I’m not as clever as I was when I was younger

I used to think that adults knew almost everything. Obviously, that’s not true. But we do increase in intelligence as we get older, right?

I’m not so sure about that anymore. I work as a journalist and sometimes I’ll be writing a story, and I rack my brain for the simplest of words to express what I want to say… but, nothing.

I’ve forgotten so much of what I learned in school and university. University, for me, was a time when my brain was really switched on. Days were filled with stimulating lectures and endless reading and learning.

As for my current life which consists of a nine-to-five office job and an evening where I kind of forage for food and then eat it in front of the television, I don’t feel quite as switched on. I’m not sure I really know who Satre was anymore. I’m sure I read something of his, once… And who was the guy who had those really dark ideas and spoke of ‘nothingness’ etc, etc? Nope, I got nothing.

I know that a big part of memory is repetition. And I haven’t been repeatedly encountering that information, so it’s bound to slip through the cracks, right?

But I also can’t help thinking there’s something bigger at play, too. I have a feeling, and I’m sure it’s one shared by others, that my brain is simply spread too thinly. There’s too much to read and consume at any one time, so I remember fragments of information, but not fully developed ideas.

Of course I am not the first to contemplate this idea. There are many books on the subject, and one which I plan on reading is How The News Makes Us Dumb: The Death of Wisdom in an Information Society by C. John Sommerville.

Also, there’s so much to keep up with! Neologisms, new slang that pops up every minute… Yes, it’s fun to play around with the English language, but also draining to keep up with every new ‘abbreve’ (which is an abbreviation of the word abbreviation, in case you missed that) and hashtag — OOTD, SMH, nonversation (which is actually one of my favourite neologisms BTW), and so on and so on.

I’m quite convinced that my vocabulary has shrunk, too. Perhaps due to laziness, in a sense. When you’re in university and you trip up on a word you encounter in Conrad or Hardy or Woolfe, you have to look it up, lest you fail the exam (the horror!). You have to have a grip on every word in your set works. But now, when I read, which I do fairly regularly, I just gloss over words I don’t understand — “pfft, I’ll look it up later” (but I never do) — and carry on with the book.

Well, OK, all this negative wallowing but what are the solutions? I have thought of a few, whether they are helpful I am not sure, but I’m going to give them a go:

1. I am a big believer in harnessing the power of apps (there really is an app for everything!), so I downloaded a crossword app — because I love crosswords and also because I think it will exercise my mind and help me learn new words.
2. I subscribed to just two newsletters from writers I like, setting a goal of reading their work each week. To balance this out I will click on less links on Twitter because let’s face it, there’s only so much one can read in a day, and I am *sobs gently* quite exhausted, TBH.
3. I have always intended to keep a ‘word book’ but I have now officially started doing it; it’s a notebook with new words that I’ve learned and their official meanings.

It’s a ‘less is more’, ‘quality over quantity’ approach. Let’s see where it takes me.

[Read the original post (and more) on my blog: https://musthaveflowers.wordpress.com/2015/08/10/im-not-as-clever-as-i-used-to-be/]