The Body Has a Cure for Parasites. The Mind Has None.
Watch an animal weakened by a parasite and you see something almost unbearable to look at — a creature slowly drained of the energy it needs to live, with very little agency to stop what’s happening to it. If it’s lucky, something else intervenes. A companion picks the parasites off. A predator that specialises in exactly this problem does the work the animal can’t do for itself. Without that intervention, the drain just continues, quietly, until there’s nothing left to drain.
We’ve largely solved this problem for the body. Science and medicine protect us from what would once have slowly killed us from the inside — antibiotics, antiparasitics, immune systems we understand well enough to support when they fail. A parasite in the body today is a problem with a name, a treatment, and usually an end date. We’re not as helpless as that animal.
The mind is a different story. We have no equivalent defence for what feeds on it, and we’re so used to giving up the fight that most of us haven’t even named what’s feeding. A news cycle built to keep you afraid enough to stay. A feed engineered to keep you comparing. A chase for status because someone told you being on top was the point. None of it announces itself as a parasite. All of it behaves like one — attaching quietly, drawing down vital energy, and leaving you slightly more depleted than before you opened the app or read the headline.
This is slower and harder to see than a physical parasite, which is exactly what makes it more dangerous. A physical one eventually produces symptoms you can’t ignore — you feel it, you look for the cause, you get it treated. A mental one rarely announces itself the same way. It just steadily narrows what you have left for the things that actually matter — the work in front of you, the people who need your attention, the decisions only you can make clearly — and you adjust to the smaller amount without registering the loss. You don’t wake up one day and think “I’ve been drained.” You just notice, eventually, that you’re running on less than you used to.
None of this requires a villain. No one built these things specifically to weaken you, not the way a parasite is shaped by nature to feed. The news doesn’t hate you. The feed doesn’t know your name. But the effect holds regardless of intent — energy leaves, and it doesn’t ask permission first.
The animal usually needs outside help — a companion, a predator, something external doing the work it can’t do alone. You don’t have that waiting for you by design. There’s no companion whose job is to pick these particular parasites off your mind while you go about your day. The noticing has to be yours, because nothing external is coming to do it unasked.
So the question isn’t whether something is feeding on your attention and energy right now — it almost certainly is, in some form, today. The question is whether you’ve actually acknowledged that, or you’re still telling yourself it’s just the news, just checking in, just staying competitive — and if you have acknowledged it, what you’re actually going to do about it.
