Critical Thinking: Now With Less Thinking: Thoughts, Prayers and Pre-Chewed Opinions

A Slightly Irascible Dispatch from the Mindless Age By Someone Who Remembers When Shampoo didn’t sponsor News

There was a time, not that long ago, when people had to think for themselves. Not because it was trendy or #mindful or part of a brand identity, but because there wasn’t anyone else around to do it for you. The phone didn’t tell you what to believe. Your toaster didn’t offer daily affirmations. There were no thought leaders, just a few cranky uncles and a neighbor who still read actual books with spines and footnotes.

Now look around.

We live in an era where critical thinking is considered a microaggression. Where “doing your own research” means watching a TikTok made by a 22-year-old life coach with a ring light and a degree in manifesting vibes. Where newscasters lean forward with knitted brows to deliver breathy interpretations of events as if they’re auditioning for a soap opera titled America Is Burning and I’m So Brave for Telling You. Reporters used to tell you what happened. Now they tell you how to feel about it: angry, ashamed, euphoric, guilty, smug, or all of the above in under 90 seconds.

And we eat it up, because it’s easier than thinking. Thinking takes time. Thinking might lead to discomfort. Worse. Thinking might make you change your mind.

But nobody wants that anymore. Minds are set like concrete, poured into moldy party lines and left to harden under the heat lamp of social media validation. Pick your team, pick your influencers, repeat the slogans, and be ready to pounce on anyone who uses the wrong pronoun or the wrong war analogy.

Even dinner-table debates have been outsourced to cable news segments. We used to argue about baseball and whether Cousin Danny was ever going to pay back that money he borrowed. Now we argue using words we don’t understand, like “late-stage capitalism” and “toxic masculinity”, borrowed wholesale from people who themselves borrowed them from people who once had a thought in grad school and never let it go.

Meanwhile, “free speech” has become code for “saying things I already agree with,” and “open dialogue” means two people screaming past each other with microphones shaped like therapy cats. Everyone’s got a podcast now, which is what happens when you give the village idiot a condenser mic and a Patreon.

And I pause.

Because I wonder. Does this mean that I am, as I vowed never to do, quietly reverting to my grandparents’ and parents’ worldview? The one that always ended in a sigh and a muttered, “Back then, everything was better”? And is it possible… that they were right?

It’s a dangerous thought. The kind that creeps in around dusk, after the news has finished gaslighting you and before your second glass of wine. Maybe they weren’t just being sentimental old coots pining for rotary phones and firm handshakes. Maybe things were better. Not perfect, not utopian, but at least less insultingly stupid. There was time to think. Room to disagree. Fewer algorithms are involved in your identity. I remember when silence wasn’t considered suspicious. When a man could sit on his porch for three hours staring into the middle distance without being diagnosed or interviewed. We called that thinking. Or possibly digesting. Either way, it was private.

Today, any thought not posted is wasted. Heaven forbid you form an opinion and not share it with 800 Facebook friends and a bot named “Craig4Trump2028.” Privacy is now suspect. Nuance is elitist. Doubt is weakness. And silence? Silence is complicity, unless it’s part of a curated mental health journey narrated with soft piano music.

But I still hold out hope.

Somewhere, right now, a teenager is unplugging his phone because it’s dead and he lost the charger. He wanders outside, accidentally, and sees a tree, not a Tree App™ or a Tree NFT, but a real one, and he starts to wonder. About trees. About the sky. About why nobody ever just shuts up anymore. And right there, in the brief space between distractions, he starts to think. It’s fragile, flickering, and unmonetized. And I say: hold onto that.

Because thinking for yourself is the last great act of rebellion in a world where everyone’s been trained to speak before they understand. To react before they reflect. To follow before they wander. And if you're reading this essay and thinking, “He’s talking about them”. I’m not. I’m talking about you.

And so the world spins on, louder than it used to be, faster, flatter, and a bit more smug. The headlines scroll like lottery numbers, and we pretend to understand them. We wear opinions like team jerseys, trading in curiosity for certainty, questions for quarrels.

But out there, beyond the noise, the old things still wait. The hush of a library. The creak of a rocking chair. The heavy pause between “I don’t know” and “Let me think about that.” Maybe the soul of the world isn’t dead, just… resting. Tired from being shouted at all day. And maybe, if you sit quietly enough, long enough, if you dare to think a thought all the way through without needing to win an argument or collect a like, something good returns to you. Something small and clear, and old. The sound of your own mind, working.

And isn’t that something?