The Cost of Knowledge
Silence.
I catch myself doing it without thinking. Grabbing my phone. Opening email, X, LinkedIn - sometimes just the news. No purpose. No intent. Just a small dopamine hit to keep my brain occupied.
It feels like a reflex.
Iāve gotten good at it.
Scrolling while my kid tells me about his day, excited to see me after school. While waiting at red lights behind the wheel. In the cinema when everyone else is watching the film. At Xmas dinner, surrounded by family I see twice a year.
I feel ashamed writing this. But Iām grateful.
The obvious costs are easy to name. Disconnection from the people in front of you. Tired eyes. Fractured attention. The guilt that hums underneath everything.
The hidden cost - the moment you accept signal, you stop creating signal.
When your brain operates in constant receiving mode, it thinks itās creating. But itās recycling. Remixing the inputs. Reacting to whatever the feed served up that morning.
We say weāre thinking but weāre mostly processing.
They told us - surround yourself with brilliant people and youāll become brilliant too. Fair enough. But now we surround ourselves with them ten hours a day through screens. Americans spend over 60% of their waking hours consuming content.
At that ratio, how could you possibly know what you actually think?
The world tells you what the standards are. What success looks like. Whatās right and wrong. How to build, how to compete, who to measure yourself against. Why to measure. And your beliefs form around those signals - inevitably. You donāt notice it happening because it feels like your own thinking.
But it isnāt.
Itās inherited. Absorbed. Recycled.
And this is why most businesses look the same. Most brands sound the same. Most strategies follow the same playbook. Everyoneās reading the same feeds, absorbing the same frameworks, reacting to the same signals. The output converges because the input is identical.
Real differentiation comes from seeing something others donāt. And you canāt see what others donāt if youāre looking where everyone else is looking.
The breakthroughs - in business, in art, in life - come from people who found a way to stop the signal long enough to hear their own.
Iāve spent years in design. Itās my adult life. My edge. My way of seeing the world.
Itās also my cage.
My brain has been shaped in ways that arenāt easy to change. That shaping gave me something - a kind of force. But the same force that pushes me forward also holds me back. I see every problem through the same lens. I reach for the same tools.
Knowledge can become a golden cage. It makes you efficient at things you should probably question.
The only way Iāve found to escape it - even briefly - is to stop the signal entirely. To sit in silence long enough that my own thoughts have room to surface.
Not the recycled ones. The real ones.
Silence is uncomfortable.
Your brain fights it. It reaches for the boost - anything to avoid being alone with itself.
That discomfort is the point.
On the other side of it is something you canāt get any other way: your own voice, ideas, purpose, goals. Your own judgment. Ideas that didnāt come from someone elseās feed.
AI models are built on other peopleās knowledge. They remix. They react. They predict the next word based on patterns theyāve absorbed.
The one thing they canāt do is originate from silence.
You can.
Iām not telling you to delete your apps or move to a cabin. Iām not even telling you to meditate.
But notice.
Notice when you reach for the phone. Notice when the input is filling space that could hold something else - or maybe nothing. Notice what happens when you let yourself be bored.
And when you can, turn the device off. Stare at a wall for five minutes. Feel your heartbeat. Smell the air.
Have a conversation with your younger self - the one who hadnāt absorbed all these signals yet. Ask them what they wanted before they learned what they were supposed to want.
Then see what comes up when no one else is talking.
Thatās where the good stuff lives.
Now turn this device off.


Hey, great read as always. My brain is definitely just remixing!