"You are a mashup of what you let into your life”
This is a good enough reason to be extremely selective about the content we consume.
“You are a mashup of what you let into your life,” - Austin Kleon
This is a good enough reason to be extremely selective about the content we consume. Our diets, whether food or information, should provide us with nourishment, sustenance, healing, energy, and enjoyment. But often they drain, confuse, and depress us.
There is little need to describe how the sheer volume of information in our digital age can become overwhelming, so this letter will focus on how and why we might become more selective about our intake.
Information has addictive properties. It feels good in the moment, we can use it to escape unpleasant feelings and we crave more and more. It makes sense that we would have evolved this way as information provided a survival advantage. But in a similar way that food high in fat and sugar that once gave us a much-needed calorie boost has now become over-abundant, we now have information on demand at all hours of the day and night. We still experience the dopamine hit from gathering and consuming information, which is only intensified by the social aspect of sharing and being validated for it. But like high-calorie food, mindless overconsumption damages our health.
Clay Johnson’s book “The Information Diet” draws many analogies between the food and information industries. The food that is cheap, tasty, and addictive tends to be the worst for our long-term health. So it is with information. "Much as a poor diet gives us a variety of diseases, poor information diets give us new forms of ignorance: ignorance that comes not from a lack of information, but from over-consumption of it, and sicknesses and delusions that don't affect the under-informed but the hyper-informed and the well-educated." Low quality information, or content that only feeds what we already believe and disparages other angles, feeds ignorance.
The thesis of the book is that we should control our desires to consume anything and everything in the moment, and instead make deliberate choices about the information we digest. Again, as with our nutrition, the most effective approach is not denying yourself what is enjoyable but nourishing yourself with content that is healthy in the sense that it aligns with your long-term goals and best impulses.
“… the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.” Thomas Jefferson
The news in particular has an addictive quality. Perhaps again, as with sugar and fat, one our biology is evolutionarily unprepared for. Compared to books, news is a recent invention, and the 24 hour news cycle even more so. The thought of limiting our exposure here often leads to a knee-jerk anxiety that we will be missing out on something we ‘need’ to know or will fall behind those who are more up to date. There is something irrational about this though. People who have given up the news for a stretch have commented that the information they really needed to know found them anyway. They were also able to take a longer-term perspective, without being pushed by the recency bias of the news cycle.
Stop Reading the News by Rolf Dobelli argues that ‘digitalisation has turned news…into a weapon of mass destruction, and it’s aimed straight at our mental health’. He questions whether ‘A man from Texas eats five kilos of worms’ is news; or, ‘China is building a new aircraft carrier’. Even describing them as ‘breaking news’ does not change the fact that they are largely irrelevant to our personal world. Perhaps we think we can rely on journalists and editors to filter what is important or relevant. But this seems illogical given that they too are humans, and responding to incentives which may not be aligned with our best interests.
Dobelli argues that news is outside our circle of competence (Warren Buffet advised that we know our circle of competence and stick within it) and so may actually make us less well-informed by obscuring the big picture in preference for newsworthiness and by skewing our risk assessment. For example, when a bridge collapses, newspapers focus on the car and driver that went down with it. Arguably though, the information we need is how that bridge was constructed, how many bridges are built like that, and where they are. That being said, with mindfulness, any interaction with the news is an opportunity to improve ourselves, whether that is through empathy or gathering more accurate knowledge about how the world works. The problem comes because the way we consume the news in reality is often anything but mindful.
“If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed.” Mark Twain
There is a host of other cognitive flaws preyed upon by the news industry including confirmation bias, most dangerous of all when it comes to ideologies, hindsight bias, and availability bias, which influences us to to rely on irrelevant considerations that have nevertheless lodged themselves in our brains. As we are susceptible to these biases anyway, it is easy for the news cycle to hook in and amplify them further, without giving us a chance to consider what might be happening.
“When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallow thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain.” - Nicolas Carr
"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone," Blaise Pascal
So what can we do? The first and most critical step to a healthier content diet is to acknowledge that we don’t have to consume something just because it’s there. That is the truth. We always have access to the choice to turn it off, stop, and change direction. This is fundamental. As well as the content itself, its quality or lack thereof, there is a separate point about the amount of noise we expose ourselves to, and the disconnect this engenders between us and our own thoughts, instincts, and wishes. We actually don’t need to be listening to a podcast every minute. That time with your own mind is anything but wasted. Being comfortable with some quiet space with no content at all gives you a powerful foundation to build from, and is an increasingly rare skill. If you feel the itches of addiction when you disconnect, don’t be afraid to go deep. What need is this? What am I escaping? You can be sure the need is not just to know what is happening in Congress today. One of the ironies of addictive behaviors is that the less they meet our true need, the more addictive they are.
On a digital detox, we aim to disconnect entirely, whether that is just for one day like Shabbat, or for a longer stretch. But what about day to day, when opting out entirely isn’t practical or desirable? Extending the analogy between food and information, the fact is that most of us need less than we think, and less than we are accustomed to. We need to create our own filtration system that allows things in that are meaningful, challenging, inspiring, and intellectually stimulating. This can begin with curating our inboxes, and disabling notifications that we know are a trigger for seeking shallow information dopamine boosts.
We often talk about information overload, but although it’s a compelling metaphor, that isn’t really what is happening. Our brains are not hard drives, human beings are not mechanical. It’s unlikely that we have a maximum capacity for knowledge. But we are in a constant conversation with our informational world and being changed by it for better or worse. We feel as well as know. Our brains react with pleasure when we find something that confirms, rather than challenges, our existing beliefs. But once aware of this, for example, we can actively seek out difficult pieces and cultivate a love of challenge. We can also take advantage of our brain’s structure by building and expanding existing connections: rather than reading in soon-forgotten snippets, take an area we have some base knowledge and go deep. And then go deeper still.
Again, like food, there is highly nourishing information; content that is just okay; and then toxic junk. We probably know which information sits where, with the salacious outrage machines at the bottom, passive scrolling somewhere in the middle, and the top portion occupied by content that educates us and inspires us to create and grow. Variety too is good, in and of itself, as it keeps the mind engaged. The process of switching up a habit, known as interleaving, has been shown to double the rate we learn and process new information. This offers us an opportunity to schedule our information consumption into blocks. I recommend using a timer until this becomes second nature. I also recommend variety in terms of online and offline, writing and video. Download things in advance if you need to, so you will be less likely to get distracted and go off down a rabbit hole.
Finally, I want to reiterate the point that it’s fine, even beneficial, to not consume any content for a period. You won’t be left behind and may be surprised by the strength and clarity that emerges. True intelligence is about removing obstructions in your mind, not about simply stuffing in more knowledge. Sometimes we worry that perhaps we’ll meet someone and won’t know what they’re talking about if we’ve been unplugged for a while. But again I say, so what? We can ask them questions, and listen carefully to their replies, rather than spending the time spotting opportunities to insert a relevant anecdote we read somewhere.
Consuming deliberately is key. Whatever you’re doing (reading, watching, listening to), do that, and not three other tasks simultaneously. If it’s not worth your full attention, it’s not worth your time. Figure out what your needs and preferences (not just habits) truly are, then deliberately choose your information diet to serve them, as you would nutrition if you had specific goals. Your consumption should be designed by you, rather than something you do either compulsively or passively. We can even schedule “cheat meals” of content for the same reasons some people like them for nutrition. If you thoroughly enjoy every bite of that garbage without guilt, and then return to your healthy consumption with renewed focus and your cravings satisfied, then the cheat meal has done its job.
Everything we come across in life shapes us in some way, but we have the power to decide how.
Have a wonderful weekend, and I hope you manage to find some time to enjoy the beauty of your own thoughts,
Natalie
P.S. You are very welcome to join my seminar on burnout this Wednesday, either live or via the recording. Details and tickets here: