health | Matthew Culnane

There’s a Good Reason You Can’t Concentrate↗

www.nytimes.com

Cal Newport argues that just as diet and exercise became cultural common sense in a generation, we need a similar shift around “mental fitness” by treating sustained attention as something to train rather than concede. The framing is useful, though it covers ground Nicholas Carr mapped fifteen years ago in “The Shallows” (the net as “an interruption system, a machine geared for dividing attention”). I am unsure whether a fitness-style cultural shift can actually take hold when the incentives of every device in your pocket run the other way.

Quitting | The Point Magazine↗

thepointmag.com

“Though the pleasure they provide is physical, the physical properties of a cigarette are relatively unimportant. The taste, smell and texture don’t really matter, the way the taste, smell and texture of food really do. The need manifests as an ambient, all-over pang, as if every cell in your body were looking desperately for a phone charger. Schopenhauer says that money is prized above other goods because rather than satisfying a concrete need it represents in abstract the satisfaction of all human needs. Cigarettes were an almost inverse case, providing concrete satisfaction to an abstract need. They felt like they were satisfaction, satisfaction incarnate.”

6 February 2026link

health cigarettes tobacco smoking habit