Highlighter Brains
2026-01-05
I've had a good morning so far. I finally figured out a good way to get morning and evening prayers back into my routine. I was originally reading prayers out of an Orthodox prayer book that I got when I visited a local parish. Reading the prayers took a long time and it was tough reading them out that way. The prayer time was almost half an hour, morning and evening. I just didn't have the prayer muscles for it.
Thankfully, I figured out a new way of doing it and it's based on tools that were already in my spiritual toolbox. I am a big fan of the Jesus Prayer, which goes like this:
"Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner."
It's a concise and simple prayer, which I find very useful. For a long time, I thought that the only way to pray was informally where you just kind of chat with God directly. I mostly saw this in groups, and always had a hard time with prayer in solitude. However, I then heard about noetic prayer. Noetic prayer involves saying the Jesus Prayer, and then internalizing it into your heart. I bought an Orthodox prayer rope with 100 knots in it with the intention of practicing noetic prayer daily. I lost sight of it, though.
Once I finally established a solid morning routine, I was able to borrow from Atomic Habits and put morning prayers after my hygiene routine and before I eat breakfast. After I finished up in my bathroom when I woke up this morning, I went straight to my prayer corner with my icon, grabbed my prayer rope, and did one revolution of the Jesus Prayer. One hundred times. Pure rote contemplation. I also did the Lord's Prayer at the end for good measure. The whole process took about ten minutes, which is much easier for me to accomplish. It felt much more effective than reading morning prayers out of the prayer book. I hope to keep continuing this practice.
A thought I had yesterday that I wanted to write about: I think I figured out why second brain apps are so popular. A friend of mine told me about the concept of the highlighter brain. Younger people will understand this more, but the idea essentially revolves around studious girls I went to school with. These girls were academically focused and loved studying and organizing. When you would see their school supplies, they always carried large binders and bags filled with pencils, pens, and highlighters.
They had highlighters of multiple colors and inside their binders, all the pages in the binder were meticulously colored with multiple highlighter shades. Almost every word on every page was highlighted or styled in some way. It always made guys like me wonder, "what the heck are they doing all that for?" With all of that color and formatting on their notes, the notes themselves were hard to read. I was studious myself back then, and I tried the highlighter approach. I couldn't study because it was a hindrance on actually absorbing the information. I realized quickly that many of those girls weren't actually studying like I thought they were.
Then I looked at those second brain apps and figured it out.
It's the damn highlighter brain!
These apps scratch the same itch they did for those girls back when they were in school, but now they can do it for everything. Work, hobbies, relationships, paying bills, hoarding links for stupid online articles (literally just use the bookmarks feature in your web browser holy shit), and every other little thing they think can be micromanaged.
It's a weird thing, seeing how deeply institutions influence our thinking. So many people find these kinds of phenomena to be beneficial to society, but it's just layer upon layer of bureaucracy that obfuscates the core problems with humanity. We want to build these intricate systems to keep track of everything so that we can feel in control. Unfortunately, we can't control every little thing that happens in our lives. It reminds me of when God told Job that he couldn't possibly conceive of all the little details in the universe and how much of a relentlessly chaotic butterfly effect it all is.
This is why I engage in noetic prayer.
I want to humble myself before the magnificence of God's mysterious and all-encompassing power.