18 min to read

At the Plateau of Meaning

🕰️ The Exhaustion of Doing and the Cost of Being

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Thinking was the last frontier we had. Now, we’ve delegated that to AI.

I don’t have a problem with thinking. In fact, I think way too much. I suffer from overthinking. I use AI, and I used AI for this very article to revise and bring clarity to my thoughts. If anything, having this tool makes me find myself word-dumping more.

I balk at those who evangelically denounce AI. Aside from the environmental consequences—which are likely way beyond our individual influence, as it is the larger corporations that wield the greatest environmental effects—it is a great tool. There are so many things that those very same detractors abstractly outsource and delegate every single day that they fail to consider like dishwashers, automated climate control systems, and the mass agricultural supply chains that source their food. The only point on which I agree with those people, assuming they even recognize this point themselves, is on the inherent danger of outsourcing critical thinking. Yes, it can be sycophantic. But with responsible use, it democratizes capability, effectively bridging the gap of my own technical shortcomings. For example, I possess no formal background in coding, save for using R in my research. Yet, this very website—the digital architecture where you are reading these words right now—began as a template written by a highly talented coder, but it was ultimately brought to life because I leveraged AI to adapt it to my specific needs.

Sure, I could learn to code myself, but that takes time (and interest). Completing tasks and challenging myself are two entirely different things. The intent is what matters, and I am honest with myself. I will delegate to AI to help with tasks, but if I want to intentionally challenge myself with something I deeply value or find purpose in, then I will do that myself. To continue with this honesty, here is the exact prompt I used with Gemini to help process the text you are about to read:

“based on the articles from my website katalepsara.com as context for my writing style/content, i want you to help me organize my rough draft for a new article. please do not shorten or eliminate redundancy as i want to really honor my longform sobering writing style. please maintain my tone and diction. try to make the content flow better in terms of narrative direction to make the messages stronger and more cohesive: [my messy rough draft here]”

Despite those who say you can endlessly keep learning new things, and that the brain has no limit to its capacity to learn, I presume I’m now at the exact intersection where high-level cognitive demands collide with human biological limits—all wrapped in my own deep, philosophical search for agency along the way.

The Fog of Saturation

After reading, digesting, then processing like forty books about graduate school in my last post, I wanted to write this article next. Am I having cognitive issues at 25? I am trying to label this unknown feeling. Perhaps it comes with age and knowledge. Maybe it’s new. I don’t know. But bringing it to words, labeling it, and reading about it is a good step in the right direction.

Lately, I’ve had no compelling motivation or drive. Just inactive wallowing. My problem is that I just cannot seem to learn as effectively as I used to. Things just no longer ‘stick.’ There could be a myriad confluence of things, but here I am trying to address haphazardly the things that come to mind. I wrote an incredibly rewarding and personally fulfilling book about modern practical stoicism, yet I still have this ennui. I can put to words how proud I am of the book, but I cannot feel those words, bodily-wise. There is a disconnect between external action and internal processing. I am hoping to write this essay to lay things out and process what has been consumed, as is the theme for my website.

For someone in my position, pursuing a PhD, my experience is not unusual among graduate students. There are logical, testable explanations. My concern is why cognition feels worse now, and what could be causing it. I experience persistent “brain fog,” a difficulty retaining information compared to my high school and undergrad years, and a significant afternoon energy and cognitive crash around 1 PM. I sleep from roughly 10 PM to 5:45 AM, getting about 7.5 hours. I dream frequently, I have rare days where I feel much clearer, and though I take no unintentional naps, I feel tired enough to take one. My fiancée reports loud, chronic snoring, and my weight has intentionally increased from 160 to 210 pounds as part of bulking and training muscular hypertrophy.

These are the physical realities. Snoring alone doesn’t diagnose sleep apnea, but it indicates airway narrowing, which disrupts sleep. Sleep disruption impairs memory consolidation, attention, processing speed, and mental endurance. It is one of the most common reversible causes of brain fog in young adults. If it’s not snoring, then it could also be the PhD-level cognitive load. Graduate work demands deeper conceptual processing, independent thinking, and less structured reinforcement. This often makes learning feel harder compared to undergrad. Stress impairs attention, working memory, and motivation. Furthermore, inconsistent midday eating and the potential for Vitamin D deficiency only compound the fatigue and reduced focus.

What I am certain of is that this is a symptom of some other problems, not a condition in itself. There is no strong evidence of irreversible decline, and many people improve significantly once underlying factors are addressed. At age 25, the brain is at peak biological function. My pattern of good days versus foggy days suggests reversible factors, not permanent loss.

The hardest truth—and the most relieving one—is that what I lost was not capacity. I lost automaticity. Automaticity comes from repetition, stable environments, and familiar abstraction layers. I am now operating near the frontier of my understanding. I am no longer learning settled facts or filling in known outlines; I am integrating incomplete models, reconciling contradictions, operating with uncertainty, and building conceptual machinery. That kind of learning feels fragile. It does not feel fluent. It does not feel “sticky” at first. But it is deeper. Graduate-level material resists compression, so the brain keeps saying, “I don’t know how to store this yet.” That is not decline. That is appropriate resistance. The brain stops handing me coherence for free since the appropriate schemas are not formed yet.

The Decorporealized Cosmopolis

To understand the internal fog, we must look at the external weather. We are inundated with soulless slop. I’m sure it’s always existed, but it was not manufactured and amplified at the rate it is now. Inputs are maxed out. That explains the stereotypical Gen Z stare; the seemingly absent-minded processing and buffering because there is just so much going on to process. We are too self-aware and have too much self-talk narrative. There is so much information; an information overload that occupies and clogs our mental bandwidth.

In many ways, we have it so easy. We are inundated with not only information, but by sustenance, nourishment, and comfort. We no longer have challenges like the ones that used to threaten our health. When I visited Scotland with my fiancée, we visited Miss Toward’s tenement and learned about the housing conditions in Glasgow during the 19th and early 20th centuries. It led me to be much more appreciative of what I have. We really don’t get an exposure to how things were to get a truly fonder appreciation of how things are. Because we have it easy, many people create unnecessary challenges and chaos in their otherwise peacefully easy lives. That’s the emptiness, or void, or aimlessness and lack of purpose I feel afflicted by: a point in which so much security has been attained.

Simultaneously, we face the overstimulation of learning too many things at once. It feels like what Adam Grant called “languishing”—the opposite of flourishing—because of the lack of immersion in any one thing continuously. The goal of the media is to mediate your perception of reality, maximizing impact by using attention as the currency. But through all of it, it is decorporealizing. Decorporealization is making it so we are not listening or being receptive to our bodies—like ignoring thirst and not drinking water, or laying in sloth and not exercising. Essentially, we remain unawareingly shackled in self-destructive rabbit holes.

The navigation of modern life is a constant vying for attention. Too many inputs in working memory creates what feels like “fog,” but it’s often excessively unrealistic and unsustainable saturation. The internet is death for creative thought, and original ideas require mental space, not constant input. Overwhelming stress limits your ability to think, to learn, and to solve difficult problems. It is a warning sign.

In fact, we face a neurobiological catch-22 with chronic stress. With mislabeled constant/chronic acute stressors, stress shifts us to habits. Stress diminishes prefrontal function and elevates striatal DLS function, biasing behavior toward habit formation. Stress shifts from thinking to habit. The brain is stuck in threat mode. Chronic anxiety and pressure keep the nervous system in a sympathetic fight-or-flight state. In that state, the prefrontal cortex is downregulated, the hippocampus works poorly, word retrieval slows, and confusion and fog appear. This is adaptive biology, not damage. The brain is prioritizing survival over learning. Depression flattens signal strength, reduces dopamine so nothing feels salient, and dampens emotional tagging so memories don’t consolidate. Information enters, but it doesn’t get marked as important.

There are many social conditions of the world that are beyond our control. With respect to stoicism, why should we care about them? Perhaps I should just concretely dismiss all that is beyond my control, socially, economically, and politically. We are surrounded by news media that is more divisive than ever. The “us vs. them,” ingroup vs. outgroup narrative is stoked and incited right in our own neighborhoods against our own friends and neighbors. “Everyone’s quick to blame the alien” is a famous quote attributed to Aeschylus. This highlights the tendency to scapegoat foreigners or outsiders for problems. And for what gain? What benefit? This creates imaginary conflicts and strife that separate us more than ever. People don’t feel connected anymore because of this.

I feel grief at this widespread spiritual impoverishment. It is a gross overgeneralization on my part, but I feel as though there is no progress in the things that really matter, like art, music, faith, and education. There are too many intrinsically human facets being neglected. When we remove tradition, we are now seeing the problems that were once resolved by those unquestionable traditions. We’ve abandoned the traditions that held meaning in place, but we haven’t replaced them with anything equally binding or nourishing.

Diagnosing the Plateau

I have already collected enough guiding meta-concepts, and at this point, I’m just mentally bloating and plateauing. I just don’t have the motivation to read or pursue more knowledge because it becomes essentially meaningless. I think the absurdists hold credence that much of life’s pursuits are meaningless, feeble, and futile. I’ve mastered enough frameworks to explain most things, but not enough to feel grounded. More information just inflates the mental balloon. What once fueled my insatiably innate curiosity now feels like empty, meaningless calories. Meaning now feels thin, and reading more seems pointless because it doesn’t solve the underlying sense of this driftlessness.

But it is crucial to state what I am not struggling with:

Ruling these out matters, because many people misdiagnose their plateau as one of these. Mine is not.

To name a problem is to tame it. Psychiatrists describe the “Rumpelstiltskin effect”: the surprising power of simply receiving a diagnosis. Diagnosing one’s suffering makes it feel more meaningful and thus manageable, even if the diagnosis is wrong. But by labeling, I think you lose the mystique of true authentic experience, because now you have to identify it rather than inexplicably and ineffably experience it. In fact, I think this overanalytic lens has progressively rendered out the quality of my own life. Although, identifying the seasonings makes the gastronomic experience more palatable. It’s just that those moments of life where we are left without words and struck with awe are equally as powerful as having the lexical experience to label it.

My plateau is a holding pattern created when inner clarity outpaces outer capacity. It is composed of cognitive saturation (where new ideas add diminishing returns and knowledge no longer transforms you), moral seriousness (where you refuse naïve savior fantasies), resource scarcity (lacking time autonomy and financial margin), and integrity preservation (vigilance against corrupted incentives).

The plateau is not a state of confusion, but of saturation—where meaning is known, but embodiment is stalled. My exhaustion is not a lack of clarity. It is clarity without leverage.

I’m not confused; I’m exhausted. Not because I lack direction, but because the gap between my capacity for meaning and my current ability to enact it feels wide. I know what kind of life I need to live to feel real—neither performative nor distracting—but the world’s selfish scaffolding and my mental bandwidth haven’t fully caught up yet. And in the meantime, accumulation feels hollow, “beingness” feels constrained, and my sense of significance feels suspended between the cosmic indifference of the universe and the practical need to affect the social world.

Wealth as Scaffolding

At the deepest level, my writing is organized around one core tension: I already know how I want to live, but I do not yet have the material, temporal, and energetic conditions to live that way without distortion. Everything else radiates from this. This is not a crisis of meaning. It is a crisis of implementation under constraint.

We live in a culture of doing, not being, and we mistake activity for aliveness. We accumulate credentials, achievements, metrics, and distractions to avoid confronting finitude and death. But meaning begins where doing ends. To be human is not to perform for the world, but to live inwardly with integrity, outwardly with justice, and daily with the knowledge that our time is decreasing. Being is truthful because death anchors it. Doing is often distraction because we fear looking directly at that truth. Yet we must do, because we live in a cosmopolis. What injures the bee injures the hive. That’s not nihilism; that’s tragic responsibility.

I know how I want to live: to maximize being a human being—not a human doing—while still acting in ways that make the world better. But being requires time, space, health, community, and attention—and those are not free.

Here is the part that many moralists avoid: meaning requires resources. Not luxury. Not opulence. But margin, autonomy, time—security that doesn’t steal one’s hours in exchange for survival. Wealth is not my goal. Wealth is the scaffolding I need to build what is my goal: to be human, to help others become more themselves, and to devote my life to the higher work of meaning, embodiment, and contribution.

I reject extractive wealth: rent-seeking, toll-taking, cash-grabs, power-through-access-control. I want to create wealth, not take it—to enlarge the world, not siphon from it. Value should be generated, not siphoned. Wealth should be earned by enlarging reality, not taxing access. That is why I pursue research. That is why I seek competence. That is why I am willing to be an employee for now—not because I believe employment is noble, but because I need a phase of apprenticeship before sovereignty. I want wealth so I can buy back my time, so I can stop selling my life by the hour, so I can devote my finite years to what I already know matters.

My real fear is not being an NPC sheep subject to the winds of societal forces. My fear is living reactively rather than deliberately. If I rush the next phase, I could lose my interior clarity before I have the means to protect it. I am afraid of being absorbed by corrupted systems, mistaking motion for progress, trading depth for urgency, burning finite life on low-yield battles, and becoming what I oppose. Power precedes sustainable goodness. Without money, time, and autonomy, virtue becomes brittle. Poverty distorts being into survival.

Systems of Survival and the Path Forward

It is up to us to create better conditions to support our endeavors. It’s easy to focus on fixing external circumstances with the implicit expectation that this will make us happy, but it doesn’t matter what you achieve if you’re not happy with yourself. However, we must learn to manage. We must build up a range of skills to adapt and apply quickly when symptoms arise.

For myself, I have already created my ‘PhD Research Repository’ where it is essentially a Git-tracked repository. I want something to document my thought process from beginning to end, to show the messy imperfect journey. This is a lab notebook for the mind. I am hoping it will clear up the mental bandwidth to invite serendipity and creative engagement, serving as a cognitive offloading system. I need to implement time blocks and remain faithfully obedient to them, so I don’t have to fret about attentional residue.

You cannot avoid making decisions. The only decision that is always wrong is to make no decision at all. I must rebuild cognitive safety. My brain needs daily periods where nothing is at stake, separating learning from self-evaluation. I must slow down to speed up, using fewer topics per day with shorter sessions, and restore bodily anchors like sleep, regular meals, and movement to regulate cortisol and restore hippocampal function.

I want to help others find meaning, but not everyone is reachable right now. People are shaped by circumstances, exhaustion can precede awakening, and incentives can deform values. I refuse martyrdom to futility. Not because I do not care, but because I care enough to stay alive to my purpose. Our energy is finite and morally precious. Selectivity is not cruelty; it is stewardship for protecting your purpose. I will remain open, adjacent, and welcoming, but I will not drown myself trying to rescue people who are not ready.

The plateau is not the end. It is the ledge before ascent. I have not lost belief, meaning, or duty. I am not tired of being human; I am tired of not yet having the power to live as fully human as I know how. So the next phase is not spiritual, intellectual, or philosophical. It is material. I will build enough to be able to give what I must without losing myself to the forces that profit from distraction.

Meaning without means is poetry, and means without meaning is misery, but meaning with means can become a life worth living.

I know what I want now: To build a life where I am free to be human, and free to help others become human too—not through extraction, but creation; not through preaching, but presence; not through outcomes, but embodiment.

I know how to live meaningfully, and now I am patiently acquiring the power to do so without compromise.

Everything else is noise.

This is the work.

This is the plateau of meaning.