Digital Hoarding & Mental Obesity

Today, when even the worst SM content format ever created (Reels/Shorts) tries to be "informative", its clear that we are living in the age of huge information excess.

It is made worse by the "good intention" of continuously learning.

So, we have access to limitless information and we consume a lot of it because of our primal instinct to collect it.

We mindlessly bookmark the webpages, save the articles, add videos to watch later, never to revisit or process and assimilate them as Knowledge.

It's digital hoarding.

Increasingly, our thoughts end up cloudy. We read contradictory articles, not only to fail to arrive at any conclusion but even scrambling our initial thoughts in the process.

Result: "Mental Obesity". David Polgar's TED Talk: https://youtu.be/g2pre2xnA1M
More: https://www.davidpolgar.com/mental-obesity

Now, before you decide to uninstall all the social media apps, you need to know about a recent study:
People who restricted their smartphone use were happier, healthier than the people who quit completely.
Benefits were surprisingly spread out across the board. The reduced usage group did better on anxiety symptoms, physical exercise, smoking and overall life satisfaction than the other group. Results sustained over the course of four months. The paper is here: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2022-50916-001

But, that's just the consumption part of the equation.

It is your responsibility to process what you are consuming, no matter how interesting it is. All the newsletter that are doling out editions every week are great for the creators because it's their work output but it's only good for the readers if they process the information and act on it.

How ?

Make incremental changes. Experiment. Paraphrase and make notes. Somehow you need to do more than telling your coworkers that you "read it" last night.

If you can't act on it, why are you consuming it ?