The Information Diet

Feeling overwhelmed? It might be time to change the way you eat the internet.

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food

There’s such a thing as too much.

Humans behave strangely when we have too much money, power, choice or free time. When a resource becomes abundant, things get weird. That’s especially true if the resource used to be scarce. Our relationship to it changes, and we don’t navigate that change very well.

Take food for example. For most of human history, food was a scarce resource. Today though, in most parts of the world, food is abundant. Across Europe, North America and Oceania and more recently, large swathes of Asia and Latin America, spending on food is now only a small part of the average household budget, which means most people can afford to eat whenever they like.

Unfortunately though, while it’s become relatively less expensive, most of it is low quality. The results are well known. Sugar now kills more people than all forms of violence combined, there are more people on the planet who are obese than starving, and the global agricultural system that we’ve built to supply all that cheap food is slowly but inexorably destroying the conditions that allowed the human race to…