The world is gradually waking up to the grim consequences of replacing our culture’s millennia-old traditional foods with Hamburger Helper, TV dinners, canned soups, pop-tarts, and candy bars. We were captivated by the novelty and then hooked on the convenience and cost of frozen and packaged foods. Dinner in 15 minutes with no mess. What a relief after a day of commuting, pouring over excel spreadsheets, and running errands! Calories in, calories out, and these meals certainly keep you going.

However, only with the hindsight gained after experiencing several generations of progressive decline in human health and well being are we starting recognize the awful health outcomes of eating microwave-nuked, preservative filled, MSG flavored, seed-oil laden packaged foods as the bulk of our diets. The promise of convenience has come at the cost of not only our health, but also our culture. Cooking skills have declined, family dinners are increasingly rare, and the idea of family recipes being passed down through generations is dying out. Truly, there are trade-offs for everything.

While we are waking up to the food situation, and I see the trend being reversed, my fear today is that we are part of the initial generation unconsciously repeating the same mistake with our informational diet. We are quickly swapping our traditional knowledge sources with ultra-processed information.

I define ultra-processed information as information delivered in a medium that is so brusque and simplified that it requires almost no effort to acquire and mentally process. These brief morsels of data lack context and nuance, and dozens of disjoint ideas usually come boxed together in website media feeds and prompt-generators.

A 60-second TikTok recipe for spicy Korean short ribs. An Eight-minute YouTube video summarizing the ideas of Nietzche. A 500 word bullet-point laden blurb from Axios on the resignation of Justin Trudeau. A 13-tweet long thread of sterile marketing-bro urgency describing the JAW DROPPING AI BREAKTHROUGH BY THIS STEALTH STARTUP. And, of course, the tsunami of answers generated from large language models allowing anyone to query on the collective corpus of human ideas.

The examples above can used for positive and constructive purposes. Consider them the protein bars of processed information. There is absolutely useful knowledge within them, but it’s been distilled into a sickeningly simple format requiring little to no effort for the individual to comprehend. A candy bar filled with oats and pea-protein is not equivalent to a juicy sirloin steak, and watching a 15-minute video on the ideas of Aristotle is not the same as grappling with the Organon over the course of many days.

(We’re not even discussing the vapid sludge that makes up most of the internet information stream.)

My childhood was spent immersed in increasingly simplified online information flows, and I feel like it has made me intellectually lazy and downright stupider. Many of the subjects I’ve spent countless hours listening to podcasts, watching videos, and reading articles on for years I still only have surface level knowledge of! For example, even with my obsession over nutrition and supplementation if you sat me down and asked what a vitamin was or what an amino acid does in the body or how the digestive system works, I wouldn’t be able to give a solid answer. My knowledge of human physiology is a hodgepodge of sticky tidbits of information, memorable facts, and personal anecdotes blended together into a brain slushie that I use to make decisions with.

This leads to a lack of confidence in my own mental faculties. I really don’t that much about my job -programming. If I was deprived from the internet, I would probably be accomplishing tasks at a snail’s pace. I repeatedly lookup syntax, method names, and function arguments for the same languages I’ve used for years. Sure, it’s not feasible to commit every single thing to memory, but what I’m saying it that I’ve trained myself not to commit as much to memory as I should because the knowledge is always a few short keystrokes away. Because there’s no lengthy search, there’s only the slightest effort expended, I’ve been conditioned to ignore context, and laser in on the solution delivered in a code snippet from a Stack Overflow post. The knowledge is used to change a few lines of code and vanishes from my memory. Like a computer cache being cleared, none of it is committed to my mental hard-drive.

Moreover, the prevalence of easily accessible and consumable information leads to a stunted ability to be resourceful, to figure things out, to innovate. If the top-10 things to visit are always accessible then I don’t need to stretch myself planning out a vacation, I can just look up what to do online or type in a prompt to a search engine. With a billion recipes readily available at my fingertips, I take the path of least resistance and follow along the instructions and don’t get pushed by necessity to be creative and experiment with the ingredients I have. It’s nice having a tutorial video for everything, but that means I’m not developing my own ability to learn and be creative.

As with any technology, tool, or piece of information there’s trade-offs to be considered. I never advocate for dismissing all technology out of hand or claim that this prevalence of information isn’t without great upside! Quite the contrary, it’s a blessing to live in this time where the whole collective body of human knowledge is at my fingertips, just like it’s a blessing to have readily available and convenient food. I point out the negative effects so we can consciously address and minimize them, not to throw the hot-pockets out with the box.

So what can we do to keep our information diet nutritionally dense, to build firm intellectual models of what we consume, and to train ourselves to be resourceful, creative, and intellectually disciplined?

The first thing is to acknowledge where we are and have the humility to realize where our development has been retarded and how our current habits contribute to an intellectually unhealthy lifestyle. We are living, most likely implicitly, with a goal to cram the most information in our mind in the shortest time possible and move as quick as possible to complete our daily tasks. We need to change our view and realize that learning and acting in the world isn’t about the journey or the destination, but who we become along the way. With that said, if there is no journey, then there’s no opportunity to grow between here and there.

For me, this means that I want to strive to be semi-independent of external sources of knowledge in my day-to-day functioning. I want to be able to cook without needing to constantly check a screen for the next instruction of a recipe. I want to navigate around my city without needing to follow the arrow on my GPS. I want to live as an independent, human being who relies on God, not as an informational-cyborg plugged into mankind’s digital library with a mushy, weak mind that is only skilled at information retrieval and following prepared instructions.

In this world we have to consciously go out of our way at the grocery store or venture to a farmer’s market to get grass-fed beef and organic vegetables our ancestors took as the norm. We have to do the same with our mental diets and go out of our way, sacrificing convenience and expending effort, to acquire and consume high quality sources of knowledge. We should go read the great books, chew on Aristotle, Plato and the other great thinkers who formed our culture. We should look to consume long-form articles, in moderation, and take the time to really digest and integrate the information we’re consuming into knowledge that expands our worldview, leads to new skills being developed, and cultivates mastery of the subject material. Watch classic movies. Listen to the great classical music. Read literature and seminal books and papers in your field of study, just as a habit, not to accomplish some immediate work task. Don’t focus on the next moment, focus on fertilizing your mind so it grows into something magnificent over time.

And let us moderate our information consumption to. Give us time to digest the ideas we are exposed to and integrate into our worldview, instead of jumping to the next article or podcast immediately. As with diets, sometimes less is more beneficial to us. There’s no need to cram ourselves full of facts and trivia every moment of the day, take some time to actually experience life without needing to consume.

The abundance of ultra processed, pre-packaged information isn’t likely to go anywhere, and a man does not have enough hours in the day to truly master every single domain of life he participates in. We will end up relying on the internet and the great digital ocean of information at times. However, with wisdom, curation of our chosen informational media, and effort invested into a healthy mental diet we can operate in the ocean of ultra-processed information while avoiding most of the deleterious effects and keeping a strong mind throughout our lives.