A Healthy Diet in an Information-Driven World
The most valuable thing in the world is human attention.
It didn’t used to be this way. But now it is. The scarcest and most sought-after commodity on planet Earth is now the mental real estate of human beings.
Our parents grew up in a world where you rode your bike a few blocks to see what your friends were up to, and you had no idea until you got there. We, on the other hand, know exactly what everybody is up to, all of the time. Even when we don’t ask.
We now live in a world in which the most abundant resource is information. Numbers and letters on screens. Opinions, news, analysis, and social interactions. Information is absolutely everywhere. Information is the new Beatles: you almost cannot escape from it.
But most people don’t understand what that means, or what the impact on our lives really is.
Information as a material of consumption
First of all, let’s frame things properly. Information is something that is consumed. We think of it as something static — something that is shared or read or explained, and then either taken to heart or ignored. It either bounces off of us or it sticks.
We think of it as something harmless — something with no agenda of its own. But it has more influence over you than you think it does. And if you’re the sort of person who thinks information doesn’t have influence over you, you’re exactly the sort of person it influences most.
Information must be thought of as a consumable good.
Information is something you ingest, and which has either nutritional or not-so-nutritional value. Most information is not static or innocent or harmless; it is a processed good which you digest. It’s either good for your brain or bad for your brain in various ways. There is very little room in between. Especially in the age of tech monopolies whose sole purpose is to fill your screen, and your head, with informational junk food.
Let’s just be clear about that: the sole purpose of companies like Meta (Facebook) and Google (including YouTube) is to absolutely drown you in information at all times. That’s their single, solitary goal. To keep you engaged with the internet for as many seconds per day as possible. And the cost, frankly, does not matter to them at all. For more on this (horrifying) topic, read Max Fisher’s The Chaos Machine.
We realized slowly, over the course of the 20th century, that McDonald’s was bad for us; we are now learning similar lessons with social media and live news feeds. The unimaginable wealth and prosperity of our society has led us to do the same thing with data and opinions that we did with Big Macs: eat too much of them, even as the evidence piled up that they’re just more than our systems can handle. We have so much free time, so little actual struggle in our lives, that we have nothing better to do than sit around and gorge ourselves on worthless junk. We just don’t have anything better to do.
And of course, that’s a problem. And, I’d argue, a spiritual one. A problem that stems directly from a lack of meaning; a lack of personal direction and self-imposed challenge. But that’s beyond the scope of this piece.
The main point is this: to survive in this new world, we must go on a diet. Each of us, all of us. We must learn how to control our intake of informational junk food and learn how to find the right nutrients in good information.
When you eat junk food, you don’t have any control over whether you digest it or not. It’s in your body. It’s too late to make decisions about whether or not you want your body to absorb whatever is in that cheeseburger.
And most people are the same way with information — they invite it into their heads (or it is placed there by someone else) and they can’t fight it. It’s going to be absorbed by their minds and affect their thinking whether they like it or not.
But there’s also a difference. You can train your mind in a way you can’t train your stomach. You can train your mind to reject non-nutritional, false, or shallow information. You can equip your mind to see some opinion or data or idea, and say “no, there’s nothing useful here. We will be letting that go out the other ear.”
No puking involved. But there is a lot of hard work involved, and a lot of ignoring what feels good in the short term (namely, the emotional gratification that comes with obsessively drowning yourself in new information).
And it’s not optional. This isn’t some cute idea like the South Beach Diet or P90X. When I say a diet, I don’t mean we should start a counterculture fad of being “anti-information-overload, man,” like a bunch of short-sighted hippies. I mean, we have a new reality, and this reality is based around information, and it’s never going back to the way it was, and it’s incredibly oppressive to our mental, emotional, and spiritual health. Whether we want that to be true or not, it is. We don’t have a choice but to face these facts.
But the beautiful part is, in order to have a better diet, we don’t have to slave away growing our own crops, or shop at specialty stores, or really do anything even remotely difficult. All we have to do is take control of the information we collect and eat.
It either has utility or it doesn’t
“But it’s hard,” you might say. “All my friends are on social media and I like being included and knowing what they’re up to.”
Well, if you are that susceptible to peer pressure, you really have no shot at being happy anyway.
“But I get all of my news on Facebook.”
Yes, and 90% of it is blatant untruth. Straight-up misinformation. This has been extensively researched and well-documented. Facebook is one of the worst places on Earth to get news. So that argument is out. You are better off having no access to news at all than you are getting your news exclusively from Facebook.
“But keeping up with my Twitter feed is fun and teaches me things.”
Okay, wonderful, and I agree with you. But only if you take control of your feed, instead of letting it take control of you.
Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube are great places to discover an extremely narrow scope of information and news. What that scope is, is largely up to you. But it must be narrow.
For instance, YouTube is an outstanding place to educate yourself — if, and only if, you stick to exactly the videos you went searching for and not much else. If you get caught chasing recommended videos through "related" subject matter, you will end up way off course and consuming high-emotion junk. That's not just my prediction — the algorithm guarantees it. That's literally the business model; it's how the platform works. That, again, has been extensively researched and well-documented. The longer you meander around on YouTube, the more likely you are to end up consuming information that is horrible for you.
(And, equally importantly, information that will turn you into a terrible influence on everyone around you. That’s another thing: when you eat a bunch of Big Macs, who ends up paying for that? Everyone else. Taxpayers. Because you end up clogging up the healthcare system with your horrible health, and not being able to pay your bills, and everyone else has to have increased expenses to make up for your failures so that the system doesn’t collapse. And when you ingest a bunch of terrible, useless information and can’t stop spreading it to the people around you, you have now become a problem yourself.)
All social media is designed to engage you. Not to teach you, make you a better person, or help you. But to engage you. To keep you scrolling and looking and chasing more and more extreme bits of information.
YouTube and Twitter can be used as excellent sources of curated wisdom and education. I have learned entire college-level concepts in 15 minutes on YouTube. I have explored the hills and valleys of philosophy on YouTube. I got my current job by interacting with my boss on Twitter. These are very useful tools.
But if you don’t put in the effort to use them very deliberately and rationally, they are likely to be profoundly negative influences on your life. They are distributors of vast and profound knowledge, but they are also distributors of meaningless informational snacks that have no nutritional value. They will bloat your mind with useless pockets of fat and nonsense the same way as sitting around eating processed foods.
An apt analogy. Because look at it this way: the information that lands on your screen every day has been processed. By “influencers” (the dumbest term I’ve ever heard), by personalities seeking approval and likes and growth, and by the algorithm. The information that appears on your screen every day has been processed to affect you in certain ways. And if you're not sure how, then you shouldn't consume it.
I mean, you don’t go around eating random berries, do you? A lot of them are poisonous.
When it comes to information, there is one thing you should ask yourself:
“Am I going to do anything with this?”
If the answer is no, then you shouldn’t be paying any attention to it.
Sometimes I hear people, especially older people, say that they watch the news so that they know what’s going on in the world. My challenge is this: if you’re not a policymaker, a pundit, or an analyst… why? If you’re not going to do anything with the information you’re consuming, is there any utility whatsoever in consuming it?
If you’re not going to be out there crusading for change, why do you need to know what’s going on every hour of every day? What purpose does that serve, other than to rile you up because you’re bored? If you’re just bored, go do something else. Learn how to knit. Call your grandson.
Now don’t get me wrong, we should be well-informed on things like war and international policy and inflation. But you can stay well-informed on those topics with about 4 minutes of effort per day. No snacks, no garbage… just eat a meal and then get up from the table.
We live in a world where 99% of the information on our screens was produced in the last 24 hours.
And yet we also live in a world where 99% of the information produced in the last 24 hours will never be important again (and wasn’t in the first place). We will not do anything meaningful with it today, and we will never think about it again.
In that light, paying attention to your social media feeds seems like an incredible waste of effort. Doesn’t it? It’s nothing but snacks. And these snacks are not slices of cucumber. They’re salt and vinegar chips, pork rinds, and sugary candy. They’re junk food.
Think about all the information you consume. Now ask yourself, what have I gotten back out of consuming all of this? For most people, most of the information they consume leads to no benefit. It’s an extraordinarily low return-on-investment endeavor.
Here’s a diet for you
Limit your screen time. You can feel the difference between chasing dopamine and reading useful information. You can’t lie to yourself about that; you know what you’re actually chasing. Be honest about it, and when the screen is nothing more than a drug to you, put it down and do something else.
Be critical. When you’ve just absorbed something from the internet that isn’t useful, consciously label it as dismissed information and then let go of it. Don’t waste any of your metabolism digesting it.
Be honest about the importance of social cues. How much value is there in your friends’ thoughts and statuses on social media? The answer is almost always zero. None.
Curate your feeds. If you aren’t extremely interested in a particular person or page, unfollow. If they’re not adding value to your life, they are actively subtracting value. And you’re letting them.
Become interested, and invest time, in people who don’t pose and perform for the internet. I cannot tell you how important this is. Be friends with at least a few people who don’t give a shit what the internet thinks. It grounds you; it keeps you attached to what’s really important.
And without a doubt the most important aspect of your diet is this: read books. The best meals come from books. Period. From the wisdom of the past, not the torrent of the present.
When it comes to information, old books are always your best bet. Old books always have been and always will be the best way to maintain informational and linguistic nutrition. Because what you see is what you get. They have not been tampered with; they are organic. They represent nourishment that has fed generation after generation with good nutritional value.
Reading old books offers an extraordinarily high return on investment. Because it’s information that you will use, over and over and over again. You absorb some good wisdom from an old book, and it will serve you forever. One meal for a lifetime of nutrition.
Besides... if you learn a little more from the past, you'll understand what's going on in the present better anyway. You'll notice patterns in behavior and information that, though they seem novel right now, are as old as time.
And then they won't affect you as much. And that’s invaluable. Being mentally sturdy against a ridiculous information ecosystem is always going to be a good. It’s the way forward. It’s like learning some carpentry so you can build yourself a shelter against a hurricane. It’s helpful for you, and it’ll become helpful for anyone over whom you have influence. Because they will find comfort and safety in the shelter you’ve built.
I know that it can sound snobbish, when someone tells you to “just read more.” But it’s not a joke. It’s not snobbish, and it’s not some sort of archaic, outdated wisdom.
If you want to be a good person, read old books. It’s almost impossible to read good books and not accidentally become a wise, well-disciplined person.
It’s not a coincidence that all of the wisest people you know are avid readers. It’s because they understand that the antidote to the chaos of the present is reading the wisdom of the past. And not attributing false importance to the low-value snacks and emotions of the day.
Drink water and uninstall Facebook,
JDR
“He who opens a school door, closes a prison.” - Victor Hugo