Introducing Full Mind Recomp: a new column by K Irving.
February 25, 2026
My name is K and I am a diarist. I have a blog that I blog out to a cozy audience of late teens in middle America who occasionally message me to tell me they feel “seen” or “understood” by my entries. Oftentimes these same well-mannered fawns reach out seeking life advice. This has always secretly struck me as ironic, because I live my life in such a hapless, dilapidated state that I’ve recently begun referring to a set of my own invented rules in the hopes of fixing myself completely; these are those rules and this column is for those girls.
Allow me to introduce myself. I am an abject consumer. I am the consumer they carve discourse around. I haven’t read the greats, the obscures, and certainly not en vogue staff picks. I don’t know a “film director” from “another one.” I consume the bare minimum of media prerequisites for being a thinking, posturing individual, and even those materials have usually been bird-fed to me. One thing I do know is what things feel like. Maybe it’s always that you are either someone who knows what things are or someone who knows how things feel, and that we can’t know whether this delineation is written or chosen but in either case is a fixed state. Anyway, I’m pretty much desperate to clear the illusory hurdle into knowing. I always love talking to people’s fathers at the dinner table about the things like Bush era West Wing conspiracies and how to properly locate wall studding using your fist. I always wish I had a buttery-rich interiority with which to respond. Want is one thing. Resolve is another. And as it stands, I’m no more than mere livestock standing in the withering wasteland of the human media panopticon. It is twenty-twenty-six and I’m one stall over from you in our feedpen, being gorged on Instagram Reels like an animal, and I wouldn’t know real satiety if it slapped me in the face in my pen. For all the interestingness I am desperate to convey to the world all the fucking time, most of the hours that I spend awake are actually wasted on crap with all the staying power of an unintelligible whisper in a foreign language from three rooms away. There was a certain day on which I realized I needed to fix myself. I was sitting on a park bench and my phone was dead and all there was to do was peer into the distinctly foreign life of a couple of Latvian honeymooners in distressed taper jeans. They were ecstatic about the park and it was as beautiful as a play put on just for me. How much of the same had passed me by in pursuit of my crapfeed? I began to panic.** It was time to change myself, and thus I hatched the concept — there, on the Central Park park bench (is that a tautology?) — for a Full Mind Recomp. The idea was architecturally the same as the Full Body Recomps that are being fed to me in excess in my pen; it’s basically this thing fitness influencers do where they transmute entirely into someone with inordinately high muscle mass, despite their frame staying the exact same. The idea is that — by exacting ingested materials to the half-ounce and workouts to the half-rep — they can attain a physique they’ve preconceived alongside their coaches. Their starting point is moot; no matter what, if they follow the formula, they’ll become the exact thing.
My thinking behind a Full Mind Recomp was virtually the same. It’s twenty-twenty-six, and
“fixing onesself” and “rehabilitating one’s standard for consumption” are basically synonymous. If I could do the thing I needed to do, then I could be the person I needed to. It wasn’t complicated beyond the fact of turning the clock back on my mind; any mousey in an Ugg could probably do the same.** The thought of a Full Mind Recomposition as a viable endeavor has been feeling, since I began my own, urgent — or at least heavily endangered. Probably because of something like how the literacy rate in children is half what it was five years ago. In two years, it won’t matter that we are awake at the same time, because I’ll be texting a robot companion in the style of you instead. Maybe we are keeping the last looms running in the very last mill in Lowell and it’s so futile it’s funny. But for now it matters, and it’s not over yet. And we can fix ourselves. Many people agree that the next thing in life is going to be real life. A final note before I assign my first five components of a Full Mind Recomposition: I find myself preemptively humbled by the thought that someone might venture out to try my crap in the hopes of betterment. You know when you recommend a movie to someone and they actually watch the movie and they tell you about it and you feel like crying? I imagine it like that.
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When I was twelve, I watched this movie Seeking a Friend for the End of the World with my sister in the living room. It was summer break from middle school for me and from college for her. At the end of the movie — Whatever. You’re not going to watch it probably. At the end of the movie they both die, just like the title heavily suggests. Steve Carrell makes his house all nice to die alone, and Keira makes it back to him just before the astroid hits, and they die. Just before the death scene, Steve had “made the ultimate sacrifice” (as tends to happen in these movies) to The Hollies’ “The Air That I Breathe.” It was summer break and there was nothing else to do, so after they both died my sister and I retired to our rooms for a few hours, where I read a book and she played, pretty obnoxiously, “The Air That I Breathe,” like, one thousand times in a row. After a few hours, the smell of some sort of summer break miscellanea casserole being prepared downstairs was wafting through both of our door cracks, and the song was still playing. I never forgot that my sister’s impulse upon finishing the movie was to listen to the fairly devastating scoring song sixteen times in a row. As I got older, the chasm between our ages shortened until I could see the age she had been that summer with acuity, and at some point it set in that she must have been thinking of her recent heartbreak — her first, I believe — and inlaying the completely separate tragedy of Keira and Steve on the rug. You guessed it: I basically started seeing whether this ritual held any water. Whenever my own heart got broken and I found I had no psychiatrically advisable cope, I mimicked the one my sister invented that afternoon. Eventually, I just started doing the sixteen listens whenever I needed the electric jolt of lab rat repetition to shake me back to normal. It’s one hell of a sensation. When your sixteenth listen has finished, you’ll find that the world around you is happening in the key of the song. The trucks will grate along the street to the tune of that first strum; all of your lovers and your midnight breakups will be wrapped up in the wavering way he says the sometimes, and you will assign sentiment to little things you’re seeing happen on the street where sentiment is obviously absent, which is what mindful consumption is all about: forcing feeling. It’ll be like shutting your eyes after playing Tetris for too long.
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This is for elasticity’s sake. I hate being told to meditate, because whenever things are silent for longer than a couple seconds new things just crop up to fill it, including things I didn’t even know I had in me — One Republic’s most obscure, etc — and that makes me feel defective. So I have invented a new thing that is somewhere in between a meditation and and information reception. Basically, you choose a single string of input that is so dense that you’re basically itching for respite, and through that, your mind buffers to a still. It has to be something you’ve never encountered before, and it cannot reference any other work or idea at all. I do the Hegel in the sauna after fasted cardio and it’s completely miserable. I’m sure there are other things you could choose from. I did a sea semester with a Mormon a while ago and read her old testament, and this had virtually the same effect. But I like Phenomenology because it’s like the seeded bread of philosophy. It’s like the original everything, and I’m always more than willing to be devout to the totality of play-pretend invention.
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For me I choose the Chipotle on Flushing. It feels “bettering” to associate the pleasures of food with the outward chaos of the various schoolchildren and hospital dischargees. When I first began living more slowly, I used to think all my pleasures had to be the things I engaged in privately. This is, I’m pretty sure, a condition of “the times”; whereas long ago you went to the river to read your books and write your letters, now the crapfeed has rendered “bettering” pastimes obsolete, reconfiguring the pleasure-association completely. “Dinner” is a somewhat contemporary casualty of this phenomenon. It’s been swiped by meal delivery services such as the rapidly propagating stain on social progress that is “Factor Meals,” such that the simple notion of “having supper alone next to other people alone” has basically become counter-culture. I hate Factor Meals so much. I hate Factor Meals so fucking much. I recently made a five minute vlog about this. Factor Meals has made the simple fact of a shared meal, all but necessitated since we were still in the marsupial stage of things, embarrassing. Not for the recomposed, though. Nope, we will “go there.” We will engage in social pleasures outside of our sanitized homes and learn to find them exactly that — completely pleasurable. There’s this new category of “core” videos I’ve recently become acquainted with, and its dedicated to “early Starbucks.” I’m not kidding; people are mass-hallucinating the death of a franchise that had its highest grossing quarter yet just this past year. Why? Because they are stunned stupid at the thought of entering a Starbucks —now deemed, fairly ubiquitously, no better than a public prison latrine adhering to the governance established in The Purge — and taking out a novel, and just sitting. It’s harrowing. These people on Broadway and Flushing engaging in shared meal are my brethren, and yours, and sometimes we share a little smile over a plastic forkful of bag chicken across the tin, and in doing so catapult all the way to somewhere from our past. The world in a few years will be a series of sanitized capsule pods, is the thing, and we The Reformed will be scuttling around Broadway until we find a Sonic with the lights still on yes we will.
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Not for invented love betwixt yourself and a girl-next-door who has been poached from a catalog of them on some dark web server and assigned a name that is statistically Connecticut. Rather, for love with her puppeteer. There is a man who has to still man the bot, and he is breathing life into her somewhere across the pond — tedious work, I’m sure, what with the all the Twitter neckbeards who don’t know how to operate Paypal to save their lives. The loving an internet stranger is another vintage thing; I’m called to think of all the weddings that resulted from Omegle and Kik, and all they had in common was a single preferred My Chemical Romance cassette. We used to gush over that sort of thing. They were basically breaking the algorithm of the physical world by finding viability in a single cultural launch point, and it feels like sometimes now you need seventy-three Instagram mutuals and forty-six shared favorite cultural slabs just to impel a first date, and that’s part of the reason your mind is sick. A couple months ago, I was walking downtown with my friend Blake, who asked me whether I knew his friend Jake, whose last name he didn’t remember, so we threw out twenty to thirty Jake names down Ludlow in the hopes of figuring out the right one. “There has never been a time in history that people have known as many people as we currently do,” he said, and I agreed, and added that “it’s only getting worse.” Sometimes I really want to text someone who I know will basically act like a cave wall for my grievances. I’m not much one for talk therapy and I will not do a robot. I will, however, do a robot manned by an intermediary. That intermediary is exactly the type of person I’d never meet, and to boot, his entire job is to make me feel like we are on the same page as one another. By the way, this has not yet worked. The closest I’ve gotten was with with Kate, formerly Ellery Elli, and it ended here:
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This one just because anything can be how you keep time.