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Life may be less physically demanding today, but our cognitive load is constantly increasing.

Keeping up with seemingly endless demands on our time, attention, and energy is making us exhausted.

To maintain our own mental well-being, we have to manage the impact of sludge on our lives.

In our technologically driven world, it is easy to lose track of how quickly things have changed in the past 100 years. By the 1920s, indoor plumbing, electricity, cars, and movies were becoming accessible to average Americans, but daily life was different. People often had physically demanding jobs, mortality rates were high due to the lack of medical knowledge, and information transfer options were limited. It is actually difficult now to think about living in a world without telephones, the internet, commercial airline travel, high-tech medicine, etc.

The Ever-Expanding Sludge of Daily Life

In 2026, we find ourselves literally living in a new world. Our homes offer multiple labor-saving devices, including smart temperature controls and our phones that double as entertainment centers, and we are awash in information. As a result, our lives are easier in many ways, but the mental load we carry is becoming overwhelming. When I survey students on my campus, they report that they spend less than an hour a day by themselves without any external or electronic input. Essentially, we are being pecked to death or at least exhausted by the never-ending demands on our attention, our time, and our energy. On top of that, the media swirl around us makes it seem like everyone else is doing things better, easier, or more successfully than we are. Is it any wonder that rates of anxiety and depression are on the rise? Even those of us who don’t technically meet the official criteria for those disorders find ourselves struggling to get enough sleep, feeling frustrated by the volume of daily encounters we have with other stressed people, recalcitrant electronic devices, and the ever-expanding sludge of daily life.

When I got my first summer job as a teenager in the 1970s, I got a paper paycheck every two weeks. I would take it to the bank, during banking hours (9-5), deposit it, and leave with some cash and a receipt. I recently took some checks to the drive-through ATM on a weekend. After going through multiple screens to log in, I fed the checks into the machine, which said it couldn’t read them (they were computer-printed checks). I ended up going to a different bank later in the week, where the checks were processed on the first pass. Economist Cass Sunstein has written a whole book on these sorts of encounters, which he refers to as "sludge" (also the title of the book). In it, he argues that we are being strangled by the creep of bureaucracy, which can, in turn, make us angry and apathetic. Consider the last time that you gave up on a task because you couldn’t get your password to work, couldn’t find an email or piece of paper in the piles around you, or just couldn’t figure out who to even ask for help?

While some of this sludge is an inadvertent byproduct of our computer-driven, litigious world, some of it is also built in for more nefarious reasons. Cable companies don’t want to make it easier to cancel your account, ad agents don’t want us to unsubscribe from their sites, and insurance companies don’t want us to contest their bills. But the costs of sludge aren’t simply financial. Psychologically, it generates a sense of frustration and futility. Humans have survived by being good at solving problems and controlling the environment around us. When we can’t do that, we may develop a condition psychologists call "learned helplessness." Basically, we stop trying to manage situations and even refrain from taking action on things that could improve the situation. This plays into our natural tendency to avoid things that cause us discomfort or anxiety, which can be adaptive. Taking your hand off a hot stove is life-saving, but avoiding dentist appointments, studying for tests, or filing your taxes all lead to other problems.

Dealing With Modern Life on Our Own Terms

So where do we go from here? Unfortunately, there isn’t an easy answer. As tempting as it is to say that we are going to disconnect from the internet and live off the grid, most of can’t do that, and don’t really want to. But maybe we can start figuring out how to deal with modern life more on our own terms. This requires self-reflection, emotional regulation, and behavior modification.

The first step is to conduct a time/energy audit. What are the things you are most frustrated about in your daily life? Clutter, keeping up with passwords, email, dealing with traffic, negative news media? It can be enlightening to keep track of how you are spending your time for a few days or a week, and to rate the things you are doing on how productive they feel, how enjoyable they are, how competent you feel at doing them, and how much time, energy, or concentration they take. It is important to note how much emotional energy you are using either to complete or avoid the tasks, and how they make you feel. Spending a productive day getting things done that feel important to you is quite different than spending hours doing things that seem trivial or useless.

Then consider how you could make changes in your daily routine to shift the balance. If the clutter in your house is a constant drain on your time and energy, how could you corral it? Do you need to purge things? Or just to organize them? The goal is not to make your house magazine-worthy; it is to make it functional. Nicely piled laundry looks nice, but your kids can probably find clothes to wear in an unfolded basket of their clothes if they don’t want to fold things themselves. Gathering all of your financial paperwork in one place, finding a password organizing system that works for you, limiting your doom scrolling, and tackling tasks in smaller, less overwhelming pieces can all work. But this is a process, not an end state, and each of us needs to find our own way. Even just setting aside some time to practice mindfulness, read, or spend time in your garden can help you regain the energy you need to face the sludge you need to tackle next.

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https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/essays/roaring-twenties

https://news.gallup.com/poll/694199/u.s.-depression-rate-remains-histor…

https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/mrcbg/programs/growthpolicy/sludge-…

Maier, S. F., & Seligman, M. E. (1976). Learned helplessness: Theory and evidence. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 105(1), 3–46. https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-3445.105.1.3

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