Jonathan Mayhew posted a great question on his blog:
What’s your anti-whetstone?
It could be alcohol. For me, that is a way of shutting my mind down from time to time. Otherwise, the weight of intelligence could be overwhelming.It could be the ease of not having to struggle very much to have your ideas accepted. You don’t have to be sharp because you are in a mediocre environment.
Maybe it’s a social thing: you can’t be as sharp as you want because that would make it socially uncomfortable for you. It’s easier not to be the asshole and just go along with the flow.
The anti-whetstone is what dulls your mind, over the long term.
I definitely need to shut my mind down every once in a while. My anti-whetstone is my news feed. When I feel like my brain is overloading, I start reading by blog roll obsessively. For instance, back in June / July when we were moving, I’d spend up to 5-6 hours a day (cumulatively) scanning my news feed. Between the visits of the contractor, the TV people, the electricity people, the real estate agents, the movers, etc., I’d do nothing else but scroll down the news feed, feverishly and constantly.
When I was still a drinking person, alcohol was definitely my anti-whetstone.
And what is your mechanism to deal with the weight of intelligence?
Clarissa's Blog 
Alcohol is not a switch off button for me, but to the contrary it takes me deeper and deeper into my mind and allows me to sink. This is absolutely necessary for me because I have two-tiered soul and if I stay on the surface I live superficially and make bad decisions. Recently, I went camping and whilst lying in my small tent I got the impression that life is short and I should do what I had originally set out to do with my writing. I have found the topics I write about traumatising because my mind is not expansive enough to deal with them, or at least has not been until very recently. However, for a period of weeks now, I have gone really, really deeply into the trauma of my being. That has been really painful, because I reach a level of guilt and shame and complete ineptitude accompanied by a very vivid imagination and vivid dreams.
But then, even though I knew this kept happening, at the middle of the day, I would find myself once again just sitting on the surface of things and wondering what might have been, so I have to begin accessing my feeling sensations again. And then the superficial sensation is never enough and I have had to go deeper.
And after weeks of this, I suddenly pulled out my old writing, because the “spirits” had been warning me that time was short. I made some revisions from my more mature state of mind than I had had when I originally began writing. I faced down the trauma and managed to surprise myself that I had finally been able to do so with maturity. That night I slept with profound relaxation. The next days, too, the spirits had stopped tormenting me. I don’t have an urge to go deeper into myself anymore. I understand everything really very clearly.
And this is after, well…20 years? And it was only in the last couple of years that encountering my own thoughts in the deepest sense has been predictably traumatising every time. It’s nice to have finally broken through from a situation that was getting increasingly worse for me over time, being worn down, and having had too many misadventures.
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I like this term. For me I have trouble at night when I am going to bed. My brain just won’t stop thinking. So I have a portable DVD player next to my bed and a selection of about 8 movies to choose from. My kids call them my ‘comfort’ movies – I listen to one at night and eventually I turn it off. Listening to the same dialogue seems to quite my mind.
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I believe most diversions in modern life are anti-whetstone. Most social media, most magazines, and most television programs are anti-whetstone. Most jobs are anti-whetstone.
To shut off my brain, I like to look at pretty glossy magazines. I will go outside and walk or run.
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For the masses, it’s football on TV. For me, it’s political activism. Something about 21st century politics and government in America is truly mind-dulling.
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sex
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hmmm
alcohol? I enjoy the taste of some and have nothing against a light buzz but dislike being drunk and/or hangovers and could never get into tobacco or weed or anything stronger
sports? I can’t summon up enough enthusiasm, though I find curling to be oddly absorbing and can happily watch for a long time without really understanding anything of what’s going on, sumo too and occasionally tennis
some dumb online games
pleasant social interactions seem to dumb me down a bit (but since I’m an introvert they exhaust me as well so any benefit is lost).
lowbrow genre literature (especially in languages I don’t know well) but I’m not sure if that’s an anti-whetstone or whetstone….
some dumb tv shows (come dine with me is a favorite)
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Knitting for me. I use it as a vehicle of meditation. Or smalltalking with not so close friends.
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Weeding in the garden, but alas that season is over. My autumn thing is bonfires. Some people meditate in front of a candle to unwind. I’m a little too pyro for that.
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Hay guys you absolutely must follow the link Clarissa has provided to the original article and read the first two comments, by one Thomas.
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I agree. Thomas is brilliant.
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I read fiction; I’m not sure what happens when I am reading, but I am definitely somewhere else, like a kind of hypnosis. (I started reading as a toddler and blame it on that) If I have to read for content or studying, it is a considerably different sort of reading.
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The orginal question was about what dulls your mind, not what relaxes you. To chill out I recommend going to a pristine beach.
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I do feel like my blogroll makes me stupid. Of course, I’m not referring to the brilliant posts by my favorite bloggers. I have many blogs there that post endless jokes about kittens and endless silly gifs.
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Thank you for clarifying that. My blogroll (or more precisely my list of subscribed feeds) is often the high point of my day, in an anti-anti-whetstone way, but my feed list is heavily filtered for high SNR. I was mistakenly imagining an apples-to-apples comparison and recoiling in horror that one of my whetstones might be one of Clarissa’s anti-whetstones. Reading Clarissa’s blog sometimes aggravates my inferiority complex, but is usually worthwhile anyway because the “analysand” perspective is valuable and curiously hard to find.
Certainly the best that the blogosphere has to offer is far better than most of what the internet has to offer, such as the execrable medium.com.
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I should be more careful. Of course, people took this as meaning that I consider their blogs stupid. They don’t know how many really silly links I add to my blogroll on purpose so that they would dull my mind.
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Novels. I can read novels critically (not an escape), or I can read them in a spirit of identification or of suspension of disbelief. What would it be like to be __________ ?
Puzzles. Sudoku variants, crosswords, etc.
In general, brain work that is entirely “useless”, has nothing to do with my day to day work.
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