I decided to leave the house.

I needed some peace and quiet, had some tasks to do, and the kids were home.

I love them, but I’m also an IT guy with a highly variable mood: if my servers are running, I’m happy; if there’s trouble, stay away until I fix it—my way.

It was around 2:00 PM when I sat down at a little café table in the shopping center in Balerna. Definitely not the quietest place to work, but the air conditioning helps, and my noise-canceling headphones would do the rest.

I started to switch my brain on by reading a few articles on the Iran–Israel crisis, mostly via Telegram. As for the mainstream press—sorry: I don’t trust it anymore.

In my saved articles on Telegram, which I also use as a link collector, this one pops up: “Why can’t we read anymore?” by Hugh McGuire, published on Medium. Time is tight—a tyrant!—so I asked ChatGPT to summarize it for me in a way I could read in two minutes, max.

The author reflects on the growing difficulty—even among passionate and educated readers—to concentrate on long-form reading like novels or essays. Even though he still reads and writes professionally, he notices a collapse in his ability to immerse himself. The cause? Constant use of smartphones, social media, and fragmented news has “rewired” the brain: we’ve grown accustomed to short, fast, stimulating inputs, incompatible with slow and reflective reading.

McGuire describes a kind of structural addiction to digital content—not just a habit, but a profound transformation in the way we process information. Long-form reading requires time, focus, and patience: all qualities the digital flow is steadily eroding.

He ends with a call to awareness: if we want to truly regain the ability to read, we need to carve out time and space for it—even if it’s hard at first.

There you have it! I did it too! An article with an estimated 11-minute read time—I got it boiled down to two!

Has my brain been rewired?

Yes, maybe.

Or maybe not.

Let’s think this through.

Personally, I was forced into a sabbatical from my main paid job due to the collapse of Credit Suisse. That’s the risk of working in banking for the Swiss bank—whose name it is wise and merciful to withhold (cit.).

I’ve got all the time in the world! Wow! What a great opportunity!

My wife said it too: “You have a full seven hours for yourself!”

Too bad I didn’t feel those seven hours sticking to me. So I started studying: where is my time going?

I kept a journal—three weeks of recording everything: what I did, when I did it, for how long, my mood, my physical symptoms.

After three weeks, I fed the whole journal to ChatGPT to get neutral insights: mine could be biased; his wouldn’t. He’s a cluster of machines—I wanted his impartial, even brutal, perspective. And it was brutal enough to calculate an average of…

TWO HOURS a day.

I repeat: I “don’t work”—or at least not in a paid way. If I did have a job… I’d have even less time.

Because everything I still have to do each day, the stuff I logged in that journal—it still needs to get done. No one’s doing it for me.

(A fun fact: the journal and the resulting AI analysis turned into a 32-page A4 document with one-centimeter margins. My wife was horrified! But I believe a study of that magnitude deserves a congruent amount of data.)

Many of us use Facebook. Just in Italian, about two million posts a day are published (a rough estimate I got from ChatGPT too). That gives you an idea of the volume of information our brains are bombarded with. And that’s without counting newspapers (for those who still read them), TV news (for those who still listen), and office or friend gossip (for those who have either).

Back to me: I came to this café planning to check some Logwatch configurations, do some updates to the documentation, maybe start installing and setting up a few tools on the servers I manage.

(Yes, I’m an IT guy: at the very least, people expect me to manage my own mail server, to host this blog on a virtual machine I handle myself—it’s my job! I enjoy it! Why should I outsource it?)

But I still have those ringing ears, muffled sounds, a bit of dizziness. ChatGPT told me:

→ These are classic signs of sensory overload or neurovegetative stress. Don’t ignore them: it’s your body telling you to “turn down the mental volume.”

In short: stop doing and stop thinking.

And once again, in my own small way, I had to choose whether to dedicate these two “free” hours to server maintenance—or to write this article.

Let’s circle back to the original topic: we’re no longer able to read → blame iDevices and rewired brains.

Really?

Or maybe we just no longer have the time—and with it, the clarity—to read.

To savor, bite after bite, a novel.

To immerse ourselves in its threads, its subtle hints, the luxury of imagining the characters’ faces, of hearing their voices whisper between the lines.

To feel their stories.

It’s not rewired brains. It’s life at 120 decibels.