Sit with your thoughts and really internalize the information that you consume, it makes the world of a difference.
In the modern age, we’re constantly bombarded with stimuli; feeds from the news, netflix, twitter, facebook, instagram, tiktok, and notifications from all of these. This instills a lot of fear for humanity in me. While we live in our phones and have no problem expressing our thoughts and emotions via social media posts, it makes us uncomfortable to go knock on our neighbors door and ask for help or simply say ‘hi’ when we cross paths. We have a constant anxiety tapping us on the shoulder (or the “Monkey mind” as Naval would say).
I think this information bombardment is incredibly unhealthy for us. I can speak from my own experience, when I used social media I would consume small bits of information from these sources and it gave me a “high” while I did it and I felt like I was doing useful things, but it ultimately left me feeling empty and tired and no better off than I was 3 hours earlier when I started (I hate wasting time).
I came to a conclusion: these sources are providing the equivalent of informational sugar. You get a short-term good feeling, but in reality it’s providing no cognitive “nutrition“ for our brains, and over time it does more harm (these tools are built to directly target/hijack our neuro-biology) than good (we’re not “stretching” our cognitive capacity when we feed ourselves this tidbits of simple, mindless information).
I like to equate information to “the food of our minds”, as I believe that information does have a nutritional value. The more dense and difficult it is to understand, the more nutritional value it has and the more it stretches your brain (if you allow it). The thing is, we can’t just read dense material and assume its doing the work. The information which is consumed needs to be digested. Unlike the body, we need to actively and intentionally trigger this information digestion process (i.e. think about what you’ve read, relate it to other things in your life, build connections with it so that it actually becomes part of your mental models). Without the process of digestion, the information goes nowhere and it’s as if we didnt read anything at all (again, I really hate wasting time).
So, I urge you to take a break from the phones, the infinite bombarding stimuli waging war on your attention, and not only read a book, but really think about what you’re reading. Think about what it means to you, how it relates to your experiences, and pay attention to the impact it has on how you think. It feels really good and refreshing for me and I hope it’s the same for you…