago. Technology connects us, accelerates us, and, in many ways, empowers us to do more than we ever could before. But it’s precisely because I understand its power so well that I’m becoming more aware of its cost, because the same systems that optimise our output can quietly erode our ability to simply sit still and think.