Your Mind Is Not a Public Park
Lately, I’ve noticed something subtle—but unsettling—among thoughtful, high-functioning people.
It’s not burnout. Not exactly distraction either.
It’s something else.
Something I can only describe as mental uglification.
I’m not talking about being “wrong” or “uninformed.” I’m talking about a shift in how people think.
Their thoughts become reactive. Their tastes dull. Their words start to echo what they’ve seen online rather than what they’ve actually thought.
It’s like something crept into their minds and rearranged the furniture when they weren’t looking.
And the worst part is, it doesn’t feel like an attack.
It feels like being “tapped in.” Like being a good citizen of the internet. Like keeping up.
Until, one day, your inner world doesn’t feel like your own anymore.
Let’s take an example.
An engineer wakes up, makes coffee, and opens their usual morning tabs: Hacker News, Reddit, maybe Twitter or Threads.
They don’t even realize how much they’re letting in:
• A clever takedown of a tech CEO
• A gloomy post about how no one’s hiring
• A spicy AI take from someone with 200k followers
• A post about a developer who shipped something amazing overnight
By noon, they’ve read a dozen opinions and seen five different definitions of success.
They haven’t written a line of code yet, but they already feel late, behind, and vaguely agitated.
They can’t quite name the feeling—but it lingers.
By 2 PM, they snap at a teammate for a small mistake.
By 4 PM, they feel unproductive and guilty.
By 6 PM, they wonder if it’s time to quit tech altogether.
And if you asked them what actually happened that day—they wouldn’t be able to tell you.
This isn’t just distraction. It’s distortion.
We talk about burnout, overload, doomscrolling—but what we don’t talk about is how constant exposure to noisy, unfiltered content can change the shape of your thoughts.
It’s not just what you consume.
It’s what you become unable to think because you consumed it.
There’s a line in my notes I keep coming back to:
Why protect your mind? Because an unprotected mind becomes ugly.
A mind that never stays quiet has likely been exposed to something terrible.
Not terrible as in shocking.
Terrible as in corrosive.
Slow, invisible erosion.
The economic term for this is “negative externality.”
When a factory dumps waste into a river, and the town downstream gets sick—that’s a negative externality.
The factory didn’t pay the price. The people did.
Most content works the same way.
A tweet that gets 10k likes for being “provocative” might cost you peace of mind, clarity of thought, or a sense of direction.
But the author doesn’t pay for that. You do.
Every time you let noise in without reflection or boundaries, you subsidize someone else’s attention economy.
It’s not your job to carry that cost.
Your mind isn’t a public park. You don’t owe it to the world to leave the gates open.
Being well-informed doesn’t mean constantly plugged in.
Staying relevant doesn’t mean absorbing every take.
And protecting your mind isn’t fragility—it’s strategy.
Here’s what that can look like:
• Close the loop. Finish a thought before seeking new ones.
• Seek re-readable content. If it’s not worth revisiting, it might not be worth reading.
• Don’t confuse stimulation for wisdom. Fast takes rarely go deep.
• Guard your “mental API.” Validate your inputs. Rate-limit outrage.
• Build silence into your day. Reflection isn’t optional for clear thinking.
Because once the uglification sets in, it’s hard to spot from the inside.
We spend so much time tuning our tools—cleaning up codebases, organizing tabs, refactoring workflows.
Maybe it’s time to tune our minds with the same care.
If you opened yours like a notebook…
Would only monsters pour out?
Or would you find something worth writing?