Lately I have been reading more in a single day than I used to read in a month couple of decades back, and I understand less of the world than at any point I can remember, and those two facts have been sitting next to each other in my head like neighbours who have stopped speaking, because I have spent this whole year eating and I cannot show you a single meal that stayed down.

I have pulled this thread before, since I wrote back in June about how sugar and information both crossed from a scarce thing into a suffocating one, and again in September about how eating a third less leaves fewer copying errors scattered through the genome, so I will only restate the small piece that matters here, which is that a mind treats a piece of information as a reward in itself and never checks whether the content is true or useful before it hands out the dopamine, and then I want to get to the part I have not written yet, which is the fast.

And the feeding ran fastest right here, because a billion of us came online through one cheap phone and one cheap data plan, and what scaled first in that flood was the forward rather than the encyclopaedia, since our internet has a middle layer that most of the world does not, which is the family group, and inside that group lives the uncle who sends the same health tip eleven times a year, and the message which says a famous man is dead when he is alive and well and filming, and the home remedy that will keep you off insulin forever, and almost none of it is a lie in any testable sense, because the damage is done by facts with no use attached to them, which is the whole disease in one line.

Junk info rarely earns the name by being false, since a work of fiction can teach you more about people than a psychology paper ever will, and a perfectly verified fact can leave you standing exactly where you started, which is the difference between knowing the chemical formula of water and needing a drink, and the factory that produces this stuff at scale is prime time television, where grown men in nice suits scream at each other for an hour about the nation, and the reason they scream is not complicated, because the cheapest strong emotion a human being owns is outrage, since all it needs is a story of somebody doing you wrong and a tribe to be angry on behalf of, and outrage is free to produce and impossible to switch off once it has started.

That is the economy of it, because attention is the only thing that is genuinely running out, and low grade information grabs attention exactly as well as the useful kind, so the rational move for anyone selling audience is to mass produce the junk, and the junk tastes wonderful, since your head cannot tell the difference between learning a thing and the sensation of learning a thing, so you come off two hours of scrolling feeling fed and rested and completely unable to name one sentence you actually read, and I have read enough of the research as a hobbyist to be careful here, but the papers keep finding that people on these apps get less able to process what is in front of them and often cannot recall what they just went past.

The body has a word for what happens when you eat like this, and the mind has no such word, so let me describe it the long way, which is that you fill up on half remembered gibberish until you can no longer tell the relevant from the irrelevant, so you get wounded by trivia and furious about things that never happened, and both the wound and the fury push you to consume even more, and while you are consuming you are not doing the one thing that would help, which is sitting still long enough to think, and the pipes quietly fur up while you are sure you are getting sharper.

Here is the thing I cannot stop noticing, which is that we are a civilisation that fasts, since Ekadashi and Navratri and Ramzan and the weekly upvas are all one inherited technology for resting the body from eating, and our grandmothers kept that discipline without ever calling it a diet, and then we built a second mouth into the front of our head and never once thought to rest it, and the yogic tradition even had the name for this practice ready, which was pratyahara, the deliberate withdrawal of the senses, and we turned the withdrawal of the senses into a two minute reel about the withdrawal of the senses. So we fast the stomach every week and starve the mind never.

So the first move is only to watch, which sounds weak until you try it, which is to pay attention to what you are paying attention to, and when the hand goes for the phone at a red light to stop for half a second and ask what this piece of information is going to do for me in ten minutes and in ten months and in ten years, and the honest answer is almost always nothing, and the honest answer is the whole cure. And when understanding fails, the second move is to make the junk physically unavailable, which for me meant writing, because a writer owes the reader the duty of not being full of shit and that duty forces you to filter every claim you carry, and writing also forces whole afternoons where no new information comes in at all, and you are left alone with whatever is actually in your head, and I have come to trust that empty room and the empty page more than any feed, and the hill roads here help a little because half of them have no signal.

Its so sad to see how long it took me to work out that the real question is how little of what I read I would defend out loud, and I keep thinking about the last weigh-in, which for all of us comes at the end when we add up the regrets, and nobody says on that day that they wish they had spent more of it refreshing a homepage. How much of what you scrolled this week could you still explain to a stranger? I don’t think most of us could explain a single thing! And when you finally notice all the holes in your own memory, the last discovery is the strange one, which is that I had not been reading the feed nearly as much as the feed had been reading me. My duty was never to stock facts like grain, since hoarding knowledge I will never use is just greed wearing the coat of learning, and the only understanding worth fasting for is the kind you can act on. Tweet to me the last useless thing you can still remember, I am @troysk704.