4

Always Being Available Means You Never Get Anything Done

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Whether you're climbing the corporate ladder, building a relationship, or participating in a costume orgy, communication is important. Beyond the obvious bare minimum required to accomplish each of those tasks, it's generally understood that increasing communication has a direct correlation to increasing the quality of the output. So quickly and punctually answering emails from your bosses will make promotion more likely, while describing exactly how you like your butt tickled with a peacock feather hat will result in far more satisfying genital sparring -- whatever the implication of that description may be for you.

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"No, I want you to use the Downton Abbey Maggie Smith voice, not the Harry Potter one. There's a difference."

The Terrible Truth:

There's a twist here: A distraction, even a brief one, can decrease your brain's ability to process information by as much as 20 percent. However, waiting for an interruption that never comes actually improves your productivity.

But really think about that -- being available all the time means your email alerts are always popping up in the bottom right corner of your screen, because like hell you're going to mark sale alerts from Steam and GoG.com as spam. And even when you're away from your computer, your phone is making a helpful little noise to let you know that an email came. There's no avoiding it, which is why a study found that distracted workers cost businesses an average of $10,790 per worker every year.

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Uh, unless they're reading a list-based comedy website. Then they get back to work smarter and sexier.

3

Dieting Puts Your Brain on Hunger Strike

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Wait a minute ... how can this possibly be bad? Everyone knows the food corporations give so few shits about our well-being that we're practically drowning in their high fructose corn syrup bukkake. And on top of that, everyone knows that Americans are the most disgustingly obese people to ever exist in the history of the world, with skyrocketing rates of heart disease and diabetes. So how can watching what we eat have any negative effects?

The Terrible Truth:

Obviously watching what you eat is good, but counting calories and keeping an eye on the scale can get your brain's neurons all tangled up. Dieting can "problematize" a part of your brain, which is awesome because a) "problematize" is a word that we can all use in casual conversation now and b) it helps explain why fat is incurable. Changing your body size means being hungry forever, and since your stomach is never going to stop sending teams of insurgent revolutionaries to try to forcibly oust the oppressive regime of your brain, your brain is going to have to constantly divert resources to its Royal Guard so they can keep committing war crimes against the restless populace.

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Your body is Game of Thrones, and "dinner is coming."

2

Learning New Things You Disagree With Makes You Disagree Harder

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Because of the fucking Internet, it's easier than ever to live in a tiny little bubble of masturbation circle jerkery, which leads to such embarrassing mistakes as saying "I think Ayn Rand made a good point" or "Nikolai Gogol was very influential in literary realism," but instead of pronouncing it "go-guhl" you repeatedly pronounce it "g'ghoul" loudly in a coffee shop like a fucking moron and make it impossible for me to concentrate on writing my dumb Internet jokes.

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Just kidding. No one actually gets writing done in a coffee shop.

The Terrible Truth:

It's not just the Internet and 24-hour news networks that are conspiring to keep you uninformed (spoilers for further down this page!), it's your brain. Key parts of our ability to process and synthesize new information shut down whenever we're confronted with something we disagree with. In fact, if we are bludgeoned (or bludgeon ourselves, as intellectual masochists are wont to do) with information that contradicts our inane beliefs, we can actually end up making ourselves cling even more desperately to our erroneous assumptions -- even if they've been proved false. In fact, especially if they've been proved false.

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I'm just going to leave this here.

1

Watching the News Makes Us Uninformed

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Nothing will earn you the rightful dismissal of your peers faster than casually saying that you "don't follow politics" or "don't really keep up with the news." Especially if you live in the United States, or another First World country, your every little decision has ramifications that stretch around the globe. Failing to pay attention to what's happening in the world isn't just ignorant, it's downright irresponsible. Just have MSNBC playing in the background while you play Dota 2, for fuck's sake.

The Terrible Truth:

OK, so watching all news isn't bad for you -- it's pretty much just the 24-hour networks. Remember that headline that was making the rounds a while back about how Fox News was making you dumber? They only spun it that way because the real headline -- "Journalism in the United States Is Less Reliable Than Inspector Gadget's Tragically Glitchy and Mangled Body" -- wasn't quite as clickable.

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"Wowsers" is just another way of saying "What in the name of Christ am I?"

Yes, people who watch Fox News were "significantly more likely" to believe things that aren't true, but pretty much only in a way that favored the American right. People who watched MSNBC, NPR, and PBS believed, for example, that it had been proved that the Chamber of Commerce was laundering money (it was just accused), while people who watched network TV broadcast daily were more likely to believe that Obama signed the bank bailout (it was Bush).

But that's an old story from 2010. What about the 2012 study saying Fox makes you stupid? Well, although NPR did better that time, CNN, Fox, and MSNBC were still the least informative news sources. Fox is still the worst by a reasonably large margin (obviously), but when all three major news outlets in the country suck, picking on one of them and acting like they're the only problem is actually the exact goddamn core of that very problem. Even contemplating that idea has dropped my IQ into "Hey, look, a quarter!" territory.

J.F. Sargent is an anti-dumbass activist, vehemently lobbying against self-improvement. He has a Twitter, a Tumblr, and a Facebook.

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