The Diffuse

Nothing dramatic has happened. No one capacity has gone. Your writing, mostly, is still your writing. Your decisions, mostly, are still yours. Your memory, mostly, holds. But each of those mostlys conceals a small handover, and the handovers have started to compound. None of it dramatic. None of it any one alarming thing. The pattern is the alarming thing.

What this produces is a particular kind of fog. You feel competent in the moment, because the model is right there, and the work gets done. You feel less competent in the abstract: a sense that you used to be sharper, that ideas used to come quicker, that the people around you used to find you more interesting. The fog is real. It's the absence of the small frictions that used to keep your faculties in working order.

The work for you is slow and even. Pick one capacity each week — writing one week, decision the next, memory the one after, navigation the one after that — and use only that one unaided. The exercise rotates rather than concentrates. Six or eight weeks in, the fog thins, not because you fixed any one thing, but because you stopped letting all of them go quiet at once.