After nearly forty years teaching graduate students and advising some of the most inventive companies on the planet, I’ve earned the right to sigh a bit. But this isn’t about “kids these days.” In fact, it’s not about youth at all. The shift I’m seeing — this collapse of intellectual agility — is striking all generations. All cultures. All walks of life.
Studies on cognitive flexibility, coupled with anecdotal observations about the death of long-form journalism and the slow drift of reader attention, suggest something dire: We are growing unable to sit still with ambiguity. We no longer walk through the fog of a complex question — we skip across it, like stones. Our thoughts sprint, but the world is a marathon. And so, we are left with answers to the wrong questions.
What happens when we can no longer think through contradiction, paradox, tension? When climate change, homelessness, political division, and regional conflict are seen as disconnected problems with easy answers — when, in truth, they are tangled systems that resist simplicity?
The answer is only simple if you don’t understand the question.
This is the danger of living in a world where thinking is outsourced. Where cognition becomes project management. Where uncertainty is eliminated, not explored. Where truth is boxed and shelved, not wrestled with. If the world is a box of nails — individual facts, sharp and ready — then our minds become hammers. Tools of force and certainty. Banging out conclusions. Flattening nuance. And who builds a cathedral with a hammer? Who composes a symphony with a hammer?
This is no way to live. Because if you see the world as nails, you’ll mistake noise for knowledge. You’ll assume volume means validity. And when you no longer know how to recognize true expertise — because you yourself have never gained any — you will fall for the confident fool. The YouTube doctor. The Instagram monk. The LinkedIn philosopher.
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If you want to reclaim your mind — not as a hammer, but as a compass, or a loom, or a garden — start here:
- Ask better questions.
- Be suspicious of certainty.
- Practice long-form attention.
- Sit with something confusing until it teaches you something.
We are not meant to be hammerheads in a world of nails. We are meant to wonder, to wander, to build. The true mind does not pound — it inquires, connects, reshapes. It listens to contradiction without collapsing. It plays. And most of all, it remembers that the world was never simple. It was just, for a while, flattened by search engines.
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