You have a strainer in your kitchen sink. That little basket that catches the coffee grounds, the rice, the onion skins before they reach the drain. You put it there on purpose. You know what happens to a pipe you let anything flow into. It clogs, it backs up, it starts to stink, and eventually it fails and floods the cabinet underneath.

So you protect the drain. A five-dollar piece of mesh stands guard over it every single day.

Now think about your mind.

All day long you let things pour into it. Things like the feed you scroll before you are fully awake, or the headlines built to alarm you, or the coworker's complaint, or the stranger's opinion, or the argument you overhear and carry home. The mind takes all of it, the grounds and the skins and the grease, straight down the drain with no basket in place. You would never treat your plumbing this way. But you treat the more important pipe worse.