Input diet

Two related pieces of writing are doing the loops in my head recently. The first is the editorial piece from Dense Discovery #361—thank you Mattia for sending it to me—where Kay wrote

We’ve normalised giving our attention almost exclusively to people who already have obscene amounts of influence. And we amplify them by watching. The power law in action: a few rise to the top, and we keep them there by never looking away. (...) Seeking out lesser-known voices isn’t just an act of cultural curation; it’s a philosophical stance, a refusal to let attention be the only metric that matters. Because the most interesting stuff usually happens on the margins.

The topic of who is getting my attention these days is something I’m spending a lot of time thinking about. Because time and attention are a precious resource, one we probably take for granted way too often. A resource that’s been abused by the modern economy to the point where people seem unable to focus anymore, with the sole goal of selling us crap we likely don’t need.

The other piece I’ve been thinking about is Ridgeline #217, where Craig wrote:

The modern smartphone, laden with the corporate ecosystem pulsing underneath its screen, robs us of this feeling, conspires to keep us from “true” fullness. The swiping, the news cycles, the screaming, the idiocy — if anything destroys a muse, it’s this. If anything keeps you locked into a fetid loop of looking, looking, and looking once more at the train wreck, it’s this. I find it impossible to feel fullness, even in the slightest, after having spent just a bit of a day in the thralls of the algorithms. The smartphone eradicates “space” in the mind. With that psychic loss of space, grace becomes impossible. You see the knock-on effects of this rippling out across the world politically.

I’m starting to believe that a phoneless life is, for me, the ultimate goal. How to get there, that I don’t know, but I feel like it’s a worthy goal to pursue. And I think this goal is gonna be part of a broader push towards really curating the inputs in my life. By inputs, I mean everything I consume. Because I realised my mental health is deeply affected by what I consume, day after day. The books I read, the posts and blogs I scroll through, the news I ingest, the music I listen to. Everything contributes to how I feel, and I think I’m only now realising how much more strict and diligent I should be with my input diet.

The other day, I reopened my RSS reader after my small break from media consumption, and I was both over- and underwhelmed. Overwhelmed because I follow quite a lot of blogs, and so there were thousands of posts waiting to be read in there. Underwhelmed because after a quick scroll through all those entries, I realised there wasn’t much I was genuinely excited to read. Which isn’t to say the content in there wasn’t interesting, quite the opposite. I follow a lot of people who write a lot of interesting content. But I realised it was not content that really resonates with me, at this point in my life. And I came to the realisation that the only reasonable thing to do is to start from scratch again. Remove everything and start adding back only the content I really want to consume. And in doing that, this time around, I should be a lot more deliberate, a lot more careful in what I add. Because now more than ever, in this age of infinite digital abundance, quality really is more important than quantity.