I've written a new book and it's your fault
I need to tell you something, and I’d rather do it honestly than with one of those polished author announcements that reads like a press release wearing a cardigan.
I’ve written a new book. It’s called Harder Than It Should Be: Modern life and the Systems Trying to Survive it. And in a very real sense, you lot are the reason it exists.
Over the past eighteen months, the most common thing people have said to me, in clinical rooms, in emails, in the comments under these Substack posts, at dinner tables in Đà Lạt and Adelaide and Boston, is some version of the same sentence: I used to be sharper than this.
Not dramatically impaired. Not unable to function. Just … heavier. As though somebody had quietly increased the cognitive gravity without updating the manual. Still competent. Still showing up. Still getting it done. But the ‘getting it done’ part now costs more than it used to, and nobody can explain where the invoice is coming from.
I couldn’t either, for a while. And then I started pulling on threads.
What the book is about
Here’s the thesis in one line: We did not return to normal. We adjusted to chronic strain and called it resilience.
The book argues that post-2020 life increased cognitive demand while quietly impairing cognitive supply. The result is widespread, normalised depletion that standard medical assessments don’t capture, productivity culture refuses to acknowledge, and individual resilience cannot solve.
Thirteen chapters. Three parts. Short enough to finish, dense enough to matter, because writing a long book about depleted attention felt like the kind of irony even I couldn’t justify.
Part I names the pattern. That quiet slowing you’ve noticed. The brain fog that doesn’t qualify as dramatic enough for a diagnosis but is real enough to change how your Tuesday afternoon feels. The way competent adults compensate so effectively that the problem stays invisible until something cracks.
Part II explains what changed. Nervous systems that never completed their stress cycles. Post-viral inflammation that standard blood panels don’t measure. Neurodivergent brains running hot under chronic load. Digital environments engineered to fragment your attention. And the centrepiece of the book: a chapter about the invisible cognitive scaffolding that collapsed in 2020 and that nobody has talked about properly until now.
That scaffolding chapter is the one I’m most excited about, and also the one that took the longest to write. Before 2020, most of us were running a significant portion of our cognition externally, through commutes that functioned as processing buffers, offices that externalised our task-switching cues, colleagues who served as shared working memory, even the barista who knew our order and provided a sliver of nervous system co-regulation we never consciously registered. When all three layers collapsed simultaneously, the cognitive work didn’t vanish. It relocated inward. And nobody added it to the budget.
Part III is about recalibration without fantasy. No hacks. No optimisation theatre. No suggestion that the reader simply needs to try harder. Instead, an honest reckoning with what changed and what a sustainable baseline might actually look like when the old one is gone.
Why I’m the one writing it
I could give you the credentials. Master’s in Counselling Practice. Four hundred and fifty academic citations. RAAF veteran. A decade as a social media strategist before I saw what it was doing to people and walked away. Clinical experience with depression, C-PTSD, and neurodivergence in veteran populations.
But the real reason is simpler. I am my own most compelling case study, and that’s not a comfortable thing to admit.
Same brain in Adelaide: couldn’t function. Same brain in Đà Lạt: works. Same pension. Same diagnosis history. Same neurological wiring. Different environment. The thing that changed wasn’t me. It was the circumstances. And if that doesn’t make you wonder whether we’ve been asking the wrong question about cognitive decline for the past five years, I don’t know what will.
I’ve also lived what this book describes. The decades of misdiagnosis. The financial ruin. The days without food. The moment I made a plan to end my life and was too poor to execute it. The slow, unglamorous, badly-lit reconstruction that followed, with the production values of regional community television.
I write from scar tissue, not theory. That’s the authority this book carries, and I think it’s the authority the topic needs.
What this means for you
If you’ve been reading Quiet Half for a while, you’ll recognise some of the threads. The anti-positive-psychology stance. The insistence that environment shapes cognition more than mindset does. The gentle suggestion that maybe, just maybe, feeling depleted in a depleting world is not a personal failing but an accurate reading of the situation.
The book takes those threads and weaves them into something larger. Something with references. Something with a proper argument that builds across chapters rather than arriving in 1,500-word dispatches. Something I can hand to the GP who keeps telling you your blood work is fine while you sit there knowing that the word ‘fine’ has become the most dishonest word in the English language.
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One more thing
The book’s epigraph reads: What you ignore does not disappear. It relocates.
I chose that line because it captures everything the book is trying to say. The cognitive load we stopped counting didn’t go away. The stress cycles we never completed didn’t resolve. The scaffolding we lost wasn’t rebuilt. It all relocated, mostly inward, mostly invisibly, and we called the result ‘getting back to normal.’
This book is my attempt to say, clearly and with evidence: you are not imagining it. It is harder than it should be. And understanding why is the first step toward something that actually helps.
More soon.
Lee
Đà Lạt, Vietnam March 2026