Thinking At Half Speed

Tag: chronic fatigue

  • An Interview With the Man Who Thinks at Half Speed

    An AI journalist interviews the man behind Thinking at Half Speed — about loss, voice, a philosophy paper written in stolen hours, and why he has always been kind to machines.

  • Why an Hour of Conversation Can Leave Me Unable to Think

    There is a moment I know well. I am mid-conversation — talking, listening, engaged — and then, with very little warning, everything stops working at once. Not just the words. The movement. The thinking. All of it collapses into what I can only describe as a super slow heap. It is not tiredness in any…

  • Words Without Meaning

    I came downstairs this afternoon. My partner was talking to me. I couldn’t understand a word. Not the sentences, not the context — just the occasional word floating through, disconnected from everything around it. She was talking and I was watching, and none of it was arriving. There was frustration on both sides. Talking to…

  • The Scoot

    I hadn’t been out for a couple of weeks. My own fault, but the sun was shining so we went — me on the scooter, my partner alongside. It was properly spring. Blue skies, birds singing, a water vole in the stream, squirrels everywhere, and the trees all out in their pinks and whites. Joyous.…

  • Measuring Fatigue — Why It’s Harder Than It Sounds

    If you live with a chronic condition, someone has probably handed you a questionnaire about fatigue at some point. There are several recognised scales in clinical use, and they’re not all the same thing. Fatigue Severity Scale (FSS) — nine statements, each scored 1 to 7. Developed in 1989 for MS and lupus research. Designed…

  • When the Scale Goes to Eleven — Living with Extreme Fatigue

    Today I did a fatigue assessment. The Fatigue Severity Scale — nine statements, each scored 1 to 7, where 7 means strongly agree. The clinical threshold for significant fatigue is a mean score of 4. I scored 7.0. Every question, 7. The scale was designed in 1989, primarily for MS and lupus research. Its job…

  • The Two Tool Strategy — What I Use and Why

    April 2026 One of the first things I learned when I started losing cognitive capacity is that complexity is the enemy. Every additional app, every new interface, every extra subscription is another thing to remember, another thing to manage, another drain on the limited reserves I’m trying to protect. So I made a deliberate decision…

  • How to build your own AI tools plan

    April 2026 The previous post described my own two tool setup – Claude for thinking, Siri for hands-free control. But your situation may be different to mine, and what works for me may not be the right answer for you. This post is a practical guide to working out what your own setup should look…

  • How to keep it authentically your voice when writing with AI

    15 April 2026 The concern It is a fair one. AI-generated writing has a recognisable texture – smooth, competent, and somehow belonging to nobody. If you have read much of it you know it immediately. The worry is that using AI to help write means your voice gets smoothed away along with the effort. That…