Written by: Brennan Jordan
They say that you are the average of the five people closest to you. It’s equally true that you are the food you eat, the thoughts you think, and the information you consume. While we’ve grown adept at curating our social circles and diets, controlling our information intake too often feels like a Sisyphean task.
Content bombards us from every direction: Substack essays, TikTok videos, podcasts, newsletters, and more. This endless stream of information satiates our curiosity, but it also traps us in loops of consumption. It takes us down rabbit holes we never meant to explore. It causes us to mindlessly allow algorithms to curate our content for us. We have arrived in an era characterized by a relentless churn of “new” that leaves no room to digest what we’ve already absorbed.
Take my email inbox for example: Every morning, it’s flooded with Substack essays from writers whose ideas I admire. Individually, each piece is a gem—thoughtfully argued, elegantly structured. But when I finish one, I rarely pause to reflect. Instead, I click the next link, chasing the rush that a new story or idea gives me. The result? All these insights blur into a schema of half-remembered ideas.
The same happens on my TikTok feed. These days I scroll past cinematic short films that would have been hailed as masterpieces a decade ago. Today, they’re forgettable. The democratization of creative tools has yielded a cambrian explosion of creativity, but it’s also numbed us. If Michelangelo were alive today, it is easy to imagine scrolling past his video where he presents David because it was sandwiched between a viral dance trend and an edit of an olympic figure skater. Today, even genius struggles to stand out.
To untangle this modern paradox—abundance breeding apathy—let's take a look at the Pareto Principle. This principle dictates that, in general, 80% of an effect is derived from 20% its causes. In literature, for example, this principle can be seen in the following phrase: “It’s better to read the best 100 books 1,000 times than to read 1,000 books once”—meaning that revisiting a few, impactful works fosters greater wisdom and application of ideas, than does skimming surfaces of a larger corpus of reading material.
Even Stoic philosophers like Seneca railed against “hoarding books” without absorbing their wisdom, urging disciples to “linger among a limited number of thinkers” to nourish the soul. Depth, not breadth, shapes mastery.
Yet in our age, we’ve inverted this logic. We mistake quantity for progress, confusing “more” with “better.” A 2009 study by the University of California found that the average person encountered 34 gigabytes of information daily. Today, some estimations put our information intake at more than double that. Our brains, however, aren’t machines. Cognitive load theory shows that excessive input fragments attention, impairing retention and critical thinking. Like a muscle, the mind strengthens through focused repetition, not endless reps.
This is why I’m trying an information diet: a four-week experiment to detox from the maladies of information overconsumption. The rules (accompanied by their inspirations) are as follows:
Intention (inspired by Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism): I’ll consume only what serves a clear purpose: researching a purchase, preparing for a trip, or deepening a skill. No doomscrolling.
Single-Task (inspired by Seneca’s Letters): One piece of media (physical or virtual) per sitting. No bingeing.
Curation (inspired by Marie Kondo’s Joy Filter): Keep only 3 Substack subscriptions and 5 TikTok creators whose work sparks genuine reflection. Ignore the rest.
Contemplation (inspired by Stoic Tranquillity): No social media after 7 PM. Let the mind contemplate. No late night screens.
Analog (inspired by Neil Postman’s Technopoly): Replace 30 minutes of screen time daily with physical books or podcasts listened to at 1x speed. No multitasking.
This isn’t austerity; it’s clarity. As novelist Haruki Murakami writes, “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” The pain of missing out, while it will undoubtedly exist, is temporary. The suffering of a cluttered, unfocused mind, however, is endless.