Our modern (content) diet

food for thought

Crawfish boil, New Jersey at K&M’s — July 2023

In the days that followed my 10-day meditation retreat, I found myself moving through the world more serenely and at peace than I've felt in a very long time. It reminded me of being a kid in the summertime when life was about going to camp during the day, playing manhunt in the evening, and reading a good book in between — when all was well in the world. A life before the nagging feeling of checking our phones, wondering what we might be missing out on. Growing up in the 2000s was about the here and now — no social media, no FOMO. Life was simple and actually social.

As a millennial, I've always been grateful for the emergence of new technology that seemed to come online right when our generation needed it the most. AOL Instant Messenger, cellphones, and Myspace all hit the scene when we were in middle school as our class sizes increased and friend groups were scattered across different color "houses." Fortunately, none of them were accessible 24/7 – AIM and Myspace requiring a dial-up connection and text messages costing 10¢ each. It allowed us to communicate just enough to touch base, set our Top 8, and make plans, but we still largely lived untethered to our desktop computers and RAZRs.

As we grew up, tech grew up with us. During high school, cellphones saw massive improvements, freeing us from the limitations of dial-up and desktop computers. Facebook found a new market in high school students and Instagram launched shortly after, allowing us to keep up with old and new friends as we set off to different cities for college. In the 2010s, tech shifted from helping us stay connected digitally to enabling IRL experience. There was Tinder to find us dates, Uber to drive us home, Airbnb to house us on weekend trips. In my early 20s, I often thought about Drake's quote, "What a time to be alive," basking in the advancements that were connecting us all in new ways.

Yet, in recent years, that sentiment feels like a dream from another lifetime. As I emerged from 10 days off the grid and relished the freedom from my phone, I picked my head up and began to observe the current state of our relationship with technology. I saw people glued to their phones while on walks, at dinners with their partners, in the middle of conversations with friends – scrolling away in pursuit of getting to the bottom of endless feeds and making it to Inbox 0 just in time for emails to pile back up.

Relinquishing all technology during the retreat gave me the space to cultivate a sense of presence and peace that I wasn’t ready to let go of. While my abstinence from technology only lasted a few days back in the real world, it gave me enough time to experiment with living more intentionally. Life slowed as I choose pen & paper over my laptop, turned to my partner to talk over scrolling social media, and opted to read outdoors rather than sit at my desk.

In our effort to stay connected despite our busy lives, we reach for the most convenient way to keep up with others. Just for a few minutes we tell ourselves as we bounce from social feed to social feed, forgetting why we opened the app in the first place. Like food, this convenience has a cost — when we feed our minds and bodies with what’s most readily available, we’re consuming the most processed, dopamine-fueled options. Left to our own devices, we may take the path of least resistance and abide by the default settings, not realizing that these settings were engineered to drive profits and boost retention rather than designed with our best interest in mind.

food for thought

While advancements in technology over the decades have undoubtedly raised our standard of living, helping us reach new heights of productivity and connectedness, the role of technology has metastasized in ways that have warped our realities of what’s healthy. We’re taught that the only way to keep up is be extremely online, reluctantly logging off only when absolutely necessary.

This era of content proliferation is reminiscent of the early 1900s when the Industrialization Revolution brought advancements in convenience foods that were once inconceivable. Refrigeration and canning made distribution of processed and frozen foods possible, allowing them to retain their shape and taste far beyond a natural shelf life. While it offered Americans a slew of novel, time-saving foods to eat, it set in motion a generation of unprecedented visible and invisible health issues including the obesity and cardiac health epidemics. The decades that followed brought Weight Watchers, the Atkins Diet, low fat diets, and an onslaught of other trends that promised to help us lose the extra pounds gained from trading fresh foods for convenience.

Growing up, I viewed food as something to be consumed and enjoyed, opting for an extra serving of dessert over a more nutrient-dense alternative. When I went out to restaurants, I’d order meals that I couldn’t cook at home, wondering why anyone would ever spend money on salads, a meal that could easily be constructed. During training seasons when I pushed my body to the limit, I’d consume any food that I thought would keep me full, the more carbs, the better. I was under the illusion that calories and taste were the only thing that mattered. Big food marketing had convinced me and an entire generation of consumers that all calories were created equal and that there was no such thing as a healthy fat.

When we view food and content as something to be consumed rather than the primary fuel source for our body and mind, it’s no wonder why we gravitate towards to the ultra-processed options. In my 20s and post college dining halls, I began cooking for myself and got curious about the foods I was consuming. As I navigated the full cycle of consumption from meal planning to grocery shopping to meal prepping to eating, my perspective on food shifted. I didn’t realize how much sugar and butter went into this dessert. Wow, there’s so little nutrition in this pasta (that I ate every day in college). I don’t recognize what any of these ingredients are. I started seeing food for what it truly is — the substance that our bodies are made of. The food we eat is literally what makes up our bodies. When I had this realization, ordering salads and filling my plate with nutritious options became obvious.

the new junk food

As the food industry has commoditized our metabolic health, tech companies have come after our mental health in the form of capturing our attention to drive ad revenue and daily engagement. Our relationship with processed foods and the dopamine-fueled content we feed our minds isn’t so different — being extremely online is the new junk food. No matter how long we spend online, it never feels enough and that’s by design. We’re always behind, always another news story, another Instagram story, another email.

In recent years, we’ve seen a rise in research studying the impact different diets have on our long-term health and companies enabling consumers to track the impact of food on their health real-time, debunking the “calories in, calories out” model. What we consume matters after all and soon we’ll begin to recognize that similarly, not all content is created equal. Research labs like Sapien Labs are beginning to devote research to understanding the impact that technology is having on our brains. Their latest study showed that the younger an individual gets their first smartphone, the worse mental health they’re likely to report as a young adult today.

When we take the “calories in, calories out” approach with our mental health, filling our brains with ephemeral content, it’s no surprise that nearly a third of American adults report experiencing anxiety or depression. As with the food pyramid, it’s time to take a critical lens to the stories we’ve been told and re-build our plates for a modern diet that makes us whole.

curating the modern diet

It is often the case that the more set in your personal regimen, the more freedom you have within that structure to express yourself. Discipline and freedom seem like opposites. In reality, they are partners. Discipline is not a lack of freedom, it is a harmonious relationship with time.

— Rick Rubin, The Creative Act

Diets commonly have a negative connotation, synonymous with restriction, but that implies we’re sacrificing something not worth giving up. Rather than viewing diets as an elimination game, I’ve come to see them as a vehicle for bringing me towards a freer, more self-reliant me. Cutting junk content isn’t a form of deprivation, it’s a path towards abundance. Abundance in time, energy, and freedom. It’s a choice I’m making to fill my mind with the intellectually simulating ideas it enjoys wrestling with.

Diets taken on with a purpose are an exercise in filling our plates and lives with whole foods and nourishing content that crowd out the processed and dopamine-fueled things that numb us.

trading dopamine hits for delayed gratification

The uncertainty that weighed on me of whether I was ready to go off the grid for 10 days was anchored in a deep fear of disconnecting from the dopamine loops and making space for subconscious thoughts to float to the surface. As I returned to our world that demands speed, I was surprised at how pleasant it felt to be without technology. It was liberating. It took a few days to readjust to carrying a phone around again — even the act of holding my phone in the palm of my hand felt unfamiliar.

I’ve observed that the days I spend less than an hour on my phone are often my more productive, meaningful days. The evenings I read a book before I go to bed rather than scroll through Twitter tend to bring a more restful night of sleep and energizing morning. The more I live in the physical world, seeing and calling friends rather than texting and DMing, the more truly connected I feel to them. Conversely, when I fall into the pattern of reaching for my phone to fill even the shortest moments of down time, I find myself being sucked into a vicious cycle, refreshing notifications and unable to snap myself out of the dopamine traps.

The good news is that there is a path to untethering ourselves from our reliance on technology and we don’t need to wait for a myriad of digital detoxes to come online to do it. We can start trading dopamine hits for delayed gratification as soon as we’re willing to rethink our relationship with the content we’re consuming. By taking the perspective that the content we feed our minds is what our mind becomes made of, we can start crowding out the dopamine-fueled content with the meaningful and nourishing.

1. Take inventory of the dopamine-fueled content & experiences in your life and turn your assumptions on their head

What social media and apps eat up most of your time? Is time spent scrolling fueling you or draining you? What beliefs do you have about why consuming this content is important to you?

I’d long committed to staying on Instagram because I thought if I left, I’d have a hard time keeping up with friends who lived on the other side of the country. Turns out, I do miss out on the small day-to-day moments that make it to their stories, but because I no longer waste hours in the depths of Instagram, I have more time for longer, deeper catch-up calls. Having no idea what the other person has been up to since we last chatted allows us to cut the surface level small talk and dive straight into what matters, opening the door for far more meaningful conversations than we’ve previously had.

2. Choose your own mode and adventure

What conditions do you thrive under? Do you prefer moderation or an all-or-nothing approach?

I’ve always preferred an all-or-nothing approach when taking on a new challenge. Recently, I thought I’d revisit my capacity for moderation and decided to get back on Instagram. As an experiment, I unfollowed or muted the accounts of everyone who I don’t actively keep in touch with and curated a feed of good friends only. I then sat back to observe my behavior for the next week. Turns out, by simply knowing I had redownloaded Instagram, I found myself giving into the urge of checking the app multiple times a day.

With some experimentation, I confirmed I still operate best when access is out of sight, out of mind. For me, it’s far easier to eliminate Instagram from my diet altogether than eat a limited feed in moderation. Know thyself.

3. Fill up and crowd out

What do you wish you had more time to do? What do you wish you were doing less? How can you put the systems in place to fill up on what nourishes you and crowd out what drains you?

In an effort to fuel my brain with meaningful content, I’ve put in a more concerted effort to keep my Reader clutter-free. Reader serves as my primary app for reading and highlighting articles and books. I found that when I let my save-for-later essays pile up, it causes too much friction to figure out what to read next so I dedicated an afternoon to clearing out my feed. Now, whenever I feel an impulse to navigate to Twitter or Slack, I’ll click on Reader first and direct my attention to reading an article that I recently saved before I check other forms of media. Similar to working out, I’ve never regretted opting to read a longer form piece over getting a quick hit of dopamine through ephemeral content. The bonus is that I rarely find myself navigating to other apps after I log into Reader — that impulse seems to disappear after the first few moments of diving into an essay.

It’s easy to look at the state of our relationship with technology and feel a sense of despair, especially as the world experiences unprecedented development in artificial intelligence that will surely bring unintended consequences that we’ll soon need to solve for. The silver lining of it all is that curating a modern diet that best suits your life isn’t about adding more and more to your plate. On the contrary, it’s an exercise in getting back to basics. It’s about cultivating scarcity in a way that paves a path towards freedom, releasing ourselves from the grips of the very thing that was meant to enrich our lives.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you think in the comments below or on Twitter.

If you enjoyed this essay, check out two related essays: Finding peace in 10 days of silence and Slowing down to speed up.

Thanks to Ryan for reviewing drafts of this essay.