At school I luxuriated in not trying very hard and doing alright anyway. Teachers called me “gifted” – a term that was, incredibly, written into education regulations at the time. They also called me lazy, insisting I had untapped potential if I would only apply myself.

Now I’m thirty going on thirty-one, almost a decade into a career with which I have a fraught relationship. I want change, and to get it I need to grow. Materially, I need to learn things: languages, skills. This year has been about discovering how much learning potential I’ve lost since those school days. What would have snapped into place effortlessly as a kid now refuses to take hold. My work ethic has improved a hundredfold, but my ability to learn and think has degraded even more.

So what – blame a decade of the internet, short-form video, AI? Maybe. But I suppose I’m finally accepting there’s a reason we go to school as children. If I were exercising more, I might find I couldn’t build muscle like a twenty-year-old. This happens to everyone. I just thought the mental decline started later.

Perhaps things will change once I ditch this career that has, as I keep saying, damaged my head somehow. My brain has grown in the wrong directions, like those watermelons forced into cube shapes.

Staging a series of mental tests in language and skill acquisition just before my thirty-first birthday was probably unwise. The ticking clock metaphor writes itself.

---

You should stay away from your potential. I mean, that is something you should leave absolutely alone! You’ll mess it up! It’s potential, leave it! And anyway, it’s like your bank balance, you know – you always have much less than you think. Leave it as the locked door within yourself and then at least, in your mind, the interior will always be palatial. Wonderful gleaming marble floors, brocaded drapes. Mullioned windows, covered in mullions, whatever they are. Flamingos serving drinks. Pianos shooting out canapés into the mouths of elegant men and women who are exchanging witticisms… “Oh yes, this reminds me of the time I was in BudaPESHT with Binky… We were trying to steal a goose from the casino, muahahaha…” But it won’t be like that. You don’t want to find out that the most you could possibly achieve, if you gave it your all, if you harvested every screed of energy within you, and devoted yourself to improving yourself, that all you would get to would be maybe eating less cheesy snacks.

— Dylan Moran, Monster