A Healthier Information Dietary

The world needs wisdom desperately, truth that is unshakable and foundations that are solid. Only Christianity provides this sort of wisdom, and it’s exactly the medicine our ailing culture needs. In order to bring the light of Christian wisdom to the darkness of our unwise age, however, Christians must recover habits of wisdom in their own lives. We need a diet built around knowledge intake that actually cultivates wisdom. We need for our mental and spiritual health what the Food Pyramid was for our physical health: guidance for what to eat and what not to eat and in what proportions, so we can become more healthy and strong.
 
From cradle to grave, we are formed by others. Contrary to what a “look within” world would suggest, the world outside our heads defines our existence in ways we are foolish to ignore. Rather than seeing this as oppressive, or simply pretending (foolishly) this isn’t the case, we should accept this situation as a gift: truth comes, in large part, from outside ourselves. We can choose the sources of where we look for truth. We can choose how we synthesize truth and apply it as wisdom in everyday circumstances. But we don’t get to choose whether or not something is true. We don’t invent truth. We don’t determine it. We search it out and accept it with gratitude, even when it’s at odds with our feelings or preferences.
 
One of the most valuable areas of biblical wisdom we need for our day is the taming of the tongue. Before we sound off online, we should remember proverbs like:

“Whoever guards his mouth preserves his life; he who opens wide his lips comes to ruin” (Prov. 13:3).

“Whoever is slow to anger has great understanding, but he who has a hasty temper exalts folly” (Prov. 14:29).

“Whoever keeps his mouth and his tongue keeps himself out of trouble” (Prov. 21:23).

 
Or there is James 1:19—a verse that, if heeded, would prevent all manner of grief in today’s world (but would also probably put social media out of business): “Let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger.” The problem, of course, is that today’s media economy is fueled by “quick to speak” rants, mobs, and pile-ons that create traffic spikes and trending topics. To resist this temptation is one of the most challenging yet subversive things a wisdom-seeking Christian can do.
 

- Brett McCracken, The Wisdom Pyramid:

Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World, 2021

Sickness of Information Gluttony

Today’s frenetic information landscape is making our brains busier than ever: the information triage that our over-burdened brains must constantly perform naturally drains huge amounts of energy. Constant multitasking also drains energy… notes neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, overstimulates and stresses our brains:
 

Asking the brain to shift attention from one activity to another causes the prefrontal cortex and striatum to burn up oxygenated glucose, the same fuel they need to stay on task. And the kind of rapid, continual shifting we do with multitasking causes the brain to burn through fuel so quickly that we feel exhausted and disoriented after even a short time. We’ve literally depleted the nutrients in our brain. This leads to compromises in both cognitive and physical performance. Among other things, repeated task switching leads to anxiety, which raises levels of the stress hormone cortisol in the brain, which in turn can lead to aggressive and impulsive behaviour.

 In addition to causing cognitive dizziness, this indistinguishable array of information erodes our ability to distinguish between the trivial and the truly important. Over time we come to value information more for its spectacle—infotainment—than for the complex realities it signifies. Our news feeds are the amusement parks, penny arcades, and vaudeville stages of the digital era.
 
Ironically, as much as the information age (and its “global village”) promises to broaden our horizons and create healthy, integrated, well-informed global citizens, in reality it has had the opposite effect. The hyper-connection and over-awareness of a space-conquered world renders us fragmented and disconnected from place—the local contexts where we can know and be known and effect change to the greatest degree.
 
After the telegraph, Postman argues, “Everything became everyone’s business. For the first time, we were sent information which answered no question we had asked, and which, in any case, did not permit the right to reply.” Social media, of course, gives us permission to “reply”—but to what end? We may have a sense that our participation is meaningful action, that it is doing something, but more often than not we are only adding to the noise, getting needlessly angry, and contributing more irrelevant information to our already overloaded, exhausted brains.
 
Indeed, the stress of having to actively sift through viewing options tends to make us more passive, with little capacity for what Tony Reinke calls “spectacle resistance”: “Our lazy eyes and incurious gaze are happily fed by the spectacle makers. We no longer seek out new spectacles; new spectacles seek us out.”

- Brett McCracken, The Wisdom Pyramid: 

Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World, 2021

Three Habits Making Us Sick

We must examine our daily diet of knowledge intake. It can be nutritious, making us wise and shrewd, more able to ward off intellectual infections and spiritual afflictions. But it can also be toxic, making us unwise and more susceptible to the lies and snares of our age.
 
1. Eating Too Much
In the competitive landscape of the digital age, the “food” of information is not getting more nutritious; it’s veering in the direction of junk food. Doritos and Skittles will always get more clicks than spinach. And so we walk down the buffet line of social media snacks and online junk food, daily gorging ourselves to the point of gluttony. Unsurprisingly, it is making us sick.
 
The “limitless space” nature of online media has also created a situation where “news” channels must find content to fill 24 hours a day, seven days a week, resulting in a diminishment of what qualifies as “newsworthy” (e.g., filling an hour with live car chases). On the Web, not only is there the expectation of daily, fresh, “breaking news” content, but there is fierce competition for clicks. Desperate to stand out, websites are motivated to use incendiary headlines and other tricks to collect coveted clicks by any means necessary. The result is content that is often rushed (a hot take on yesterday’s controversy), random, reckless, or even distorted to spark short-term controversy rather than long-term wisdom.
 
2. Eating Too Fast
The Internet is a medium of now. Its memory is short; its shape ever changing. To navigate life online is to always be playing catch up: reading the article everyone is sharing on Facebook, following someone’s Instagram story before it disappears.
 
Scholars have found that the “junk food” nature of information intake online is rewiring our brains, such that our cognitive abilities to think carefully and critically are being eroded. “In a culture that rewards immediacy, ease, and efficiency,” writes literacy advocate Maryanne Wolf, “the demanding time and effort involved in developing all the aspects of critical thought make it an increasingly embattled entity.”
Over time our skepticism about all sources leads us to turn inward, trusting only in ourselves—which brings us to our third major bad dietary habit.
 
3. Eating Only What Tastes Good to Me
We might be tempted to consume only material we like and have a taste for, but that will leave us sickly. Sadly, this is exactly what many of us do in today’s hyper-individualistic, choose-your-own-adventure world.
 
First, when everything revolves around you and your tastes, it’s only going to be awesome if you know exactly what’s good for you. And we usually don’t… The second problem is that when every individual is living a totally unique, customized, perfectly curated “i” life, it is harder to find commonality with others. We start losing the ability to be empathetic, unable to connect with people because their experience of the world—the news they consume, their social media feeds, and so on—is different from ours in ways we can’t even know. We are all living in our own self-made media bubbles, and no two are the same. Part of the reason society is increasingly divisive is that we can’t have productive conversations when everyone comes to it with their own set of “facts,” “experts,” and background biases, having been shaped by an information diet completely different from anyone else’s. And when we can’t relate to others, we retreat further into our individualistic, self-referential bubbles, which is not an environment where wisdom can grow.
 

- Brett McCracken, The Wisdom Pyramid: 

Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World, 2021

Learning How to Learn

In essence people have two fundamentally different modes of thinking: focused and diffuse. 
 
Focused Mode
- has tight spacing for the rubber bumpers, which seems to, in some sense help keep your thoughts concentrated. 
- is centered on the prefrontal cortex and it often seems to involve thinking about things you are somewhat familiar with. 
- stepping along the somewhat familiar pathways 
 
Diffuse Mode
- has more widely spaced bumpers that allow for more broad ranging ways of thinking. 
- to solve or figure out something new
 
When we find ourselves stuck on a problem, or even if we're unsure of a situation, the course of living our daily life. It's often a good idea once you've focused directly on the situation. To let things settle back and take a bit more time. That way more neural processing can take place, often below conscious awareness in the diffuse mode. The thing is it often takes time for neural processing to take place, and time, as well, to build the new neural structures that allow us to learn something new. 
 
It's through practice and repetition that we can help enhance and strengthen the neural structures we're building as we're learning something new. Practice and repetition is particularly important for more abstract topics. 

Working Memory vs Long Term Memory

Memory of course is an important aspect of learning. There are four slots in our working memory. Things can fall out of those slots unless we keep repeating them to hold them in mind. In that sense working memory is like a not very good blackboard. 

Long term memory, on the other hand, is like a storage warehouse. If you practiced and repeated something well enough to get it into long-term memory, you can usually call it up later if you need, although you may need an occasional bit of repetition to freshen the memory up. 

It's never a good idea to cram your learning by repeating things many times all in one day. Because that's like trying to build muscle by lifting weights all in one day there's no time for solid structures to grow. 

- Barbara Oakley, Learning How to Learn, by Deep Teaching Solutions.

Future-focused Time Management

One way of understanding capitalism, in fact, is as a giant machine for instrumentalizing everything it encounters—the earth’s resources, your time and abilities (or “human resources”)—in the service of future profit. Seeing things this way helps explain the otherwise mysterious truth that rich people in capitalist economies are often surprisingly miserable. They’re very good at instrumentalizing their time, for the purpose of generating wealth for themselves; that’s the definition of being successful in a capitalist world. But in focusing so hard on instrumentalizing their time, they end up treating their lives in the present moment as nothing but a vehicle in which to travel toward a future state of happiness. And so their days are sapped of meaning, even as their bank balances increase.
 
This is also the kernel of truth in the cliché that people in less economically successful countries are better at enjoying life—which is another way of saying that they’re less fixated on instrumentalizing it for future profit, and are thus more able to participate in the pleasures of the present. Mexico, for example, has often outranked the United States in global indices of happiness. Hence the old parable about a vacationing New York businessman who gets talking to a Mexican fisherman, who tells him that he works only a few hours per day and spends most of his time drinking wine in the sun and playing music with his friends.
 
Appalled at the fisherman’s approach to time management, the businessman offers him an unsolicited piece of advice: if the fisherman worked harder, he explains, he could invest the profits in a bigger fleet of boats, pay others to do the fishing, make millions, then retire early. “And what would I do then?” the fisherman asks. “Ah, well, then,” the businessman replies, “you could spend your days drinking wine in the sun and playing music with your friends.”
 

- Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, 2021

Standing Firm to Resist FOMO

In practical terms, a limit-embracing attitude to time means organizing your days with the understanding that you definitely won’t have time for everything you want to do, or that other people want you to do—and so, at the very least, you can stop beating yourself up for failing. Since hard choices are unavoidable, what matters is learning to make them consciously, deciding what to focus on and what to neglect, rather than letting them get made by default—or deceiving yourself that, with enough hard work and the right time management tricks, you might not have to make them at all. It also means resisting the seductive temptation to “keep your options open”—which is really just another way of trying to feel in control—in favor of deliberately making big, daunting, irreversible commitments, which you can’t know in advance will turn out for the best, but which reliably prove more fulfilling in the end. And it means standing firm in the face of FOMO, the “fear of missing out,” because you come to realize that missing out on something—indeed, on almost everything—is basically guaranteed. Which isn’t actually a problem anyway, it turns out, because “missing out” is what makes our choices meaningful in the first place.
 
Time pressure comes largely from forces outside ourselves: from a cutthroat economy; from the loss of the social safety nets and family networks that used to help ease the burdens of work and childcare; and from the sexist expectation that women must excel in their careers while assuming most of the responsibilities at home. None of that will be solved by self-help alone; as the journalist Anne Helen Petersen writes in a widely shared essay on millennial burnout, you can’t fix such problems “with vacation, or an adult coloring book, or ‘anxiety baking,’ or the Pomodoro Technique, or overnight fucking oats.” But my point here is that however privileged or unfortunate your specific situation, fully facing the reality of it can only help. So long as you continue to respond to impossible demands on your time by trying to persuade yourself that you might one day find some way to do the impossible, you’re implicitly collaborating with those demands. Whereas once you deeply grasp that they are impossible, you’ll be newly empowered to resist them, and to focus instead on building the most meaningful life you can, in whatever situation you’re in.
 
This notion that fulfillment might lie in embracing, rather than denying, our temporal limitations wouldn’t have surprised the philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome. They understood limitlessness to be the sole preserve of the gods; the noblest of human goals wasn’t to become godlike, but to be wholeheartedly human instead. In any case, this is just how reality is, and it can be surprisingly energizing to confront it.
 
None of us can single-handedly overthrow a society dedicated to limitless productivity, distraction, and speed. But right here, right now, you can stop buying into the delusion that any of that is ever going to bring satisfaction. You can face the facts. You can turn on the shower, brace yourself for some invigoratingly icy water, and step in.
 

- Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, 2021

 
 

Facing Our Finitude

For Heidegger, is the central challenge of human existence: since finitude defines our lives, he argues that living a truly authentic life—becoming fully human—means facing up to that fact. We must live out our lives, to whatever extent we can, in clear-eyed acknowledgment of our limitations, in the undeluded mode of existence that Heidegger calls “Being-towards-death,” aware that this is it, that life is not a dress rehearsal, that every choice requires myriad sacrifices, and that time is always already running out—indeed, that it may run out today, tomorrow, or next month. And so it’s not merely a matter of spending each day “as if” it were your last, as the cliché has it. The point is that it always actually might be. I can’t entirely depend upon a single moment of the future.
 
What most of us do, most of the time, instead of confronting our finitude, which is to indulge in avoidance and denial, or what Heidegger calls “falling.” Rather than taking ownership of our lives, we seek out distractions, or lose ourselves in busyness and the daily grind, so as to try to forget our real predicament. Or we try to avoid the intimidating responsibility of having to decide what to do with our finite time by telling ourselves that we don’t get to choose at all—that we must get married, or remain in a soul-destroying job, or anything else, simply because it’s the done thing.
 
Hägglund writes, “I could never take my life to be at stake, and I would never be seized by the need to do anything with my time.” Eternity would be deathly dull, because whenever you found yourself wondering whether or not to do any given thing, on any given day, the answer would always be: Who cares? After all, there’s always tomorrow, and the next day, and the one after that …
 

- Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, 2021