The other day I realized my brain has been a bit lazy lately. It's not a lack of work, but an excess of screens. I wake up tired even before my first coffee, as if I'd spent the night chasing notifications that arrive even while I'm sleeping. Maybe I did. That "onlife" thing, in Floridi's infosphere.
This leads us to cognitive inactivity, where we let algorithms decide: which route or path to take, what to read, listen to, buy, or think about the world. It's as if we delegate to the machines: "think for me, because I'm exhausted." And they "think." So much so that we almost unlearn.
While our thinking becomes sedentary, something within us is constantly gorging itself, causing true digital obesity, an expression used to characterize the excessive and saturated use of digital technologies since the early 2000s: Ultra-processed stimuli: videos, memes, "10-second tips," alerts, messages, headlines like "you won't believe it!" We consume everything with the voracity of someone who is always hungry, without realizing that this doesn't nourish us. It only takes up space.
The result of this contemporary recipe? Cultural malnutrition. Surrounded by information like never before, but with increasingly less knowledge. It makes sense. The head becomes full of fragments, but empty of structure; full of data, poor in interpretation, stuffed and hungry at the same time.
It's as if we spend the whole day nibbling on content. No main course, no time to chew. No dessert worth remembering. Just tiny grains of attention spent on screens that politely ask us not to look away.
Cognitive inactivity convinces us not to overthink; digital obesity overwhelms us with stimuli; while cultural malnutrition leaves us, at the end of the day, with that vague feeling that we've seen everything but understood little, and we remain hungry.
The good news is that there's still a way out. How about using some time during vacations or weekends to balance your informational diet? Start with something simple: reading a text without looking at your phone, walking without GPS, watching an entire movie from beginning to end without pausing to check who liked your last photo. It's not about disconnecting, it's about reconnecting with something slower, more human. Connections are great, but they're even better when the mind breathes, the senses slow down, thoughts travel on their own, and we truly nourish ourselves again.
