Days in the Life of Mo

Sometimes, I stare at my screen and swear I can hear my brain humming like a server under load.
You know the sound… that high-pitched buzz that says, “You’ve opened too many tabs in your head, and something’s about to crash.”

It’s not burnout, exactly. It’s not even stress. It’s that weird in-between state where your brain is trying to compile life, but the dependencies won’t install.

You’re fine… until you’re not.
You remember everything, until you forget the one thing you actually needed to do.
You’re processing, buffering, pretending to multitask; until your mind throws an internal OutOfMemoryException.

The Cache Problem

We treat our brains like codebases that never need refactoring. Just keep adding; more meetings, more tabs, more ideas, more side projects, more content, more “just one more thing.”
And we convince ourselves it’s fine. Because devs are built for multitasking, right?

Except we’re not.

In fact, studies show that what we call “multitasking” is just rapid context-switching, and it actually reduces productivity by up to 40%. Every time we jump from one thing to another, our brain loses milliseconds reloading the mental context, and that adds up.

Imagine you’re coding, and you keep switching branches mid-commit. Eventually, something breaks, and you’re left staring at the console, whispering,

“What… what did I do?”

That’s us.
That’s life right now.
A society running a thousand background processes on human hardware that was never meant to handle it.

Temporary Files of the Mind

I started noticing my mental cache filling up in strange ways.
I’d sit down to fix a small UI bug, and ten minutes later, I’d be cleaning my entire desktop. Then, I’d remember an email. Then, a bill. Then, I’d start a new side project because, clearly, my brain thought “distraction is therapy.”

But here’s the thing, we’re not lazy. We’re overloaded.

According to Dr. Daniel Levitin, a cognitive neuroscientist and author of The Organized Mind, our brains can only consciously hold about four things at once. Four. That’s less than the number of Chrome tabs I open before breakfast.

So what happens when we force more? The system compensates; by offloading thoughts into anxiety, fatigue, and that quiet dread that hums under your playlists.

Clearing the Cache (Kind Of)

When I hit my mental limit, I do what any developer would: I debug.

Step one — close background tasks.
Mute notifications. Stop checking Microsoft Teams “just in case.” The world will survive without you replying “got it” within 30 seconds.

Step two — dump memory.
Write things down. Not in a fancy app. In a notebook. Studies from Princeton and UCLA found that handwriting engages deeper cognitive processing than typing. Translation: writing helps you offload the clutter properly.

Step three — restart the system.
Sleep. Rest. Not the kind where you’re doom-scrolling “to relax.” I mean actual rest — the kind that feels like defragmenting your soul.

And most importantly:
Step four — accept lag.
You’re human. You will forget things. You will have days where your brain refuses to load anything useful.
That’s not failure — it’s maintenance.

Maybe We’re Just Overclocked Humans

Sometimes I think about how we’ve built entire systems to optimize machines; garbage collectors, caches, CPU throttling… but rarely apply the same kindness to ourselves.

What if we did?
What if instead of punishing ourselves for “lagging,” we treated it like a signal?

Maybe the real debug process is learning when to stop optimizing.
Because your brain isn’t slow.
It’s just full.
And sometimes, the kindest thing you can do for it is hit “Clear Cache,” close your eyes, and remember — not everything needs to run in the background.

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If your brain’s throwing too many 404s lately, stick around. I write about tech, life, and all the bugs in between; from one overclocked human to another.