We live in an age of miracles.
A child can access more knowledge on a phone than a scholar could in a lifetime a century ago.
Yet somehow â paradoxically, painfully â weâre getting dumber.
Not just less informed.
Less curious. Less thoughtful. Less capable of distinguishing truth from noise.
Everywhere we turn, the signs are obvious: collapsing attention spans, emotional reasoning replacing logic, viral nonsense devouring reason like a digital parasite. Itâs not that humans are born less intelligent now. Itâs that intelligence itself â the cultivation of curiosity, logic, and memory â has become unfashionable.
Welcome to the age of decline.
𧩠The Rise and Fall of the Flynn Effect
For much of the 20th century, average IQ scores rose steadily â a phenomenon called the Flynn Effect. Better nutrition, education, and environments made us sharper.
But by the 1990s, that trend reversed.
Norway, Denmark, Britain, Finland, and even the U.S. â all began showing drops in IQ from generation to generation.
What changed?
Not biology.
Culture.
We built an attention economy that rewards speed, not depth.
We built educational systems that produce conformity, not curiosity.
We built digital tools that automate thinking instead of amplifying it.
And now weâre surprised when people canât reason through fundamental problems without Googling the answer.
đ± The Attention Economy and the Death of Depth
Scroll culture is killing cognition.
The average human attention span â already short â has dropped to about eight seconds. Thatâs less than a goldfish, and far less than whatâs required to follow a paragraph of complex thought.
Weâve trained ourselves to chase dopamine hits â swipes, likes, red bubbles â instead of meaning. The mind becomes addicted to novelty, incapable of patience, allergic to boredom.
Algorithms donât want you to think â they want you to react.
And when a civilization stops rewarding thought, intelligence becomes maladaptive.
đ« Schools That Teach Answers, Not Thinking
Once upon a time, education was about learning how to think â logic, rhetoric, debate, problem-solving.
Now, too often, itâs about memorizing politically safe answers.
Students learn what to say, not how to reason. Teachers fear controversy more than ignorance. Ideological conformity replaces intellectual diversity.
As Neil Postman warned in Amusing Ourselves to Death, our danger isnât Orwellâs âBig Brotherâ â itâs Huxleyâs âBrave New World.â We wonât be oppressed into silence; weâll be entertained into stupidity.
âïž The Cognitive Cost of Convenience
Technology was supposed to free us. Instead, itâs replaced us.
We no longer need to remember numbers, dates, directions, or facts.
Why bother when the machine will do it for us?
But memory isnât just storage â itâs the foundation of understanding.
Without it, our reasoning collapses. Without reasoning, we become passive.
Without curiosity, we stop growing.
AI tools, search engines, and voice assistants are magnificent â I use them daily â but they also risk creating a society of intellectually assisted passengers.
People who sound informed but canât reason without a prompt.
đ Information Without Wisdom
We are drowning in data and starving for meaning.
Never in human history has information been so accessible â yet wisdom so rare.
Knowledge is cheap. Understanding is expensive.
And discernment â the ability to separate truth from illusion â has become a lost art.
Social media gives everyone a microphone but removes the incentive to listen.
Weâve replaced learning with performing â more worried about being seen as smart than actually becoming so.
đ¶ The Generational Divide
Older generations â raised on books, debates, and boredom â still remember how to sit with ideas.
Younger generations â raised on swipes and scrolls â have never known stillness.
Itâs not their fault.
Itâs the environment.
Attention is the new currency, and distraction is the tax.
Children today are growing up inside a global experiment in cognitive conditioning â one designed not to educate, but to capture.
And as a parent, watching my own children navigate that landscape is both heartbreaking and motivating.
đ„ Intelligence Is a Muscle â and Weâve Stopped Using It
Intelligence isnât fixed. Itâs a skill, a habit, a muscle.
It grows with use and decays with neglect.
You canât outsource critical thinking to an app.
You canât âdownloadâ understanding.
You can only earn it through struggle, reflection, and conversation.
The good news? Muscles can be rebuilt.
đ± Reclaiming the Mind
The antidote to decline isnât complicated â but it is intentional.
Read long-form again. Books, essays, anything over 280 characters.
Practice boredom. Let your brain breathe.
Debate respectfully. Donât cancel â converse.
Create instead of consume. Every act of creation strengthens cognition.
Teach curiosity. Especially to children. The future depends on it.
If we can rebuild our attention, we can rebuild our intelligence.
If we can rebuild our courage, we can rebuild our civilization.
đĄ Closing Thoughts
The machines are getting smarter.
But humans donât have to get dumber.
We stand at a crossroads: one path leads to a civilization of convenience without comprehension, while the other, more complex and slower, leads to renewal.
The tools of decline are also the tools of rebirth.
AI, the internet, the smartphone â none of them are inherently destructive. But they require discipline. They demand intention.
Because intelligence isnât about what we know.
Itâs about how we think.
So think deeply.
Read slowly.
Question everything.
Thatâs how we fight the remarkable decline â and light the way back to human brilliance.