Reading Ourselves Stupid, Diseases of Abundance, and Breast Milk
Baxter's Blend #4
Hey everyone,
Greetings from sunny and sweaty Austin!
This week with writing, I’ve felt more alive and creatively aligned than ever before. For a lot of my time writing online, something about the way I approached the creative act always seemed off. As if there was some structure or rigid recipe I had to follow. Nope.
What I learned this week is that many of my ideas need some more nurturing time. They need a bit more breast milk before I take them off the teat and share them with the world.
This is why I like my new newsletter format. It’s a lighter lift. It still holds me accountable to ship something every week and share what I’m learning with you. But it also lets me spend most of my writing time working on longer, higher-quality essays.
Today’s edition of Baxter’s Blend is all about consumption. Let’s begin with a quote from angel investor and entrepreneur Naval Ravikant:
“All modern diseases are diseases of abundance. We punish ourselves by constantly entertaining our minds and bodies.”
Reading Ourselves Stupid
Everybody always talks about the metaphor of the information diet, but I’ve never seen anybody talk about over-consuming “healthy” inputs.
Consider this thought experiment: let’s say a guy named Ted eats organic and local at Whole Foods. Ted eats to maximize muscle growth and minimize the mean and standard deviation of his blood glucose. But he eat 20 meals a day. 20,000 calories.
After only a few months, Ted is shocked: “What’s going on here? I’m a fat-ass, but I’ve been eating really clean at Whole Foods and have been working out every day!”
In other words, you can still get fat no matter how healthy your inputs are.
Even if you read the classics and have a fantastic filter for the toxicity of the information age, I’m starting to think that it’s possible to read too much. Because while you keep reading, you have no time to think about what you just read. Without reflection and rereading, it’s hard to assimilate a lot of the information.
As Arthur Schopenhauer wrote in 1851:
“And so it happens that the person who reads a great deal — that is to say, almost the whole day, and recreates himself by spending the intervals in thoughtless diversion, gradually loses the ability to think for himself; just as a man who is always riding at last forgets how to walk. Such, however, is the case with many men of learning: they have read themselves stupid.”
(Hat tip to Arshad on Twitter for this one.)
The Acceleration of Addictiveness
The best essay I’ve read from Paul Graham is called “The Acceleration of Addictiveness.”
In it, Graham talks about how the world is becoming increasingly addictive. By addictive, he means this in the colloquial sense—liking something too much.
Technological progress is good because it makes more things that we want to want. But it also leads to more and more things that we don’t want to want, like Cheez-Its, TikTok, and all kinds of other things:
“Alcohol is a dangerous drug, but I'd rather live in a world with wine than one without. Most people can coexist with alcohol; but you have to be careful. More things we like will mean more things we have to be careful about.”
But as he predicted in 2010, people won’t be as careful as they need to be, leading to a divergence in how people live:
“Most people won't, unfortunately. Which means that as the world becomes more addictive, the two senses in which one can live a normal life will be driven ever further apart. One sense of "normal" is statistically normal: what everyone else does. The other is the sense we mean when we talk about the normal operating range of a piece of machinery: what works best.
These two senses are already quite far apart. Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly.”
We Don’t Crave What We Don’t Consume
I found a lovely cartoon from Roz Chast of The New Yorker:
I looked up “ignorance is bliss” on Merriam Webster Dictionary. It’s “used to say that a person who does not know about a problem does not worry about it.”
So in other words, we don’t worry about things we don’t know about. On the theme of consuming media or food, it’s similar: we don’t crave what we don’t consume.
I no longer crave TikTok because I deleted it from my phone four years ago. I no longer crave Cheez-Its because I don’t eat them anymore. I no longer crave cotton candy ice cream because I don’t have any in my freezer. (Ok but as I write this, my mouth is starting to pool with drool for some ice cream…)
Photos Of The Week
I caught a glimpse of a guy’s home screen at my gym. It’s so cool to see other people who agree that many apps and notifications are nonsense. I’m betting that most of the world thinks this guy’s phone setup is weird:
And last of all, to wrap things up on the theme of consumption and abundance:
See you next week,
—Baxter
P.S. Know an intellectual who’d find this interesting? Send it their way:
The way I see reading a ton of books is similar to eating without digesting.
You're shoving content into your brain but not taking the time to reflect on what it means.
The digestion process is extracting nutrients from what we consume and eradicating what isn't nutritious.
We need to spend time consuming & digesting.
My favorite intellectual digestion process is writing.