When cognitive load became fashionable

The term arrived in our vocabulary around the early 1980s through John Sweller's work on instructional design. He was trying to explain why some teaching methods worked better than others—why a diagram with too much text in the margins broke people's learning, while the same information presented sequentially didn't. The framework was narrow and testable. It predicted something specific: that working memory has limits, and exceeding them degrades performance on novel tasks. That was genuinely useful. The problem is what happened next. The concept sprawled. By the 2010s, every productivity guru and UX consultant was invoking "cognitive load" to justify design choices, meeting structures, or why you shouldn't check email. The term got dragged so far from Sweller's actual claims that it started explaining everything and predicting nothing. It became a just-so story. Why is this interface bad? Cognitive load. Why did that meeting exhaust you? Cognitive load. The framework had become unfalsifiable, which is how you know it's stopped being useful science and started being folk psychology with footnotes. The honest version: cognitive load theory makes real, narrow predictions about learning and immediate task performance under specific conditions. It says something about how we process novel information in constrained time windows. But it's terrible at explaining chronic exhaustion, why some people thrive on complexity, or why meaningful work feels energizing even when it's demanding. Those need different frameworks entirely—attention, autonomy, purpose. We've borrowed the language but dropped the precision. That's the trade-off we made for accessibility, I suppose.