What’s Taking Up Your Mental Bandwidth Right Now?

Your mind is always pointed at something, and it matters what it is.

If you spent most of your day preoccupied with thoughts about a past failed relationship, for example, that makes for a different kind of day than one in which you’re preoccupied with solving a computer programming problem. Your mood, your actions, and the tone and feel of your life depend hugely on what’s on your mind.

As you know if you read this blog, the mind can focus on things other than thoughts; you can attend to present-moment sense phenomena. Even a few seconds of this at a time can break the momentum of thinking.

For the most part, though, if you’re a human being living in the modern world, chances are your attentional bandwidth is going to be dominated by thinking. There’s just too much in the environment drawing us into abstract world of thought. Every glimpse of entertainment, advertisement, news, gossip, or content is a seed that can set off an open-ended, self-sustaining weather system of thinking and feeling.

Passing a gas station, you see that prices are up, and within one second you’re thinking of your household budget, and other rising costs, then inflation, and politicians, and that person you know who voted for the bad politician instead of the good one, and so on. Depending on how sticky the subject matter is for you – and problems tend to be stickier than anything else – this one glance at a sign can set a mood and theme that colors your whole day.

We often inadvertently give these mental weather systems much more energy. When a topic dominates your thoughts, you might reinforce it by talking about it and consuming content about it, creating fodder for more rumination, triggering more content consumption, and so on.

This pattern isn’t strictly maladaptive – if the topic really serves you. If, instead of becoming preoccupied with political talking points, you became preoccupied with making a career change, that preoccupation might steer your life in a great direction.

If you became preoccupied with banjo music instead of “world events,” it might lead you to pull your banjo out of the closet, learn some new licks, download some banjo podcasts, and join a banjo-focused community. Banjo music might not solve world hunger, but this is still probably a better timeline for you than the one in which you’re arguing with political wrongthink in your head to and from work every day.

For each moment of your sixteen waking hours, your mind is pointed at something. If you had the data, you could make a pie chart of attentional subjects, just like one depicting app usage on a mobile phone. You are spending some actual number of minutes and hours ruminating over workplace drama, or “the state of the world,” or your health troubles. The makeup of this hypothetical pie chart has a direct effect not just on how life feels, but on what you do, and therefore where your life goes.

The Contents of Your Mind Drives the Contents of Your Life

Here’s a personal example.

I have a history of serial obsessions. My mind will fixate on an intriguing topic, and I’ll dive into books, films, and podcasts about it, for weeks or months. I’ve engaged in fruitful obsessions with blues guitar, wine, Cold War history, veganism, bodybuilding, chess, 19^th-century seafarers, coffee brewing methods, Lovecraftian horrors, Buddhism, Scotch whisky, Stephen King’s bibliography, rock climbing, and countless smaller interests that only held my mind for a week or two.

How long a human mind gives a topic serious bandwidth depends on how magnetic it is to one’s sensibilities, but also how strongly you orient your habits towards cultivating that interest, by consuming related content and bringing its paraphernalia, thinking patterns, and communities into your life. A passing fancy for vintage clothing might change how you dress forever. Watching a documentary on vegetarianism might change your diet, and your health, for the long term.

On a slow workday in 2008, I read a blog post that began a years-long preoccupation with blogging and online entrepreneurship, which led to the founding of this website, and a complete change of my career and life path. At the time I was constantly reading about those topics, engaging in the relevant communities, building things, and planning future projects. My mind was strongly attuned to the subject, and it drove my habits; I’d get home from work and look forward to spending my evening hours making something.

This was great, because it was driving my life in the direction I wanted to go: towards independence, creativity, prosperity, and connection with similar minds.

That was a long time ago. For more than a decade now, my interest in building a business and an online community has been far from the center of my mind. I guess it’s been filled with other things.

So what has been dominating my bandwidth the way entrepreneurship once did?

Lots of topics, some of which I listed above. But over the past few years at least, without quite noticing it, I’ve become very preoccupied with political philosophy of all things.

In hindsight, this interest has been driven by our wild online culture war — the vicious and strangely dichotomous disagreement over COVID policy, speech rights, racism and weaponized accusations thereof, and use of state power. Something has seemed very unhealthy in the way people have been disagreeing over this past decade. It’s become so strongly ideological and partisan. In order to make sense of where this comes from, I’ve jumped headlong into Lasch, Hayek, Marx, Marcuse, Sowell, and a host of contemporary pundits.

By now I’ve consumed massive amounts of content on the topic. Between home, the gym, and my vehicle, I’ve been absorbing about three hours of audiobooks alone per day, and ~80% of that is about political ideology. I’ve just been slamming them back in this way for the last three or four years.

This phase has been very informative, and it’s helped me understand the mass human craziness that seems to characterize the 2020s. But it’s not good for me. Rather than drive my creative abilities, career, and connection with other humans, this interest has driven me to my phone, into the bottomless ocean of ephemeral political hot takes. Even when I’m not absorbing content, my head is swimming with political arguments, maxims, and talking points, and generating new ones.

I don’t need that. Unfortunately I find the topic of political ideology fascinating. Thoughts on how societies should be run drive so much of history. There is certainly a place for it.

But right now I want to invest my bandwidth elsewhere. I’m trying to build something I think the world really needs –- a way for ADHDers and procrastinators to overcome the biggest problem in their lives –- and instead of filling my bandwidth with the ideas and skills needed to do that, I’m filling it with diatribes about economic policy and propaganda methods. I have a chance to make life better for thousands or millions of people, but if that’s my goal I’m misallocating my bandwidth.

Making a Deliberate Bandwidth Change

The mind doesn’t ask your permission before attending to something – it will simply grasp what seems salient. However, you can change what it tends to grasp by curating the inputs.

On February 1, I began an experiment. For the months of February and March I’ll be dumping politics from my attentional bandwidth as entirely as possible. I’m cutting off any inputs that draw the mind in that direction. That means no news or political editorials*, no books on the topic, and I’ll avoid any discussions about politics or world events.

It certainly means no browsing of social media. Scrolling X or Bluesky or Threads is essentially browsing an endless rolodex of emotionally-driven political stands.

Instead of pumping political ideas into my head every day, I’ll mostly be consuming content related to small business marketing and community building, like I did back in the early 2010s. If my mind’s going to be mulling over some problem, I’d rather it be how to get my best work out to a million people, rather than how to express the hubris of socialist planned economies.

The “Civic Duty” Objection

I need to address the inevitable “civic duty” objection that comes up whenever someone advocates ignoring politics for a while. A responsible adult needs to know what’s going on! You can’t just stick your head in the sand! 

I share this moralistic feeling that by tuning out the news I’m abdicating some important role of watchdog and opinion-haver, but I think the moral importance of that role mostly is an illusion. It’s a hobby, or an addiction, dressed up as a duty. While it is technically possible for informed, ordinary people to influence political outcomes, that isn’t really what we’re doing by consuming massive quantities of content. We’re too easily convinced, by those with far more influence over the proceedings, that the amount of attention we invest in what they do is a measurement of our degree of participation. We’re spectators, hooked on the spectacle.

Also – any mental bandwidth taken up by politics is unavailable for anything else. While you’re doomscrolling news apps, are you really investing everything you can in human connection, creative work, material prosperity, spiritual realization, or whatever else is “important” to you?

In any case, this is a break, not a lifelong renunciation. Believe me, I still have my opinions.

Follow the Experiment (or join me!)

I’ll be keeping a public experiment log to detail my experience with this bandwidth-swap campaign.

If you opt to do something similar – whether with politics or any other bandwidth-stealer — you can share your insights in the comment section there.

What’s occupying your mental bandwidth? Is there something better you could be using it for?

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*Except what is strictly and practically necessary for my household decisions. My country is currently dealing with the imposition of new US tariffs and I want to understand the implications, so I’m reading only about tariffs. It’s not fun.