🔥 📖 A Book Without Chapters 🧠 The Nun Study 🎥 Is AI “rusting” our brains? 🌺 Confucius on orchids

#75: a weekly 4-item newsletter created to inspire dads to use the challenges of fatherhood as fuel for building an incredible life & an antifragile mind.

Welcome to the 75th edition of the antifragile 4 🔥.

This week, I wax on why life has felt like a blur. And how an idea from a parenting book and some out loud self-talk could be the solution.

Plus, revisiting one of the most profoundly exciting studies on neuroplasticity ever, yet another good TED talk on the perils of AI doing our thinking for us & a lovely outro from Confucius on orchids.

Thank you, as always, for reading.

With love,
Chris

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Here’s this week’s antifragile 4 🔥:

1. 📖 A Book Without Chapters

2. 🧠 The Nun Study

3. 🎥 Is AI “rusting” our brains?

4. 🌺 Confucius on orchids

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1.) 📖 A Book Without Chapters

My days often feel like a good book—without chapters.

I’m trying to be a lot of things at once: Father, Husband, Brother, Son, Friend, Entrepreneur, Leader, Athlete, Healthy, Writer, Thinker, Community Member.

And working with the same slippery 24 hours as everyone else, I move from one task to the next to the next without ever really coming up for air.

There are no endings or beginnings. Just…motion.

Morning workout > breakfast > shower(?) > kids wake up > make their breakfast > negotiate them into the car > preschool drop-off > meetings > work blocks > skipped lunch > more work blocks > more meetings > speed-eat on the way to pickup > play / referee / break up sibling fights > make dinner > kids don’t eat dinner > negotiations > kids still don’t eat dinner > hangry bathtime > books > negotiations into bed > bedtime > attempt to hold a coherent conversation with my wife while eating salmon patties off the kids’ plates > journal > write the newsletter I left until the last minute again > read for 15 seconds > pass out.

It’s a life packed chock full of wonderful stuff. Even the negotiations (sometimes).

But despite how full it is of things I want in my life, it feels like a blur.

That’s why I so often look at the time/date and think, How the f@$& is it already [insert time/date]?

I suspect this blur is also why my memory feels strained lately. When I look back, I don’t see moments—I see a smear.

It’s not that the days lack meaning. They’re packed with it.

It’s that none of it gets time to settle.

Experiences, no matter how meaningful, stack on top of each other before the last one has been digested. Nothing gets filed away. There’s no “before” and “after”—just a continuous stream.

A blur.

And when nothing gets digested, no meaning can stick. Nothing sinks in.

Experiences and whatever potential meaning, learnings, or stickiness they held glide into oblivion. You’re left with an ephemeral shadow of whatever you just lived.

This got me to wondering; maybe the problem isn’t busyness.

Maybe it’s integration.

In The Whole Brain Child, one of the central ideas is that children don’t automatically integrate their experiences. They feel them—in big ways—but need help making sense of what happened. Parents help by narrating, reflecting, and connecting moments so they become part of a coherent story rather than loose emotional fragments.

After reading that, I wondered if I needed some Whole Brain Child—Whole Brain Daddy?—medicine of my own.

I live moments, but don’t close the loop. I don’t give my mind a chance to say, That was a thing. It’s over now. Here’s what it meant.

I just move on.

Again.
And again.
And again. And again.

Until I pass out and do it again.

So what to do?

As you may have guessed, I don’t have this figured out.

But I do have a hypothesis—and a new experiment to run.

I don’t think this is about doing less. I don’t think it’s about having fewer responsibilities or better time-blocking or more optimization (for god’s sake).

What I think we need more of are two things:

1. Explicit endings & beginnings

2. Reflection

Explicit endings and beginnings are about letting our monkey brains know when a chapter of the day is closing—and when a new one is opening.

I literally plan to say these transitions out loud.

I tried it tonight, and it was surprisingly cathartic: “Parenting chapter is over for today, Thinking & Writing chapter beginning”.

My brain exhaled at the explicit statement that parenting was over for the day—even if later this proves to be untrue. And it felt ready to step into its next role of Thinker/Writer.

I might even do it during the workday: “Advertising chapter is over. Operations chapter is beginning". We’ll see how loony I get with it.

As for the reflection, my experiment is to handwrite (on reMarkable tablet) bullet points from my day with a quick 3-5 question wrap-up at the end:

• What do you want to remember from today?

• What made you feel most alive?

• What made you most proud?

• What do you want to adjust?

• What’s your intention for tomorrow?

It was shocking to realize I had nearly forgotten events from today. Let alone integrate them into any meaning.

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Time will tell how this experiment shakes out.

I really hope it proves that the problem isn’t my book being too full.

But rather, none of the chapters ever gets to an end.

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2.) 🧠 The Nun Study

The Nun Study was a decades-long research project that followed 600+ Catholic nuns to understand aging and Alzheimer’s disease.

[It found that] even though biological markers for dementia were present (at post-mortem analyses), the clinical (behavioral and cognitive) manifestation of those symptoms was prevented by the quality of vocation, through education, occupation, community lifestyle and other factors that "boost" cognitive reserve.

This blew my mind.

There were Nuns in this study who had the physical brain structure of someone suffering from Alzheimer’s, yet they stayed mentally sharp until death.

This was correlated with “sustained mental engagement” throughout life. These activities included:

• Writing

• Reading (difficult books)

• Learning new skills

• Having deep conversations

• Teaching

• Storytelling

• Playing music

• Physical activity

• Social connection

Stay engaged 🧠.

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3.) 🎥 Is AI “rusting” our brains?

Even closer to my concerns of AI than last week’s video.

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4.) 🌺 Confucius on Orchids

An orchid in the deep forest sends out its fragrance even if no one is around to appreciate it.

Confucius

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Two last things for you this week:

1. Feel like your days are a blur? Experiment with chapters + reflection.

2. Be fire and wish for the wind 🔥

With love,
Chris

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