Over the weekend, I took time to be away from my phone and not worry too much about the world that wasn’t right before me.
Social media, posting, and e-mails took a backseat while I celebrated my body and exercised, went out to vote early (Go Vote!), and went apple picking.
It got me thinking about how I set certain goals for myself every week (shout out to my man Sean for holding me accountable for larger, weekly goals versus my usual dailies) that require me to be attached to the digital world.
I didn’t feel the same sense of defeat this morning when I looked at my weekly goals and saw that a few of them didn’t quite get done. I did, however, think about how crazy it is that much of our lives have become “processed,” and not just from a food perspective, either.
I highly recommend reading that newsletter linked above if you have 15-20 minutes.
Newsletter Summary:
How much of what we consume in life is optimized to keep us addicted
Ways to detach and be more present in the real world this week
One quote about reality to start the week
🛢️ How "Processed" Is Your Life?
Between our cravings for sweet foods and our attention spans constantly being jerked in all directions, there are many similarities in our consumption of nutritional (or non-nutritional) things and digital things.
Phan’s newsletter noted an interesting parallel between the hyper-palatable way in which media and food are served to us today, citing author Cal Newport’s initial noticing of these concepts:
“Text-based media: This is comparable to minimally-processed whole foods (grains, fruits, vegetables, meats). Humans have eaten this type of food for thousands of year. In this analogy, we’ve been working with some form of reading for over 5,000 years. All things equal, eating whole foods rather than junk food will make us feel better while “consuming writing tends to make us feel better [than other types of media], and we rarely hear concerns about reading too much.”
Electronic mass media: Newport puts the major types of mass media that proliferated from the 1950s (radio, TV) through to the early internet (podcast, blogs) into the moderately-processed foods. In the analogy, these are comparable to white bread and canned soups, which are “easier to consume and much more superficially palatable”. While this content can be valuable, “the ease of its delivery requires vigilance to protect against over-consumption.”
Social media: This most recent crop of media is comparable to ultra-processed foods with their “lab-optimized hyper-palatability”. The design of smartphone social apps powered by recommendation algorithms deliver “hard to resist combinations that will appeal to users”.”
Think of how you consume both of these things.
Have you sat down to read a long-form article like Trung’s recently? Or are you more of a TikTok scroller?
Do you enjoy cooking a well-thought-out and detailed recipe for a delicious meal, or would you rather order takeout?
This is not to say you should never scroll social media or even cancel takeout meals altogether.
But too often, people lose track of time (and calories) by not being mindful of consumption.
These are concepts you should think fairly deeply about weekly for your mental and physical health.
Take TikTok, for example:
The team of internal researchers at Tiktok, while redacting as many as THIRTY PAGES(!) from their white paper, determined that it only takes 35 minutes of scrolling (or 260 Tiktoks, for an exact number) to become addicted to the app.
Along with this, they also admitted to demoting people’s posts who they deemed unattractive, which we learned from the Meta lawsuit makes the people who stare at these pre-determined hot people (particularly women) more depressed.
Let’s also assume that most TikTok scrolling happens in a stationary position, too (I hope you aren’t walking in the streets watching and listening to brain-rot content). Sitting for long periods has been known to be correlated with depression and anxiety, too, with immobile people feeling about 20% more depressed than active people.
Did this scare you straight?
I’m not perfect either — I do find myself getting caught up in the plethora of social media apps I use to manage and grow my business (and occasionally scroll) and have to re-assess what’s important every few hours to get off them.
But thinking about the deleterious effects of digital media the same way we think about food can help us.
Imagine if we thought of the data points above the same way we think about processed food:
Trung Phan’s breakdown of How Doritos Became So Addictive in his newsletter highlights the freaky way the chips are made, which makes me want to stay away from a bag for a little while.
On top of crazy chemical processing, the U.S. still has a major additive problem. There are up to 7 additives that are still tossed into a lot of processed U.S. foods that are banned in other countries because of their links to cancer, inflammation, and genotoxic mutations.
We like fresh food from farmer’s markets better because foods produced in smaller quantities — not mass-produced in factories — are less diluted by water, which means less water weight, fewer calories, more satiation, and oh yeah… better taste.
The occasional junk food is okay for most people, to be sure, but we’ve all had a junk food spiral — whether it’s on the weekend or for a few days at a time — and I think we recognize that that can’t always happen. Why can’t we do the same with our media consumption?
Ways To Detach
Coincidentally, the solutions for both of these problems can be solved by getting up and going to do something (preferably outdoors) in the real world.
The above apple picking trip was a perfect example.
We still took pictures on our phones, but we didn’t feel compelled to post anything to Instagram in the moment.
We also had an hour-drive to the orchard, where we didn’t focus too much on our phones (obviously — eyes on the road!) and had good conversation in the car.
And of course, all the food on the farm was fresh, the veggies in our other dishes were sustainably sourced, and we didn’t feel bloated after those meals.
Another shocking claim from the TikTok white paper is that constant exposure to the app (or any similar app with a manipulative algorithm) might make it less likely for people to engage to face-to-face conversation in a day.
As wonderful as the banks of knowledge are in platforms like Youtube and Substack, and even in some parts of X (when you filter out all the other annoying noise), too, you’d be delighted at how much you can learn from just talking to a person face-to-face.
A good metric for deciding how much you can get out of a conversation with someone— friend, acquaintance or stranger — is as follows:
“Find out what someone is really talented at, and then ask them about that thing.”
These usually tend to be the most fruitful discussions because you can learn more from the anecdotal experience of an expert than you could from someone speculating on an app.*
*I get that experts exist on social media too — but those connections are manufactured. You won’t always have control over which experts get thrown at you, or be able to ask them the “tough” questions like you could in a face-to-face convo.
As far as detaching yourself from bad food goes, my best advice would be to spend the extra time in grocery stores reading nutrition and ingredient labels.
A recent podcast episode from Andrew Huberman dissected a lot of the harmful endocrine disruptors in our environment, the likes of which are also jammed into food (among some of the ones listed above).
Doing your part to not over-consume canned and highly-packaged foods and cooking your meals as often as possible is the best way to get yourself unstuck from the processed mania around our diets.
🔎 One Quote To Start The Week
"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all."
– Oscar Wilde
Let’s have a great week!
My instinctive reaction to TikTok the first and only time I used it was “I can not afford to get hooked on this!” And so I never went there again. I’m the kind of person that falls hard for traps like this.
Now I’m surrounded by phone zombies- who know they have a problem but just can’t help themselves.