Why Your Morning Brain is the Last Thing Worth Saving
Don’t waste it on anything AI could handle
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Listen up, because I’m telling you this for your own good, and frankly, I’m already depressed just thinking about it.
I’ve been staring into the digital abyss long enough to see the pattern, and I’ve come away with one utterly essential, utterly miserable piece of advice for dealing with this new reality of AI creeping into every crevice of your day. It’s not some grand, clever strategy; it’s a pathetic, little act of self-preservation.
You need to protect your mornings. Absolutely ruthlessly.
I’m talking about a solid first two hours of the day being declared an algorithm-free, screen-free demilitarized zone. No AI. No feeds. No inputs from the howling digital crowd.
Why? Because your consciousness, that damp sack of electric jam lodged inside your skull, is at its peak of fragile, temporary competence right after you peel yourself out of bed. Your morning brain is different. It’s momentarily clearer, less cluttered, it hasn’t yet been marinated in the day’s usual brine of social media bile and desperate, urgent emails.
It’s the only time it’s truly able to hold complex things without dropping them into the vast mental septic tank where your forgotten passwords and the lyrics to 90s pop songs reside.
Now, I’m not telling you this so you can achieve some sort of productivity nirvana. I’m telling you this because you need to reserve that fleeting, precious, actual brainpower for the few tasks that haven’t yet been rendered pointless by the march of automation.
Don’t waste it on email. Why are you wasting your peak cognitive window drafting passive-aggressive replies or forwarding pointless attachments? That’s clerical rubbish, the kind of thing a bored chatbot could manage in a fraction of a second, and probably with better grammar.
Don’t waste it on reacting. Don’t let your valuable morning clarity be hijacked by whatever fresh hell or manufactured outrage has spilled onto Twitter. That’s just being jerked around by someone else’s miserable agenda.
And for God’s sake, don’t waste it on anything AI could handle.
Reserve those two hours for thinking. The real kind. The messy, inefficient, deeply frustrating sort of cognitive labour that involves synthesis, genuine origination, and maybe, just maybe, an idea that isn’t statistically predictable. The sort of thinking that, if you can actually manage it, makes everything else easier because you’ve already laid the conceptual foundations for the day’s inevitable shambles.
It’s a desperate siege, really. Because as the machines gobble up the routine, predictable tasks, the remaining “human” work becomes either exponentially more difficult or wildly more abstract. Your morning brain is your only defence against becoming a highly paid rubber stamp. Use that fleeting window of clarity to prove you’re still worth the bother, before the AI learns how to replicate the grim, unique misery that currently defines your output.
Now, go and sit in silence and try not to think about your tax return.
