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October 30th, 2025
​A newsletter by Anne-Laure Le Cunff

💸 Cognitive Luxuries

Have you noticed it’s gotten harder to read a book? Or have those deep conversations that used to stretch late into the night? Maybe you reach for your phone during every spare moment, even when you want to think about something important.

If so, you’re not alone. A recent New York Times article argues that thinking is becoming a luxury good, and that our capacity to truly think our own thoughts is under attack from the very technologies meant to help us.

So what exactly are we losing, and how can we get it back? Let’s explore the most precious cognitive luxuries and how to reclaim them.

The Three Types of Cognitive Luxuries

What I call cognitive luxuries aren’t just pleasant mental activities – they actually rewire our brains for the better. For instance, research shows that developing reading skills changes our neural architecture, boosting vocabulary, analytical thinking, and our ability to concentrate.

All cognitive luxuries share something in common: they need time, space, and sustained attention in a world designed to fragment these. I find it helpful to think about them in three categories:

1. Spaciousness (thinking slowly) is respite from constant input and urgency. It’s when you can let your mind rest and reflect – those moments when you can actually hear yourself think, when you’re not juggling notifications, deadlines, and digital noise, when you can daydream or even be bored.

2. Agency (thinking freely) is your ability to create rather than just consume. This includes learning across domains, generating new ideas, following your curiosity for its own sake rather than for output or approval. It’s the difference between scrolling through others’ content, at the mercy of the algorithm, versus freely exploring your own thoughts and making connections.

3. Depth (thinking deeply) is your ability to engage fully with challenging ideas, emotions, or tasks – focusing on difficult problems and complex questions, falling into rabbit holes for hours, practicing metacognition and interoception to dig deeper into your own thoughts and emotions.

Spaciousness is the foundation of all cognitive luxuries, as it enables both agency and depth. Without mental space and time, you can’t create meaningfully or think deeply.

Unfortunately, our modern world actively works against all three. Smartphones fragment attention, social media optimizes for endless engagement, and our work culture often rewards busyness at the expense of slow, free, and deep thinking.

But there are simple ways to push back and create space for cognitive luxuries in your personal and professional life.

How to Cultivate a Rich Inner Life

Reclaiming cognitive luxuries can feel like an uphill battle, but it doesn’t have to be complicated. Start with small, sustainable changes that gradually expand your mental space. Here are five strategies that can help:

• Create phone-free zones. Begin with one room or one hour a day where devices are off-limits. This could be your bedroom, or the first hour when you wake up. This builds spaciousness by letting your mind wander without digital interruption.

• Take thinking walks. You don’t need a full “Think Week” like Bill Gates. Go for short walks around the block without music, podcasts, or any input. Let your mind digest recent experiences, work through problems, or just drift.

• Start a low-stakes creative practice. Try something purely for exploration such as sketching, morning pages, learning an instrument, building something with your hands. Remove any pressure for it to be good or useful.

• Curate your information diet. Choose what enters your mind as intentionally as you would food. Replace some social media scrolling with long-form articles, some podcasts with audiobooks, some news with fiction.

• Join or start a discussion group. Whether it’s a book club, philosophy café, or just regular chats with a thoughtful friend, commit to social rituals that reward deep engagement with ideas.

Most importantly, experiment! Try different approaches and notice what works for you. You can even incorporate a Plus Minus Next review to capture potential tweaks.

The aim here isn’t to become a digital monk, but to intentionally create space for thinking that will make your life richer and more meaningful.

The ability to think deeply, create meaningfully, and reflect spaciously shouldn’t be privileges available only to the wealthy, and cognitive luxuries shouldn’t feel luxurious – they’re basic human capacities we’re losing to convenience and distraction.

The good news is that reclaiming these capacities doesn’t require dramatic life changes. It starts with tiny experiments: reading a book, walking in silence, or journaling for a few days. So, what cognitive luxury will you reclaim first?

🔬 Tiny Experiment of the Week

Ready to put these ideas into practice? Try this week’s tiny experiment to help you reconnect with your thoughts:

I will [journal for 5 minutes everyday] for [5 days]

You can do that in a notebook, jot some quick bullet points on your phone, or dictate your ideas using a recorder app while commuting.

📖 Host a Book Club

Hosting a book club is a great way to slow down your thinking, deepen conversations, and build shared reflection. Here’s how you can reclaim this cognitive luxury:

• Step 1: Choose a few friends or colleagues and send them a short message (template) to invite them at the beginning of the month.
• Step 2: Schedule a meeting at the end of the month and add anyone who joins your book club.
• Step 3: Use a discussion guide during the meeting to explore themes and ideas in the book.

Bonus: If you choose Tiny Experiments and host your book club in November, fill out this form and I’ll record a personalized video message for your book club.

👀 Into the Mind of...

GOLDIE CHAN

Each week I ask a curious mind about their habits, routines, and rituals. This week we learn from Goldie Chan, speaker, advisor, cancer survivor, and author of Personal Branding for Introverts.

1. One daily practice you can’t do without? I check in with my plants. Watching something grow slowly reminds me that creativity doesn’t always bloom overnight, but it always blooms.

2. One mindset shift that transformed your work? Being heard isn’t about being loud. It’s about being clear. Once I embraced that, I stopped chasing trends and started building trust.

3. One habit you wish you had? Taking more intentional breaks. I’m great at creating for others, but I’m still learning how to pause for myself without guilt.

Read her book

🛠️ Brain Picks

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🗓️ Brain Trust

If you enjoy the newsletter, you’ll love our community of curious minds conducting tiny experiments within a safe space and learning together. Here is an overview of upcoming events (full calendar):

• Explore creativity without alcohol. Josh Woll, filmmaker turned sobriety coach, will explore three specific patterns where alcohol limits creative potential, how these patterns play out, and how sobriety compounds upward into greater flow, focus, and fulfillment.​
• Rethink your relationship to work. Join Bree Groff, author of Today Was Fun, to explore how work doesn't need to be drudgery nor does it need to be our identity and religion.
​• Improve your personal knowledge management system. Let's process some notes while we chat about anything and everything during the Processing Hour with Remy Rohan and members of the PKM Collective.​
• Make your creative practice more resilient. Join Gosia Fricze for a one-hour workshop to explore what keeps your creativity steady through life’s challenges, what might disrupt your flow, and how to create a flexible creative practice.
​• Make progress on your projects. Our Pomodoro-based coworking sessions are hosted twice a week by Kathryn Ruge and Joshwin Greene, covering all timezones. Then, join Benjamin Covington for a weekly review on Sunday.
​• Host your own workshop. Do you have an idea for a short presentation and Q&A or a workshop you’d like to trial? Test your first iteration in the Ness Labs community and get feedback. We promote all sessions here in the newsletter.

All of these and future events are included in the price of the annual membership ($49), as well as access to our courses, recordings of all our previous sessions, a dedicated space to track your tiny experiments, and a growing collection of case studies.

Until next week, take care!
Anne-Laure.