Winter in New York City can be unforgiving. Freezing temperatures forcing you inside cramped dwellings. The minimal sunlight you do get, unable to be enjoyed because of the frostbitten climate. While most of the northeast was engulfed last weekend in negative temperatures, trying to find the will to survive through winter, I, like many others, thought through ways to pass the time inside.

Figuring out ways to keep yourself busy, or entertain yourself, is a problem few people spend much energy on these days. I myself have spent countless hours scrolling, streaming, binging, gaming – all in an effort to cognitively disassociate after long days.

Apps, social media, iPhones - a never ending buffet of dopamine that masks passive consumption for activity.

The end results of which leaves you feeling more tired and stressed than before. Cortisol spiked and dopamine depleted.

Alas, with the benefit of an empty apartment (my fiancée was traveling for work), and after my two-year-old golden retriever and I survived a jaunt into the polar vortex; I did something I had been avoiding. I did something I too often use the aforementioned distractions to avoid.

I actually sat down, with a pen and a piece of paper, turned my phone off – and spent time writing by hand.

Now my personal impetus was of the self improvement variety (I found a simple pdf “workbook” aimed at pushing you to reflect and clarify your own intentions, limitations, and goals) – but any version would have sufficed. Journaling, coloring, note taking, doodling.

Now why did I do this? Was I struck by some sort of inspiration for self improvement? Did being locked in an apartment, unable to leave because of negative temperatures, drive me to look inward? Was I struck by a need to confront my deep rooted issues so strongly I couldn’t help but write thoughts out by hand?

Hardly. I, like many a modern person, had a backlog of articles, videos, activities, tasks saved “for some later time”. A growing pile of mental loose ends that in the moment I deemed important, but not important enough to stop whatever I was doing.

I finally decided enough was enough, and freezing temperatures, an empty apartment (aside from a snoozing puppy) was enough impetus to say ‘you know what – I’m actually going to do one of these things’. I didn’t have anywhere to be, and instead of snacking on attention junk food, I was going to write with a pen and paper.

By the end, I felt completely invigorated and refreshed.

I feel little need to go into the specifics here regarding the self improvement stuff, you probably have your own backlog of articles, exercises and activities you can work through.

What blew me away about this specific exercise was the clarity with which it presented, and required you to actually write the words by hand. The magic of holding a pen in your hand, thinking through what you actually want to expend energy putting on a piece of paper sharpens your thoughts and output.

In an age where everything and anything can be created by technology, when your hand is actually sore from writing it forces you to figure out what matters.

In an ever increasing world of speed, optimization, efficiency - the deliberate art of slowing down, and physically grounding yourself in something is a relic of bygone times.

But maybe our boomer parents were on to something - as my hand grew sore from the pen in my hand, writing down ten sentences on “the ideal version of myself” and “what limiting beliefs I tell myself” I realized that, yes, the exercise was stimulating. But the real value was forcing myself to clarify what I actually wanted, what matters to me, and steps I can take to get there.

As the hours passed, I found myself getting deeper and deeper into my answers, approaching views and thoughts I had never sat with before.

The exercise also helped me anchor to the present moment, and ultimately to myself. I wasn’t rotting away on the couch watching someone else do something, I was actively using my own mind and skillset.

It brought me back to why I enjoy writing in the first place. It’s great to create something sure, and my mom gets a lot of enjoyment out of these articles, however ultimately it’s a way for me to take unlimited external stimuli and make them into something of my own.

Maybe it has been the artificial intelligence boom, or just my own inability to stay offline, but I increasingly find myself stressed, exhausted and overwhelmed with external stimuli. The latest viral thread, trending topic, hot tea, controversial sports take. Not even to broach things like political scandals, economic concerns. All of it creates a constant sense of mental nausea, your brain sick from constant stimulants and overindulgence.

Find something that allows you to unplug from the matrix–to use a cliche analogy.

Maybe for you it’s listening to music, exercising, catching up with friends, it can literally be anything. We all need something that allows us to disconnect from the attention machines, telling us what to think and what to do.

I now grasp why people got into gardening, or why my dad liked using tools and fixing things.

Maybe it can be something as simple as going for a walk (except when it’s -15 degrees out but you get my point), and not listening to a podcast at 1.5x speed or anything at all.

Because that’s the thing - when you’re constantly being stimulated and force fed inputs externally, it’s impossible to generate thoughts of your own. Your internal operating system can’t come up with outputs if it’s expending all its energy on processing inputs.

After about three hours, my puppy woke up, and it was almost time for a second bathroom break.

It felt great to finally sit down and work through something I had saved in the “do later” digital pile.

The real benefit was sitting down and writing by hand, and clarifying my own thoughts.

Back out into the frostbitten wind we went, but I felt mentally a thousand pounds lighter. I didn’t know how long the dog and I were going to be out, but I felt closer to knowing where we were going.

When I first started writing earlier this year, it was really to satisfy a personal urge. Initially, I struggled to determine what exactly that urge was. I constantly found myself dealing with a mental storm, my brain scattered and jumping from thought to thought. I was unable to focus for extended periods of time, reading constantly interrupted by a need to check my phone or look at an app. I needed to do something to disperse the energy that was built up in my mind and body, but somehow left me feeling constantly fatigued. I needed something to ground me in the present moment. The realization dawned on me - I was missing the act of creation. Literally using my mind or my hands to make something that previously had not existed, not just sitting and consuming something mindlessly. This sounds extremely basic, but I venture to bet if you are similar to myself in regards to your age (shoutout young millennials) and are not an artist by trade; that you rarely, if ever, are actually “creating” anything.

Think about it. We wake up, and 99% of us immediately grab our phone. We start frying our central nervous system with dopamine-hijacking 12-second videos or 140-character messages. We go to work, sit in front of screens, move numbers around, and answer emails. After the taxing workday, we need to unwind. So, we sit in front of an even larger screen, playing something we barely watch while we digest our nighttime serving of digital sludge.

This is not meant to be a depressing diatribe on the state of the world in 2025, just more of an observation that I have been thinking about as I have begun to build my creation muscles back up. Atrophy is the act of muscle mass disintegrating when it goes unused. Just as your physical muscle mass disappears if you don’t actively use it, so too does mental muscle mass. I cannot be alone in noticing how difficult it is to concentrate now, or how rarely I go throughout my day without watching something, or feeling the need to click into one of the various trillion dollar applications designed to feed off this urge.

Writing turned out to be the rare activity for me where I was completely unaware of how much time had passed while I was doing it. As someone whose life has revolved around competitive fitness and finance for over a decade, measuring numbers and time pretty much dominated my life. Suddenly, it was not about tracking some quantifiable variable - but simply creating something.

Creation, in whatever form, literally requires different parts of your brain than just consuming information. I have always prided myself on being a very active reader, but even as someone who reads a tremendous amount - digesting information does not have the same effects as taking those inputs in your mind, mixing them in a stew, and delivering outputs.

The outlook for society does not rapidly seem to be improving in regards to how skewed it is towards consumption vs creation. The rise of the internet and mobile phones has dramatically increased the convenience of our lives, but at the cost of the ability to engage in making things of our own creation. Boredom or inactivity often led Gen X or Baby Boomers to writing great works of art, painting masterpieces, or cultivating vibrant social lives. Millennials and Gen Z inversely have limitless forms of “entertainment” at their fingertips - there is rarely the space to think and create that said physical or mental inactivity often provides.

We haven't even gotten to the generation raised on iPads and TikTok yet. In the coming decade, a whole cohort of young people will enter adulthood, having spent the majority of their time in front of screens from almost the moment they experienced consciousness. Long car rides, once spent daydreaming or reading, have been replaced with flashing content and declining attention spans chasing the next distraction. This group will have gone through school using artificial intelligence that gives them every answer, rather than forced to go to the library or even filter through Google search results. In their spare time, endless online forms of “entertainment” numb their brains from developing an original thought or perspective, hindering critical thinking ability.

I am glad I grew up when I did. I’m still struggling to pay attention, and I’ll binge television or play video-games for hours with the best of them - but I'm glad I grew up with legos, action figures, books, and [insert boomer voice] playing outside. Writing really illuminated how much my “creation” muscles had atrophied. It also made me audit how much time I was actively using them vs just consuming.

Ordering food on an app vs cooking, scrolling social media vs writing or drawing, streaming content vs playing an instrument or learning photography- the ways in which our lives have totally been shifted towards consuming vs creating are numerous. There’s not a takeaway I have here, or a nice little motivational directive. Creation can look different for everyone, maybe its food for one person, relationships or social activity for another. Whatever it is, I hope we can all take back our ability to get out of pure consumption mode. Maybe we can all take a step back, or outside, and do something with our hands and our minds. Otherwise, I’m not even sure there will be much left to take over for the iPad kids.