Take Control of Your Information Diet

During 2008-11, the Indian filmmaker Ramgopal Varma (RGV) was a prolific blogger. I was a keen reader and gulped everything he wrote.

Later on, RGV did a zillion video interviews on every conceivable topic under the sun. The cumulative playlist might run a few hundred hours.

But nothing RGV said in those interviews ever sounded new to me.

There’s nothing in all those hours that couldn’t be derived from his blog.

And here’s the real kicker: the entire blog would only take a few hours to read.

In order to avoid reading, some people literally spent a few hundred hours more. All without accruing any additional advantage.

What’s happening?

According to The Information Diet, modern humans spend up to 11 hours a day in constant consumption. Not eating, but consuming information from modern devices. Just like bodily obesity, information obesity has consequences too.

Information overload prevents you from focusing on things critical for your life goals and fulfillment.

As philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau remarked: “Real wisdom is not the knowledge of everything, but the knowledge of which things in life are necessary, which are less necessary, and which are completely unnecessary to know.”

Also, information obesity doesn’t necessarily make people smarter. On the contrary, if their first principles are shaky, informationally obese people are more, not less, vulnerable to disinformation. Precisely the deluge of information prevents them from reflecting and questioning their belief system.

Further, overload prevents you from critically evaluating what you’ve consumed. Today, it’s vital to immunize oneself from the propaganda reigning over the infospaces. That can only be done when you consume responsibly.

What can we do?

W. Keith Campbell, a psychologist, was asked the following at a local psychology club: “What do you do if you want to become a successful academic?”

He responded:

“Then I shared the first two things that popped into my head: read old books and stay physically fit.

The “read old books” part should be obvious. In 2025, more content is created in a single day than all of 1925 combined. You simply can’t keep up. The only reasonable approach to understanding the world is to read old books, build a basic reality map from the old models, and then use your reality map to navigate the deluge of new content. Again, that’s pretty obvious—although, unfortunately, most people don’t read old books.”

Great advice, this. Read old books.

In my view, reading philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche makes most pop psychology books redundant. Because, to my mind, most of these books are inspired by Nietzsche’s works. If you’ve read Nietzsche keenly, the new ideas will all look like derivatives.

For people neither intellectually indulgent nor time affluent, Will Durant’s “The Story of Philosophy” is uniquely-qualified to be the “Minimum Effective Dose” as far as the western philosophy is concerned.

Among the tons of books on writing advice, if you have time for just one, go for William Zinsser’s “On Writing Well”. Sure, there are many other books offering great writing advice. Yet, Zinsser’s book can help you make a good enough leap.

Interestingly, the first two books (cited above) are about 100 years old. The third book’s first edition came out 50 years ago.

You need a newspaper, not an internet rabbit hole

Those of us who completed schooling in the pre-internet era appreciate how the internet is now allowing us to deep-dive into niche topics.

But we don’t appreciate how the mental frameworks we imbued from that era are helping us drill-down without feeling overwhelmed.

Imagine a digital-native seeking to learn physics on his own.

• Where does he start?
• What’re the foundational principles?
• How does he navigate oceanic knowledge?
• Why was quantum physics such a paradigm shift from classical physics?

Without a syllabus, without structured learning, the student will be baffled by the enormity of knowledge that lies ahead.

Look at it this way: the internet has everything you require to master a subject. But it is designed for those who already know what they need. In contrast, it’s most likely to bewilder, not illuminate, the beginners.  Considering we now have access to even Nobel Prize-winning academic papers, what’s preventing you from learning a subject you’re interested in?

• Lack of structure.
• Lack of a process that takes you from fundamentals to complex theories to application.
• Lack of a teacher who connects the dots for you.

I use the analogy of newspaper to denote a process that gives you a bird’s eye view of everything newsworthy. It gives you a solid foundation on things that constitute news. It gives you a snapshot of various news elements (editorial, op-eds, reports, ads, features, publicity, etc). Atop this foundational knowledge, you can niche down into areas you like.

Now, imagine asking a digital-native to follow news without offering a structure. Sure, he can dig deep into topics that interest him. He can follow influencers and have strong opinions on certain issues. Yet, he’ll have no clue about things out of his radar. His understanding is concentrated on a few topics, while he’s blissfully unaware of the rest.

Importantly, he’s more opinionated than he’s aware.

It’s this problem that impacts Gen-Z most. They have opinions before they know facts. They’re ‘woke’ before they even listened to the other side. They insist on being politically correct before they even understand politics.

Significantly, this happened, not because they’re any different, but because their sources of information are different.

We need generalists who gradually transform into specialists. Not born specialists.

What we need today is a newspaper; not an internet rabbit hole.