Smoking a Cigar on a Florida Balcony, Contemplating Brain RAM

we've been running hot for a long time now.

Last night I found this Naval Ravikant tweet that was so simple, yet so brilliant:

I came across this when I shouldn’t have been scrolling- I was outside under the moonlit Florida sky enjoying a cigar a friend had gotten me.

There was plenty to look at and admire- the stars, the way light of the moon reflected off of the fronds of the palm trees, that quiet, sort of eerie Florida hum.

But I guess we’re all dopamine addicts of varying degrees, huh?

The serenity of my surroundings lost the attention war to the almighty timeline.

That’s probably why that Naval tweet hit so hard.

He’s right.

The phones are invasive enough.

That’s not to dispel their luxury- it’s amazing the interconnectivity we enjoy.

The world has gotten incredibly small as a result.

However, it doesn’t change the fact we’re simply just not built for this.

It’s enough stimulation and overload just handling the micro, our own lives.

Grab any given person’s phone for a day and you’ll see the following:

-Endless IG Reels and TikToks sent from friends

But bro it’s so funny you gotta watch it!

(How many AI reels of Trump and Epstein drinking lean together do I need?!)

-Work calls, emails, perhaps Slack or Discord

-At least one constant group chat

-The best friend chat

-The family chat

-GF/BF/SO whoever or “Roster Management”

That list itself is thousands of notifications a day, thousands of little pings of dopamine.

This is before we get to the macro stuff!

At any given point, we can get the Apple News notification.

-Trump did XYZ

-One of your favorite celebrities died

- Awful weather is about to hit some part of the country you’ve never been to

-Disease, war, famine, death

Well, what if I just turn off the News push notifications?

Go ahead.

One of the aforementioned constant streams of texts will let you know what happened anyway.

It’s really no wonder we’ve started to see more and more outlandish civilian behavior.

We (and I) have pointed the finger at short form content and scrolling culture, but perhaps digital culture overall lends itself to this.

We’re all running browsers with 30 tabs open.

Modern life forces you to run 47 different programs at once:

GlobalWar.exe

Peercomparison.exe

CulturalOutrage.exe

Where do you find time to run focus or self care?

Some of us try.

“This application has stopped responding. Force Quit?”

In the IRL version of this analogy, this is the point when your laptop or PC’s cooling fans start roaring so loudly you can’t even hear yourself think.

Oh how life imitates art.

Hyper-connectivity is great.

It literally allows me to what I’m doing right now by writing.

But what do we do when our human RAM runs out of space?

It seems, much like actual PC memory, that the human brain isn’t malleable past a certain level of storage.

There’s no cloud data for the mind.

Managing your girlfriend’s breakdowns, watching a clip of an overtime GWG, emoji reacting to the latest Christopher Moltisanti meme in the bros chat, and being alerted of missile strikes in Tehran shouldn’t all be things that happen within fifteen seconds of one another.

I’m not so sure where it goes from here.

This could be the point of this little write up to throw in a cutesy “disconnect, unplug, touch grass” CTA, but how realistic is that?

The pragmatism of the online world is too alluring, and we’re all addicted.

Perhaps a real biohacking wizard will come up with a solution, perhaps there’s a team out there at Harvard or MIT or some other thinktank with ungodly powerful minds that are assembling something to help us deal with this.

Until then?

We keep running hot.

This was initially supposed to be an article with sub headers in bold and line breaks and maybe a photo or two.

I turned it into a stream of consciousness.

Will I hide behind saying it’s for the artistry of it?

Yeah, honestly I will.

The real truth?

I’m feeling a bit throttled.

My fans have been pumping for awhile, and yours probably have, too.

Hey, at least this was a quick read.

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Enjoy the weekend 🫶🏻

-John Abbate

3.6.2026