As a recovering obese guy who’s had more than his fair share of apple fritters, I know for a fact that junk food tastes great. How I feel after eating it is another story. One strange thing happens after I kick off a morning with sweet junk. My mind tells me I must balance it with some salty junk. Then, since I’ve already wrecked my calories and macros for the day, I just eat junk the rest of the day.
There sure is a lot of junk food on the internet. Shoot, it’s the most effortless content to grab. Scrolling the infinite timelines on X, Instagram, or TikTok is great-tasting content; it makes you crave more (no one can eat just one) and is free for us to use. The problem is, much like its food counterpart, the junk content isn’t full of nutrients.
As I age, my body slows down, but I’m feeling my brain work quicker. After reading a few books on learning and decision-making, it comes down to experience and pattern recognition. We’ve been there - done that, and have some idea about how to solve the problem.
But I want to continue to improve. Filling my time with these junk apps is alluring, and I feel good when using them, but I want to find content that takes me somewhere. Ultimately, I don’t want to look back and see hours blocks of time squandered on things I’ll not even remember in a day or two.
The old adage garbage in, garbage out is probably mostly true. There’s no recycling of TikTok content to make trash a treasure. If it is true, then the content we ingest is the foundation we’re building on.
I want to find content that can be a solid foundation to build my life. That means shifting from these bites of junk content to more curated, highly nutritious reading.
I will be ruthless, cut the junk, and begin spending time at the table feasting on the good stuff. We have the hours in the day. My weekly Screen Time report tells me the truth.