Escaping zombie flow — Jason Preston

A few years ago, my calendar started to feel haunted.

Every open block was a magnet for “productive” drift: one more feed, one more article, one more smart person’s take. I’d sit down to work on something hard and somehow end up 40 minutes deep into Substack, Bloomberg, Discord, or Slack — no single thing was terrible, but the whole pattern left me wired, scattered, and oddly empty. It felt like flow, but nothing important was actually moving.

Derek Thompson has a name for this: zombie flow. It’s the state where your attention is fully occupied but not truly engaged. Your brain is busy, but not alive. The modern internet is exquisitely optimized to keep you there: infinite scroll, algorithmic feeds, notification trails that stitch one micro-task to the next. You never quite choose to be in zombie flow; you just never quite choose to leave it.

The distinction matters, especially if you’re in the business of thinking for a living.

Real flow is what happens when you pick one hard, meaningful thing and let the rest of the world recede. It has stakes: a decision, a story, a product, a conversation. It’s uncomfortable at the edges, because you bump into your own ignorance. Zombie flow, by contrast, feels smoother. The systems around you are constantly offering the next small, solvable unit of stimulation. There’s always another post, another hot take, another chart.

What’s made this worse in the last 18 months is AI.

On the reading side, it’s suddenly trivial to summarize anything. You can point a model at a 3,000-word essay and get a tidy set of bullets in a few seconds. That’s powerful — but it’s also a perfect zombie-flow surface. It lets you feel like you’ve consumed a piece without ever wrestling with the argument.

GeekWire ran a smart piece this week on how to read with AI instead of letting AI do your reading for you. The key move is subtle: use the model as a coach, not a shortcut. Ask it to help you frame questions before you read, or to stress-test your own understanding afterwards. Don’t start by asking “summarize this”; start by asking “what should I look for if I care about X?” and then go read the thing yourself.

The same logic applies to the rest of your inputs. If you let the feeds drive, you’ll get zombie flow by default. If you want real flow, you have to put a little friction in front of the drift.

Here are a few practical tweaks I’ve been playing with:

Schedule reading windows, not reading tabs. Instead of leaving 15 articles open “for later,” block 30 minutes and decide in advance which two matter for your current questions. Close everything else.
Turn AI into a sparring partner. After you read something important, ask the model: “Here’s how I’d summarize the argument in three sentences. What am I missing or oversimplifying?” That keeps you in the driver’s seat.
Batch the ambient feeds. Thompson’s other essay this week, on the “Substack-ification” of American religion, is a reminder that we’ve turned identity and meaning into endless micro-updates. It’s fine to dip into those streams — but do it once or twice a day, not in 90-second hits between tasks.

None of this is about purity. I’m not going to pretend I don’t enjoy a good doomscroll. The point is to be honest about what these patterns do over time. If most of your day is spent in zombie flow, you’ll end it feeling busy and behind, with nothing you’re truly proud of to point at.

The upside of the current moment is that the same tools that enable zombie flow can also help you escape it. AI can compress the low-value parts of the information firehose so you can spend more time on the few ideas that actually deserve deep attention. But that only works if you’re willing to make a few small, deliberate choices about how you read, what you read, and when you let yourself drift.

The next time you feel yourself sliding into that pleasant, numbing scroll, try this: pick one piece from your queue that might actually change your mind about something, and give it your full attention for fifteen minutes. No summaries. No feeds. Just you, the argument, and a notebook.

If that feels harder than it should, you’ve just met the zombie. Now you know what you’re fighting.