How to protect your cognitive liberty

A few years ago, I made a rule for myself: I don’t watch reels.

This decision came after my husband’s Bluetooth accidentally connected to my noise-canceling headphones while I was deep in a silent meditation, suddenly blasting a stream of incoherent and raucous TikTok fragments into my ears. It was a full-blown assault to the nervous system. I swore off short-form videos then and there.

For a long time, it was easy. But lately, I started getting lax. The algorithm has gotten so much better. It knows exactly what to tempt me with and where my “pain points” are as a 36-year-old mother in a time of professional transition who recently left the city, as well as many of my secret desires and fears. There’s always another content creator waiting in the wings to tell me all about these things. And another. And another.

Earlier this summer, I consciously reinstated my rule, redirecting that extra time (it adds up!) to reading, journaling, hanging out with my kid, and being outside. Having begun to feel the slow creep of brain rot, I knew an early intervention was necessary. Researchers describe the endless stream of short-form videos as a “mini slot machine” that locks us into the scroll, hijacking our brain’s reward pathways and compromising focus, deep thought, impulse control, and overall cognitive functioning. I knew I didn’t want to spend my time in a digital casino.

Having gotten out of the fog, what was striking to me wasn’t just how seductive the algorithm is and how much time and energy it took away from things I actually care about (I knew this already), but how deeply it began to shape my thinking. What was most alarming was the low hum of pressure I started to feel around aging, reinventing myself professionally, creating more content to stay relevant as a writer, and trying to find a way to turn my experiences into something consumable.

We talk about the attention economy as a problem of distraction. But distraction is really just a symptom. The deeper problem is agency: Who gets to decide what occupies our minds—and what we do with the finite expanse of time that we have to think at all?

There’s a term for this: cognitive liberty. It was brought to my awareness in a recent conversation with my friend Chris Kelley, a professor of Buddhist studies at The New School and founder of Psychedelic Sangha, who I interviewed for Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Cognitive liberty is the idea that we have a right to mental self-determination, to sovereignty over our own minds and consciousness. The term is commonly used in the psychedelic space to refer to the freedom to alter your own consciousness, but it has broader applications, too. From a human rights perspective, it’s not just a vague ideal but an actual, indivisible right protected by international treaty. Duke University law professor Nita Farahany defines it as “a right to be free from interference with our mental privacy and freedom of thought.” Kelley puts it simply: “You have a right to the private domain of the self.” Today, he told me, that basic right is increasingly at risk. “It’s really hard to extricate yourself from the group think of social media and technology and AI,” he said.

That’s the real stakes of the phone-in-hand lifestyle creep we’ve slid into without ever choosing it. When not just our attention but our inner lives become raw material for tools designed to mine and monetize them, cognitive liberty stops being an abstraction and starts being the thing actually at risk.

Journalist and human rights advocate Dr. Courtney R. Radsch describes how this erosion happens so gradually that we are often unaware of its impacts until it’s too late (cue the boiling frogs). She writes:

Mental autonomy doesn’t disappear all at once. It erodes gradually—through design choices, incentives, defaults, options. It is diminished through algorithms and AI agents that learn your preferences, personalizing and optimizing your reality; through devices that listen, watch and converse; and through agents that do things for you, making decisions and suggestions, translating your instructions into prose, art, or action… these developments rarely feel coercive, which is the danger. They feel convenient. Efficient. Helpful. That’s the pitch, and it’s working.

These systems are designed not to support human flourishing but to maximize profit, which means they’re getting better and better at deciding what we want to see before we’ve decided what we’re actually looking for.

To preserve our cognitive liberty, she notes, we must have “space to think” and “space to reflect.” In other words, contemplation.

This is where I keep landing: contemplation isn’t just a wellness practice or a way to optimize productivity or creativity. It’s the exercise of our right to mental self-determination. Every time we turn attention inward instead of letting it be captured, we’re exercising freedom over a mind that extensive infrastructure has been built to hijack.

It comes down to the simple act of choosing what matters to us, and keeping our attention there.

Contemplating death (the subject of this newsletter) is, I think, a particularly potent form of this practice because of how radically it clarifies our own true values and priorities—which may be very different from the ones we absorb from the ambient culture around us. Reflecting on life’s impermanence, and the fact that we will die one day, changes us. If done with intention, it changes our lives. It is the fastest route to identifying and orienting our lives around what truly matters—and having the courage to walk away from what doesn’t. It brings with it an urgent imperative to use the time we have wisely, because its finitude is what makes it precious.

Death, held close rather than avoided, enriches our lives immeasurably. Contemplating mortality, I’d argue, is also cognitive liberty in its most consequential form—because it forces us to ask what we actually want to spend our finite attention on. Few of us, with our mortality in mind, would choose to spend two and a half hours a day on social media, or five hours a day on our phones, which is what the average person now does.

We can’t trust the algorithm with the all-important question of what our remaining time is for.

To contemplate, then, is to consciously bring our attention back, and to choose what is worthy of it.

In a recent conversation with Sam Harris, tech ethicist Tristan Harris described social media and the problem of attention as “the problem underneath all problems,” because of how deeply it disrupts our ability to hold our attention on what is most important to us.

“That’s what it is for something to matter, right?” replies Sam Harris. “If you can’t sustain your attention on it, it cannot matter.”

“That’s right,” said Tristan. This has led, he argues, to a “degraded” experience of being human.

That’s the upshot, stated as explicitly as I can imagine. When we lose the capacity to sustain our attention, we lose the capacity for anything to matter. And what matters to us is what makes our life meaningful.

What I’ve decided matters at this particular moment? Slowly making my way through the numerous volumes of the diaries of Anais Nin. Hosting more friends at our home in Maine. Taking longer, more meandering walks. Giving myself a little extra breathing room during a period of change and transition. They’re small actions, but they add up quickly to something that feels meaningful and nourishing.

Every time we redirect our attention toward what truly matters, we reclaim a little of our agency. We remember that our attention is not a commodity to be harvested or a resource to be optimized.

It is our life.

What matters to you?

— Carolyn