5 ms·

Can't Think, Can't Remember: More Americans Say They're in a Cognitive Fog

53 points by walterbell 3y ago

RecycledEle 3y ago
This is definitely a problem for me.
navjack27 3y ago
http://archive.today/lcqEK http://archive.today/lcqEK
hotdogscout 3y ago
I felt this way after a COVID infection, takes 6 months at least to get cognitively back.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  Maybe there's hope for me. It hasn't yet been 6 months since I stopped being actively sick with Covid, but my head is still foggy and I still get tired absurdly easily.
  - ljf 3y ago
    There certainly is hope - my wife had long covid back before we even heard the term or knew what it was. But she's largely recovered now, despite long covid hitting her really hard with measurable impacts (myocarditis, POTS etc.) At times it felt liked she'd never improve, but she has - she just needs to build her strength again. If you want more hope look for people who had similar symptoms from SARS - they largely recovered in a similar time frame.
  - hotdogscout 3y ago
    This helped me. https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/long-covid-brain-fog-treatment https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/long-covid-brain-fog-treat...
PopAlongKid 3y ago
>Because the census relies entirely on self-reporting, experts say the data could also be capturing a shift in how people perceive their cognition, even absent changes to their health. >People with disabilities might have taken note of rising disability acceptance and become more likely to answer the census questions honestly, researchers say. >But those changes in perception are likely to have a relatively small influence on the numbers, said Monika Mitra, who directs the Lurie Institute for Disability Policy at Brandeis University. Most of the increase is probably capturing real changes in people’s health, she said. [emphasis added] In conclusion, experts and researchers say one thing, Monika Mitra says the opposite, so we really don't know.
- faeriechangling 3y ago
  I can’t help but notice the word “honestly” there. I am sceptical that people are being more honest now than they were before. I think that people feel more sick than they did before. I also feel there is a huge societal trend of medicalizing how people act and feel and expressing it in terms of it being a mental illness or disorder. I’ve noticed that mental health outcomes keep getting worse and worse and doctors consistently go “wow that’s great there must be so much more awareness and acceptance of mental health problems!” That’s a very self-serving interpretation and I don’t understand why people don’t question it more.
  - coffeesque 3y ago
    > That’s a very self-serving interpretation and I don’t understand why people don’t question it more. People say "don't talk to police" because they can fuck you over, legally speaking. Regardless of whether you're innocent or guilty, you stfu when police are around Psychologists can also fuck people over legally speaking (and likely will be able to even more so in the future), but the same standard doesn't exist for some reason, instead it's a bunch of people willingly talking. And there's also no due process either, the entire system goes around it
    - faeriechangling 3y ago
CommitSyn 3y ago
If they have the means and the opportunity, people should try an isolation retreat e.g. go camping in nature with a friend (or solo is personally preferable) for 2-3 days and only power on your cell phone for emergencies. As always, research and take preparations like telling people where you are going and went to expect you back if you're going into the wilderness. It only takes about 30 steps off the marked path to potentially get lost (forever). People so vastly underestimate the role of their attention-seeking, cognition-theiving phones in their ability to think clearly. I would hazard a guess that most people increased their phone addiction (and psychological importance placed on their phones) during COVID. However, it's well-known and confirmed that long-covid does cause brain fog. Plus all the other viruses that people got when they started mingling again after the entire population was inside allowing their immune systems to be mostly dormant... Long-covid really kick-started the research into long-virus issues.
barrysteve 3y ago
It is easy to spread oneself too thin on Youtube. Following clickbait titles and doom scrolling disconnects me from sequential thinking. It is really unhealthy.
- hotpotamus 3y ago
  I don't deny the possibility that there are long-term post viral health effects and covid is obviously a big possibility there, but I've said many times that I think a lot of the health issues that people are experiencing are from stress and anxiety. I say that as someone who has had near lifelong issues with them. When I was going through the experience of working for a company acquired by private equity, it was incredibly stressful to see rounds of layoffs and wondering when my number would come up (I really need my health insurance). When it actually did it was actually relieving and I found I was able to think a lot more clearly and able to learn things much more easily, though this process easily took a year and I'm probably still continuing to improve (through some real work) a few years later. So while the virus is a real biological factor, I can't help but think that the mass stress event of the pandemic and all that came with it had enormous effects on its own.
- hypefi 3y ago
  Yeah, I suppose it's mostly information overload—scrolling through many apps, constantly ingesting information at a high bandwidth without utilizing memory recall. There could also be some biological origins, perhaps related to food or disruptions in the nervous system.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  I wonder if it is in many ways loss of attention span and capability to concentrate due to too many distractions and opportunities to be distracted. Smartphones, social media, internet in general.
JohnMakin 3y ago
Throughout much of 2022 something like this happened to me. Calling it a "fog" would have been a complete misnomer, it was more like a complete blackout - I was unable at one point to keep as little as 3 digits in my head for more than a few seconds, it became a real problem while trying to enter MFA prompts, to the point where I'd give up and start sobbing. I forgot my own address at one point, which prompted me to go to a neurologist who tested for everything under the sun including dementia. Nothing came up. Turned out it was the pandemic - sorta. I had been completely isolated for a while due to the pandemic and remote work, had severe physical pain due to some pending surgery I couldn't get treated (also indirectly due to covid), and some deep personal loss (also covid). As soon as that stuff cleared up and got better, my memory returned promptly. Maybe it was a little covid going on, but I think these studies discount the secondary and tertiary effects of the pandemic a little too quickly. Lots of these symptoms are self-reported too, which is really really prone to error. They need to start putting these people in double-blind studies that test cognition over long periods of time to really get to the root of this.
- t0bia_s 3y ago
  Are you vaccinated with mRNA?
  - JohnMakin 3y ago
    Yes, why?
    - t0bia_s 3y ago
      Have you consider it as cause of your symptoms?
      - JohnMakin 3y ago
        No - because there is no data to support this, and I got my first vaccine over a year before this started in the first place, and have had subsequent vaccinations since it cleared up.
commandlinefan 3y ago
I've definitely found that my attention span has shortened, but I wonder if I shouldn't attribute at least some of that to my age (50 now). I could concentrate a lot longer when I was younger, maybe it's normal to lose some ability to concentrate like losing eyesight and hearing?
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  In his autobiography, the linguist R.M.W. Dixon (who could concentrate at least well enough to produce great scholarship into old age) suggested that the break was puberty. He wished he could go back to that halcyon time of boyhood before a redblooded man would constantly find his thoughts turning to sex. No later advance in years was as clearly harmful as that.
davesque 3y ago
I've definitely experienced this. Lately, I often forget that I'm making coffee and just leave the grinder on the counter. This is utterly bizarre behavior for me. I'm usually very focused on what I'm doing. I'm in my early forties so dementia feels unlikely.
ilaksh 3y ago
[flagged]
nickpp 3y ago
The legal weed? Not judging, just observing this at friends that are now consuming daily. The chronic lack of sleep? Doom scrolling at 2am is so common in the post-pandemic world. The continuous notifications and distractions coming from our devices having an effect on our mental sharpness? I barely use Facebook but its icon on my iPhone always has a number on red on it. And I could go on.
timeagain 3y ago
Anecdotally most of my friends are now quick to attribute their (mostly benign) behaviors to various mental health shortcomings. This is new, the same people ten years ago were not doing this. My narrative (based entirely on hunches) is that it has become very trendy in social media to assign any “strange” behavior to mental disorders like autism, adhd, bipolar… Conveniently, the same social media that thrives on cultivating these behaviors. Short attention spans, niche interests, and mood swings are all part of the SM addiction machine. So social media says “you might have ADHD if (insert normal thing)”. People self identify, and now watching videos for 4 hours can be chalked up to the mental deficiency instead of the addictive substance. Over-all this trend to me is a way of relinquishing responsibility, since it’s “just my brain” it is outside of one’s locus of control. There is also more pressure now than ever to be a rational economic agent, and compared to that most of us have forgetfulness, procrastination, social shortcomings, moods that are not conducive to being an employee, etc. I have a hard time believing that modern people are any more mentally challenged than those in the past, we are just much more quick to pathologies normal human experiences. It is convenient that this pathologizing is a boon for TikTok.
- habinero 3y ago
  That's facile. Those conditions were always underdiagnosed. In the past, people just struggled. For example, I was diagnosed with ADHD in my late 30s and it explained a lot of things I had always struggled with, and meds were incredibly helpful. There's no value in making life any more difficult than it already is, and there's no award for who can endure the most. I did manage without meds or a diagnosis, but with them, it's like dropping a 50lb pack you didn't know was there.
- projectazorian 3y ago
  > Over-all this trend to me is a way of relinquishing responsibility, since it’s “just my brain” it is outside of one’s locus of control. That would only be the case if one didn't seek treatment, perhaps because of stigma due to attitudes like this; if someone pursues a course of treatment they are in fact accepting responsibility.
  - 3y ago
porknubbins 3y ago
I am on day 10 of recovery from pretty severe COVID and I would have been a long covid skeptic except I just woke up one day and felt like a completely different person. Its like I have all the memories and abilities of the person I was but all emotional motivation is just gone and I struggle to remember why I liked to do anything I used to do. Everything also feels kind of soft and hazy in a way that is difficult to describe. This is not at all subtle or anything stress or attention related as some have suggested. It is utterly unlike anything I’ve ever experienced.
- ok_dad 3y ago
  That’s a good description for how I’ve felt since I got Covid a few months ago. I have to force myself to do anything, even sleeping is hard. I can’t focus on anything and life feels unreal somehow.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Yes, me as well. It's been 3 months since I started testing negative. My overall state is certainly better than three months ago, but this stuff persists. Based on what I've heard from people IRL as well as here, I'm not going to actually start worrying for another 3 months.
- altairTF 3y ago
  Thats actually a very scary side effect of the virus, did you get vaccinated or not? Naive curiosity, not implying anything
  - porknubbins 3y ago
    I had gotten the original 2 part vaccine, though not any of the many boosters so its possible that having one of those would have given me a lot more resistance and a smoother recovery.
    - t0bia_s 3y ago
      Or maybe it helps to give you those symptoms. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37999349#38006436 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37999349#38006436
keiferski 3y ago
I think this is mostly due to the increasing complexity of modern informational society – and the failure of information processors like the New York Times to live up to their supposed roles. Reading the news today, nothing adds up to a coherent whole. It’s just chaos, opinion pieces, emotional reporting, and outright propaganda. I don’t blame the average person for becoming cognitively overloaded by all of this and then feeling lost, unable to think, and unable to order their memories into a logical narrative that explains the world.
- jstarfish 3y ago
  Lately it's been feeling to me like we live in a theocratic hellscape. Like, so much of our "life" occurs on a plane of existence that doesn't actually exist. It's all virtual. Fake worlds! Fake relationships! Fake money! (Fake news!). Then we have to reconcile that with the reality we live in. We might as well be living according to the arbitrary whims of God all over again. The rules change arbitrarily; systems that work predictably one day get silently updated overnight to overhaul everything from the business logic to the interface itself. God willed it! Making it worse, it's bureaucratic beyond comprehension. I have weeks at work where I don't even know what my job even is. I could write some code, I guess. Deploying it is going to require interacting with a number of teams to beg for provisioning, credentials, firewall exceptions, etc. I have to ask this from people I haven't seen in so long they might as well be NPCs in a scripted loop. I don't even know if they still manage whatever it is I need. This isn't even my job, it's just what I need to do in support of my actual job, since nobody can just have one role anymore. We're supposed to have faith that God/tech will provide. Robots were supposed to do difficult or dangerous work so we could live a life of leisure! But instead tech is eliminating the unskilled jobs. There's no time for mental breakdowns. The cracks are starting to show. Life feels too much like I'm trying to multiclass in four different MMOs while fending off real-life pickpockets and patching holes in the roof-- all at the same time.
aatd86 3y ago
All these mm-waves must have an impact too. (well the science claims that they do already).
- lxgr 3y ago
  Pretty sure the impact is in what the waves (mm or otherwise) transport onto people’s screens.
  - aatd86 3y ago
    I'm still more curious,if not wary, about electro-magnetic fields disrupting neural activity as far as I'm concerned.
    - lxgr 3y ago
      There's a very high possibility that EM radiation emitted by smartphones can indeed disrupt neural activity. My money is on the 380 - 700nm kind.
      - aatd86 3y ago
        Yeah I understand but don't remove your eyeballs from their sockets just yet. If that's one (quasi-permanent) solution to your worries, that is still not very advised. Try to shut down your phone first to mitigate that. The concern is about what one cannot control...
thadk 3y ago
If you "improved" the insulation on your domicile in the past few years and/or people in your household began working at home more, consider the average CO2 may have increased notably (which will vary by season) leaving you foggier. Try cracking windows for a cross-breeze (or more than cracking them if the temp is not too different outside from inside). Aranet4's are an investment but can be worthwhile once you recognize it as an issue for you.
local_crmdgeon 3y ago
Probably unrelated to the fact that a ton of Americans now smoke weed from the moment they wake up until the moment they fall asleep.
black_13 3y ago
[dead]
WentFullRetard 3y ago
[dead]
IYasha 3y ago
Not American, but can confirm. And I think the statement can be generalized to most, if not all, urban population, sadly. I've been observing this problem for at least 10 years, and EVERY age group is affected. And also, among people I know, the farther from large cities they live, the better they feel. (EDIT: I was implying that COVID may have boosted something that was already a trend before it)

53 points by walterbell 3y ago

RecycledEle 3y ago

This is definitely a problem for me.

navjack27 3y ago

http://archive.today/lcqEK http://archive.today/lcqEK

hotdogscout 3y ago

I felt this way after a COVID infection, takes 6 months at least to get cognitively back.

JohnFen 3y ago
Maybe there's hope for me. It hasn't yet been 6 months since I stopped being actively sick with Covid, but my head is still foggy and I still get tired absurdly easily.
- ljf 3y ago
  There certainly is hope - my wife had long covid back before we even heard the term or knew what it was. But she's largely recovered now, despite long covid hitting her really hard with measurable impacts (myocarditis, POTS etc.) At times it felt liked she'd never improve, but she has - she just needs to build her strength again. If you want more hope look for people who had similar symptoms from SARS - they largely recovered in a similar time frame.
- hotdogscout 3y ago
  This helped me. https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/long-covid-brain-fog-treatment https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/long-covid-brain-fog-treat...

PopAlongKid 3y ago

>Because the census relies entirely on self-reporting, experts say the data could also be capturing a shift in how people perceive their cognition, even absent changes to their health. >People with disabilities might have taken note of rising disability acceptance and become more likely to answer the census questions honestly, researchers say. >But those changes in perception are likely to have a relatively small influence on the numbers, said Monika Mitra, who directs the Lurie Institute for Disability Policy at Brandeis University. Most of the increase is probably capturing real changes in people’s health, she said. [emphasis added] In conclusion, experts and researchers say one thing, Monika Mitra says the opposite, so we really don't know.

faeriechangling 3y ago
I can’t help but notice the word “honestly” there. I am sceptical that people are being more honest now than they were before. I think that people feel more sick than they did before. I also feel there is a huge societal trend of medicalizing how people act and feel and expressing it in terms of it being a mental illness or disorder. I’ve noticed that mental health outcomes keep getting worse and worse and doctors consistently go “wow that’s great there must be so much more awareness and acceptance of mental health problems!” That’s a very self-serving interpretation and I don’t understand why people don’t question it more.
- coffeesque 3y ago
  > That’s a very self-serving interpretation and I don’t understand why people don’t question it more. People say "don't talk to police" because they can fuck you over, legally speaking. Regardless of whether you're innocent or guilty, you stfu when police are around Psychologists can also fuck people over legally speaking (and likely will be able to even more so in the future), but the same standard doesn't exist for some reason, instead it's a bunch of people willingly talking. And there's also no due process either, the entire system goes around it
  - faeriechangling 3y ago

CommitSyn 3y ago

If they have the means and the opportunity, people should try an isolation retreat e.g. go camping in nature with a friend (or solo is personally preferable) for 2-3 days and only power on your cell phone for emergencies. As always, research and take preparations like telling people where you are going and went to expect you back if you're going into the wilderness. It only takes about 30 steps off the marked path to potentially get lost (forever). People so vastly underestimate the role of their attention-seeking, cognition-theiving phones in their ability to think clearly. I would hazard a guess that most people increased their phone addiction (and psychological importance placed on their phones) during COVID. However, it's well-known and confirmed that long-covid does cause brain fog. Plus all the other viruses that people got when they started mingling again after the entire population was inside allowing their immune systems to be mostly dormant... Long-covid really kick-started the research into long-virus issues.

barrysteve 3y ago

It is easy to spread oneself too thin on Youtube. Following clickbait titles and doom scrolling disconnects me from sequential thinking. It is really unhealthy.

hotpotamus 3y ago
I don't deny the possibility that there are long-term post viral health effects and covid is obviously a big possibility there, but I've said many times that I think a lot of the health issues that people are experiencing are from stress and anxiety. I say that as someone who has had near lifelong issues with them. When I was going through the experience of working for a company acquired by private equity, it was incredibly stressful to see rounds of layoffs and wondering when my number would come up (I really need my health insurance). When it actually did it was actually relieving and I found I was able to think a lot more clearly and able to learn things much more easily, though this process easily took a year and I'm probably still continuing to improve (through some real work) a few years later. So while the virus is a real biological factor, I can't help but think that the mass stress event of the pandemic and all that came with it had enormous effects on its own.
hypefi 3y ago
Yeah, I suppose it's mostly information overload—scrolling through many apps, constantly ingesting information at a high bandwidth without utilizing memory recall. There could also be some biological origins, perhaps related to food or disruptions in the nervous system.
Ekaros 3y ago
I wonder if it is in many ways loss of attention span and capability to concentrate due to too many distractions and opportunities to be distracted. Smartphones, social media, internet in general.

JohnMakin 3y ago

Throughout much of 2022 something like this happened to me. Calling it a "fog" would have been a complete misnomer, it was more like a complete blackout - I was unable at one point to keep as little as 3 digits in my head for more than a few seconds, it became a real problem while trying to enter MFA prompts, to the point where I'd give up and start sobbing. I forgot my own address at one point, which prompted me to go to a neurologist who tested for everything under the sun including dementia. Nothing came up. Turned out it was the pandemic - sorta. I had been completely isolated for a while due to the pandemic and remote work, had severe physical pain due to some pending surgery I couldn't get treated (also indirectly due to covid), and some deep personal loss (also covid). As soon as that stuff cleared up and got better, my memory returned promptly. Maybe it was a little covid going on, but I think these studies discount the secondary and tertiary effects of the pandemic a little too quickly. Lots of these symptoms are self-reported too, which is really really prone to error. They need to start putting these people in double-blind studies that test cognition over long periods of time to really get to the root of this.

t0bia_s 3y ago
Are you vaccinated with mRNA?
- JohnMakin 3y ago
  Yes, why?
  - t0bia_s 3y ago
    Have you consider it as cause of your symptoms?
    - JohnMakin 3y ago
      No - because there is no data to support this, and I got my first vaccine over a year before this started in the first place, and have had subsequent vaccinations since it cleared up.

commandlinefan 3y ago

I've definitely found that my attention span has shortened, but I wonder if I shouldn't attribute at least some of that to my age (50 now). I could concentrate a lot longer when I was younger, maybe it's normal to lose some ability to concentrate like losing eyesight and hearing?

OfSanguineFire 3y ago
In his autobiography, the linguist R.M.W. Dixon (who could concentrate at least well enough to produce great scholarship into old age) suggested that the break was puberty. He wished he could go back to that halcyon time of boyhood before a redblooded man would constantly find his thoughts turning to sex. No later advance in years was as clearly harmful as that.

davesque 3y ago

I've definitely experienced this. Lately, I often forget that I'm making coffee and just leave the grinder on the counter. This is utterly bizarre behavior for me. I'm usually very focused on what I'm doing. I'm in my early forties so dementia feels unlikely.

ilaksh 3y ago

[flagged]

nickpp 3y ago

The legal weed? Not judging, just observing this at friends that are now consuming daily. The chronic lack of sleep? Doom scrolling at 2am is so common in the post-pandemic world. The continuous notifications and distractions coming from our devices having an effect on our mental sharpness? I barely use Facebook but its icon on my iPhone always has a number on red on it. And I could go on.

timeagain 3y ago

Anecdotally most of my friends are now quick to attribute their (mostly benign) behaviors to various mental health shortcomings. This is new, the same people ten years ago were not doing this. My narrative (based entirely on hunches) is that it has become very trendy in social media to assign any “strange” behavior to mental disorders like autism, adhd, bipolar… Conveniently, the same social media that thrives on cultivating these behaviors. Short attention spans, niche interests, and mood swings are all part of the SM addiction machine. So social media says “you might have ADHD if (insert normal thing)”. People self identify, and now watching videos for 4 hours can be chalked up to the mental deficiency instead of the addictive substance. Over-all this trend to me is a way of relinquishing responsibility, since it’s “just my brain” it is outside of one’s locus of control. There is also more pressure now than ever to be a rational economic agent, and compared to that most of us have forgetfulness, procrastination, social shortcomings, moods that are not conducive to being an employee, etc. I have a hard time believing that modern people are any more mentally challenged than those in the past, we are just much more quick to pathologies normal human experiences. It is convenient that this pathologizing is a boon for TikTok.

habinero 3y ago
That's facile. Those conditions were always underdiagnosed. In the past, people just struggled. For example, I was diagnosed with ADHD in my late 30s and it explained a lot of things I had always struggled with, and meds were incredibly helpful. There's no value in making life any more difficult than it already is, and there's no award for who can endure the most. I did manage without meds or a diagnosis, but with them, it's like dropping a 50lb pack you didn't know was there.
projectazorian 3y ago
> Over-all this trend to me is a way of relinquishing responsibility, since it’s “just my brain” it is outside of one’s locus of control. That would only be the case if one didn't seek treatment, perhaps because of stigma due to attitudes like this; if someone pursues a course of treatment they are in fact accepting responsibility.
- 3y ago

porknubbins 3y ago

I am on day 10 of recovery from pretty severe COVID and I would have been a long covid skeptic except I just woke up one day and felt like a completely different person. Its like I have all the memories and abilities of the person I was but all emotional motivation is just gone and I struggle to remember why I liked to do anything I used to do. Everything also feels kind of soft and hazy in a way that is difficult to describe. This is not at all subtle or anything stress or attention related as some have suggested. It is utterly unlike anything I’ve ever experienced.

ok_dad 3y ago
That’s a good description for how I’ve felt since I got Covid a few months ago. I have to force myself to do anything, even sleeping is hard. I can’t focus on anything and life feels unreal somehow.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  Yes, me as well. It's been 3 months since I started testing negative. My overall state is certainly better than three months ago, but this stuff persists. Based on what I've heard from people IRL as well as here, I'm not going to actually start worrying for another 3 months.
altairTF 3y ago
Thats actually a very scary side effect of the virus, did you get vaccinated or not? Naive curiosity, not implying anything
- porknubbins 3y ago
  I had gotten the original 2 part vaccine, though not any of the many boosters so its possible that having one of those would have given me a lot more resistance and a smoother recovery.
  - t0bia_s 3y ago
    Or maybe it helps to give you those symptoms. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37999349#38006436 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37999349#38006436

keiferski 3y ago

I think this is mostly due to the increasing complexity of modern informational society – and the failure of information processors like the New York Times to live up to their supposed roles. Reading the news today, nothing adds up to a coherent whole. It’s just chaos, opinion pieces, emotional reporting, and outright propaganda. I don’t blame the average person for becoming cognitively overloaded by all of this and then feeling lost, unable to think, and unable to order their memories into a logical narrative that explains the world.

jstarfish 3y ago
Lately it's been feeling to me like we live in a theocratic hellscape. Like, so much of our "life" occurs on a plane of existence that doesn't actually exist. It's all virtual. Fake worlds! Fake relationships! Fake money! (Fake news!). Then we have to reconcile that with the reality we live in. We might as well be living according to the arbitrary whims of God all over again. The rules change arbitrarily; systems that work predictably one day get silently updated overnight to overhaul everything from the business logic to the interface itself. God willed it! Making it worse, it's bureaucratic beyond comprehension. I have weeks at work where I don't even know what my job even is. I could write some code, I guess. Deploying it is going to require interacting with a number of teams to beg for provisioning, credentials, firewall exceptions, etc. I have to ask this from people I haven't seen in so long they might as well be NPCs in a scripted loop. I don't even know if they still manage whatever it is I need. This isn't even my job, it's just what I need to do in support of my actual job, since nobody can just have one role anymore. We're supposed to have faith that God/tech will provide. Robots were supposed to do difficult or dangerous work so we could live a life of leisure! But instead tech is eliminating the unskilled jobs. There's no time for mental breakdowns. The cracks are starting to show. Life feels too much like I'm trying to multiclass in four different MMOs while fending off real-life pickpockets and patching holes in the roof-- all at the same time.

aatd86 3y ago

All these mm-waves must have an impact too. (well the science claims that they do already).

lxgr 3y ago
Pretty sure the impact is in what the waves (mm or otherwise) transport onto people’s screens.
- aatd86 3y ago
  I'm still more curious,if not wary, about electro-magnetic fields disrupting neural activity as far as I'm concerned.
  - lxgr 3y ago
    There's a very high possibility that EM radiation emitted by smartphones can indeed disrupt neural activity. My money is on the 380 - 700nm kind.
    - aatd86 3y ago
      Yeah I understand but don't remove your eyeballs from their sockets just yet. If that's one (quasi-permanent) solution to your worries, that is still not very advised. Try to shut down your phone first to mitigate that. The concern is about what one cannot control...

thadk 3y ago

If you "improved" the insulation on your domicile in the past few years and/or people in your household began working at home more, consider the average CO2 may have increased notably (which will vary by season) leaving you foggier. Try cracking windows for a cross-breeze (or more than cracking them if the temp is not too different outside from inside). Aranet4's are an investment but can be worthwhile once you recognize it as an issue for you.

local_crmdgeon 3y ago

Probably unrelated to the fact that a ton of Americans now smoke weed from the moment they wake up until the moment they fall asleep.

black_13 3y ago

[dead]

WentFullRetard 3y ago

[dead]

IYasha 3y ago

Not American, but can confirm. And I think the statement can be generalized to most, if not all, urban population, sadly. I've been observing this problem for at least 10 years, and EVERY age group is affected. And also, among people I know, the farther from large cities they live, the better they feel. (EDIT: I was implying that COVID may have boosted something that was already a trend before it)