Twelve hours of input, zero hours of output
The average American adult spends 12 hours and 37 minutes per day consuming media. Over 6 hours of that is digital. Two and a half hours is social media alone. These are not fringe statistics — they come from eMarketer's 2024 media consumption report and they describe the baseline behavior of a normal person in a developed economy.
Herbert Simon saw this coming in 1971, decades before smartphones: "A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it." He was describing an economic law. Attention is finite. Information is infinite. When supply outstrips demand, the scarce resource becomes the bottleneck. And right now, most people treat attention — the only resource that determines the quality of their thinking — as if it were free.
This is the problem an information diet solves. Not by asking you to consume less in some vague, aspirational sense. By asking you to choose what you consume with the same deliberation you'd apply to any other system you depend on.
The nutritional metaphor — and where it breaks
Clay Johnson coined the term in his 2012 book The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption. His argument was direct: just as the industrialization of food created an obesity epidemic by making cheap calories available at scale, the industrialization of media created an information obesity epidemic by making cheap content available at infinite scale. People don't get fat because they lack willpower. They get fat because the system is optimized to overfeed them. People don't become informationally obese because they're lazy. They become informationally obese because every app, platform, and notification system is engineered to maximize their consumption.
Johnson's prescription mirrors nutritional advice: consume less processed information, seek out primary sources instead of reprocessors, learn to read data yourself rather than relying on someone else's interpretation. It's solid advice. And the metaphor works up to a point.
Where it breaks is specificity. Carbohydrates are interchangeable — your body uses the same glucose molecule whether you're running or thinking. Information is not interchangeable. A research paper on machine learning is not a substitute for a case study on organizational design, even if both are "high quality." Your information diet has to be matched to your epistemic goals — the specific questions you're trying to answer, the decisions you're trying to make, the skills you're trying to build. This means a good information diet isn't just about quality. It's about relevance to your current cognitive work.
Tim Ferriss pushed this further in The 4-Hour Workweek (2007) with what he called the "low-information diet" — essentially, selective ignorance as a productivity strategy. His rule: "Will I definitely use this information for something immediate and important?" If the answer is no, don't consume it. He claimed to have stopped reading newspapers entirely for five years with zero negative impact on his life or income. The strategy was deliberately extreme, designed to break the assumption that staying informed is a prerequisite for functioning.
Ferriss's approach is useful as a thought experiment. Taken literally, it creates blind spots. But the underlying question — would I definitely use this? — is one of the most efficient filters you can run on any information source.
Why your defaults are adversarial
Selective exposure theory, rooted in Festinger's 1957 work on cognitive dissonance, explains why your natural information consumption pattern is already biased. People don't select information randomly. They systematically prefer information that confirms existing beliefs and avoid information that challenges them. This isn't a personal failing — it's a documented cognitive pattern. Your mind seeks consonance. Dissonant information creates discomfort. So without deliberate intervention, your information diet self-selects toward confirmation.
Now layer algorithmic amplification on top of that. Social media platforms analyze what you click, what you linger on, what you share, and what you react to — then serve you more of the same. The algorithm doesn't care about your epistemic health. It cares about engagement. And engagement is maximized by emotional arousal, not by accuracy or depth.
The research on this is unambiguous. A 2022 Texas Tech University study found that 16.5% of surveyed adults showed signs of "severely problematic" news consumption — where news stories dominated their waking thoughts, disrupted relationships, made it difficult to focus, and contributed to insomnia. A 2025 study in JMIR Mental Health described the self-perpetuating cycle: people consume media to reduce uncertainty about the world, but the consumption itself generates more anxiety, which drives more consumption. The system is designed to keep you in the loop, not to keep you informed.
This means your default information environment is not neutral. It's adversarial. It's optimized to capture your attention, confirm your biases, and provoke emotional reactions — none of which serve your ability to think clearly. Curating your information diet isn't a luxury. It's a defensive measure.
The subscription model: choosing inputs instead of filtering outputs
The previous lesson established that high-quality sources reduce the need for noise filtering. An information diet operationalizes that principle. Instead of consuming whatever the algorithm serves and then trying to separate signal from noise after the fact, you choose your inputs deliberately and let everything else go unread.
This is the difference between an algorithmic feed and a subscription model. In an algorithmic feed, someone else decides what you see based on what maximizes your engagement. In a subscription model — RSS feeds, curated newsletters, specific authors, targeted publications — you decide what you see based on what serves your thinking.
RSS, in particular, deserves rehabilitation. Declared dead after Google Reader shut down in 2013, RSS has experienced a resurgence as people seek alternatives to algorithmic feeds. A 2023 Pew Research Center study found that 68% of users feel overwhelmed by algorithmic feeds. Feedly, one of the major RSS platforms, reported 25% user growth in Q4 2024, attributing it to users seeking escape from social media echo chambers. The reason is structural: RSS delivers content in chronological order from sources you explicitly chose. No algorithm. No engagement optimization. No surprise outrage bait in between the articles you actually want to read.
The practical framework looks like this:
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Define your epistemic goals. What questions are you trying to answer this quarter? What skills are you building? What decisions are upcoming? Your information diet should be matched to these, not to "staying current" in some abstract sense.
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Choose sources, not platforms. Subscribe to specific writers, specific publications, specific podcasts — not to "Twitter" or "Reddit" or "the news." The unit of subscription should be a source you trust, not a platform that aggregates sources you haven't vetted.
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Set a time budget. Cal Newport, in Digital Minimalism (2019), argues that intentionality is satisfying — that deliberately choosing how you engage with technology produces more benefit than any individual tool provides. Set a fixed window for information consumption. Twenty to forty minutes per day is enough for most people who aren't in media or journalism.
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Batch and schedule. Ferriss's advice to check email twice a day applies to all information consumption. Batch your reading into one or two sessions. Do not keep feeds, news apps, or notification-driven channels open during deep work.
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Apply the one-in-one-out rule. Every time you add a new source, remove an existing one. This forces a quality competition among your inputs and prevents gradual drift back toward information overload.
Progressive digestion: turning consumption into cognition
Consuming good information is necessary but not sufficient. The failure mode of even a well-curated diet is passive consumption — reading high-quality material and retaining nothing. Tiago Forte's progressive summarization technique, described in Building a Second Brain (2022), offers a useful model for active digestion.
The technique works in layers. When you capture a note or article excerpt, you save the full passage. On a second pass, you bold the key sentences. On a third pass, you highlight the most essential phrases within the bolded text. On a fourth pass, you write a one-line summary in your own words. Each layer compresses the information further, and the act of compression forces you to decide what actually matters. You're not filing information for later. You're metabolizing it — turning someone else's ideas into objects you can use.
This maps directly to the epistemic infrastructure this curriculum builds. Captured, highlighted, summarized information is no longer someone else's thought sitting in your feed. It's a thought-object in your system — versioned, retrievable, composable with other thought-objects. The information diet determines what raw material enters your system. Progressive digestion determines whether that material becomes usable cognition or just noise that happened to come from a better source.
AI as a digestion layer, not a consumption multiplier
The temptation with AI tools is to use them to consume more — summarize more articles, scan more feeds, monitor more sources. This is exactly backwards. AI used to increase consumption volume recreates the information overload problem at higher throughput. You're still consuming more than you can metabolize. You've just automated the gluttony.
The correct use of AI in an information diet is as a digestion layer. Use it to compress, not to expand. Specific applications:
- Summarize before you read. Run a long article through an AI summary before deciding whether to invest full attention. This is triage, not replacement — you still read the things that matter, but you stop spending 20 minutes on articles that could have been two paragraphs.
- Extract structured insights. After reading something valuable, ask AI to extract the core claims, supporting evidence, and open questions. Compare its extraction to yours. The gap between them is where your understanding is either deeper or shallower than you thought.
- Cross-reference across your notes. Use AI to find connections between new material and existing thought-objects in your second brain. "How does this article relate to the three notes I captured last week on decision-making under uncertainty?" This is composition, not consumption.
- Generate challenge questions. After reading a piece you agree with, ask AI to steelman the opposing position. This directly counteracts selective exposure bias — the tendency to consume only what confirms what you already believe.
The principle: AI should reduce the cognitive cost of processing information, not increase the volume of information consumed. Your information diet stays small and deliberate. AI helps you extract more from less.
The protocol: build your diet this week
This is not a someday-maybe project. You can build a functional information diet in a single focused session.
Step 1 — Audit (30 minutes). Run the exercise from this lesson. Track every information source you consume for one full day. Categorize each source as essential, nice-to-have, or autopilot.
Step 2 — Cut (15 minutes). Unsubscribe from every source in the autopilot category. Unfollow accounts that don't serve your epistemic goals. Turn off notifications for everything except direct messages from people who matter. This will feel aggressive. Do it anyway.
Step 3 — Subscribe (15 minutes). Identify three to five sources that directly serve your current epistemic goals. Subscribe via RSS, email newsletter, or bookmarked site — not through a social media feed. The goal is direct access without algorithmic intermediation.
Step 4 — Schedule (5 minutes). Block one reading window per day — morning, lunch, or evening. Twenty to forty minutes. This is when you consume. Outside this window, you produce.
Step 5 — Digest (ongoing). For every reading session, capture at least one idea into your notes using progressive summarization or your preferred method. If a reading session produces zero captured insights, the sources you read that day aren't serving your diet. Replace them.
What this makes possible
An information diet is not deprivation. It is the prerequisite for depth. When you stop trying to stay current on everything, you create the cognitive space to understand a few things well. When you choose your sources deliberately, you stop outsourcing your attention to algorithms that don't share your goals. When you digest what you consume instead of just passing it through, information transforms from noise into material you can think with.
The previous lesson showed that high-quality sources reduce the need for noise filtering. This lesson operationalized that insight into a practice: choose your inputs, set boundaries, metabolize what you consume.
The next lesson confronts the emotional resistance directly. Because the hardest part of an information diet isn't building it — it's living with the fear that you're missing something important. That fear has a name, and it has a cost. L-0126 examines what "staying informed about everything" actually costs you.
Sources
- Johnson, C.A. (2012). The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption. O'Reilly Media.
- Ferriss, T. (2007). The 4-Hour Workweek. Crown Publishing. Chapter on "The Low-Information Diet."
- Newport, C. (2019). Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World. Portfolio/Penguin.
- Forte, T. (2022). Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential. Atria Books.
- Simon, H.A. (1971). "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World." In M. Greenberger (Ed.), Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest.
- Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford University Press.
- McLaughlin, B. et al. (2022). "Problematic News Consumption and Its Relationship to Mental and Physical Ill-Being." Health Communication, Texas Tech University.
- JMIR Mental Health (2025). "Impact of Media-Induced Uncertainty on Mental Health: Narrative-Based Perspective."
- eMarketer (2024). "Digital media makes up nearly two-thirds of consumers' total time spent with media."
- Pew Research Center (2023). Digital content consumption and algorithmic feed attitudes study.