I just spent 45 minutes surfing through streaming services to watch something. I finally landed on an NHL game between the Bruins and Maple Leafs. It wasn’t great hockey, but I had a quick thought about returning to following hockey (15 years in the Dallas area and still I enjoy watching the Stars - Razor Reaugh is the best color guy ever). Then my mind went to the fact that that would be a couple hours a few nights a week for the next bunch of months. To say nothing of the TV time I already spend.
… back to writing after a 5-minute delay reading Razor’s twitter feed …
The buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching toward infinity...
— A. Edward Newton
The amount of media and informational content is effectively infinite and growing. So much more than just more books than you could ever read. Sports, TV, movies, news, posts, books, and so on. Even this post.
There are different ways to approach this infinite supply.
On one side we have a couple of my heroes - Neal Stephenson and Cal Newport - who reject all most all of it. They focus only on creating their own things, putting their best work into the world. They know that every single bit of external input can steal from their most valuable resource: time. One assumes they indulge a little and read a lot, but at most it’s a tertiary activity.
On the other side is me, wasting hours on twitter, reddit, whatever, looking for that one nugget of content or comment that I really enjoy. Equivalently, wasting hours watching TV that allows me to take off my reading glasses, escape, and shut my brain off fully. It’s like being on a diet when there is fresh pie always cooking in the house. This falls squarely into what Brené Brown calls “numbing out”.
Missing Out.
There’s a sense of missing out when I’m not on social media. It’s so very attractive to be on top the zeitgeist, feeling like I’m part of the twitterati. Systems like twitter and reddit are a moving trainwreck that is hard to look away from. Others like Instagram (and TikTok from what I understand) are eye-candy, little mini dopamine hits from beauty. HBO, Netflix, etc. keep pumping out fantastic movies and episodic shows that are part of that whole discussion. It truly is the golden age of television. The irony is not lost that I recently discovered a great reddit thread about procrastination and life-changing book hidden in the comments (more on that in a future post). That content-farming comes at a great time cost though.
Recently twitter has found it’s way back into my conscious and I’ve been riding the wave of silliness related to the Musk takeover and the (fantastic) introduction of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Being able to get a handle on ChatGPT early has been a big deal, but that math doesn’t take into account all the hours wasted just scrolling through the feed. Now I’m looking at what I need to do to engage more people in this substack and the new one I’m launching, and that involves more involvement with social media.
Games, non-fiction reading
Games - anything from crosswords to Scrabble to Minecraft to Red Dead Redemption 2 - are a little different in that they engage the brain and reflexes and we may come away a little improved. Oddly this is similar non-fiction book reading, newsletter reading, or even much of YouTube where we (hopefully) come away edified. That’s not an excuse to spend all of our time gaming (or reading substack) at the expense of our creative endeavors, but they are an improvement over endlessly scrolling TikTok for that one thing or watching TV until it asks if you’re still watching.
Possible Futures
These things all apply in future iterations of the internet, social media, or any media. The metaverse itself will be an even more intensive method to pipe information into our heads, a stepping stone on the inevitable journey towards a Gibsonian cyberspace where the media can stimulate our brain directly without all those slow sensory organs filtering things.
There’s a personal admission here, mainly that part of me could easily go the way of just giving myself over to all this information. Parked in a La-Z-Boy, surrounded by screens, controllers, and keyboards, empty pizza boxes and Coke Zero bottles.
OK that got a bit dark.
Our input is supposed to be Nature, 24/7. Bird calls, wind in the leaves and grasses, a burbling creek, waves, flowers, starlight, the Sun, the smell of damp soil, subtle pressure changes from the weather. Input from nature is rarely like a tsunami and even then passes soon enough. Nature is the input we have evolved to handle, but the future promises we’ll be coaxed further away from that.
Battles
Most of us aren’t going to get off the grid and fully return to nature anytime soon nor will we become tech luddites: as such we’re left to take steps to fight our way through the overwhelming amount of information. Here’s the best I have so far:
Curate. We have to spend a lot of time curating what we look at. Unsubscribe from unnecessary/noisy email newsletters that are low-value. I setup RSS feeds of my favorite newsletters so that I can read them offline. If we are going to stay on social media - especially forums like reddit and twitter - be heavy-handed about blocking and unfollowing and equivalently judicious in following people that are truly adding to the conversation. Try to find a balance to where you can not feel like you’re missing out badly but can avoid endless scrolling for today’s golden nugget. You are what you eat applies to social media and TV as much as food. Things like the infographic below are a good start as well.
Spend more time in Nature. Get outside in a park, in trees. Get the morning sun in your eyes. Put your fingers in the dirt. Look at the stars. If you already do those things, do them more.
Be clear about how it is helping. Be honest with yourself about why your ears and eyes are engaged with any given piece of media. Are the funny cat videos really just you running to comfort instead of actually confronting something difficult? Is that podcast on just to cover up that you don’t want to spend time with your own thoughts? Is the TV show moving forward whatever is most important in your life or is it just dead time that you will never get back? Is it purely just leisure time (that’s fine, up until it’s just self-indulgent), or is it improving you somehow?
Be disciplined about time spent. Do a time audit, enable your screen time notifications, whatever. If you’re like me you may have to be your own nanny when it comes to time spent on TV, games, and the internet. I haven’t been this draconian yet but I think it’s coming: my self-control with addictive things has never been very good.
Thrive Longer.
Strong99 is about thriving longer in life: having effective techniques to deal with an ever-increasing amount of information in our lives is an important piece of that. We want to be able to make the most of our lives, not see it wasted away on noise. This problem isn’t going away. It’s only going to get harder. Infinity, as the say, is a lot.