touch grass

everything we have cited this summer was published in the last 2 years. the piece we want to end on is from 1989.

that year rachel and stephen kaplan, two psychologists at the university of michigan, published attention restoration theory. their claim: directed attention is a limited resource. that is the effortful kind. the sort you use to read a contract, chase a bug, or follow a hard conversation. it drains across a working day. it does not come back just because you stopped working. it comes back in environments that hold your attention without demanding it.¹

in 2008 marc berman, john jonides and stephen kaplan tested that directly. participants walked for about 50 minutes. some went through the university arboretum, some through downtown ann arbor. then they sat a backwards digit-span test, a standard measure of working memory. the arboretum group improved on it. the downtown group did not.²

same length of walk, same city. what differed was what the environment asked of them while they were in it.

the newer work we cited this summer arrives at the same place from other directions. the mit media lab's eeg study found weaker neural engagement in heavy chatgpt users. it lasted after they stopped using the tool. they called it cognitive debt.³ microsoft research and carnegie mellon surveyed 319 knowledge workers, and ai-heavy work produced less varied output.⁴ berkeley haas followed 200 employees for 8 months. 83% said ai had increased their workload.⁵ bcg surveyed around 1,500 more and named what they saw in the heaviest users brain fry.⁶

the person in all of them spends directed attention faster than they refill it. the tool in their hands makes spending it effortless.

which makes the closing advice of this series a dull one. fewer things at once. a pace you could still be holding in november. and a walk, phone in the pocket, somewhere with leaves in it. the michigan walks ran about 50 minutes.

we sell speed and we are not walking that back. the speed comes from a small number of senior people whose judgment is intact when they sit down. the ai stack does the lifting where lifting helps. the first half only works if the attention is there to spend.

one small thing from 2025 worth noting. merriam-webster made slop its word of the year for 2025. it means the low-quality ai content filling everyone's feeds. touch grass was on the same list of words their editors flagged.⁷

have a good summer. go outside for a bit if you can.