Welcome to Career Advise, the newsletter providing career advice, how-tos, and life musings through an optimistic and intriguing lens.

Each week, you will receive two newsletters written by the Oppstartr Team. Mondays — Our career-focused newsletter. Fridays — Out of Office where we discuss life and other thought-provoking ideas.

Today’s Pillar: Temper the Mind

Disclaimer: The information included in this piece does not constitute medical advice. The information in this piece is for educational and/or informational purposes only. This is not a substitute for professional medical advice. 

We live in an age where we have to be more aware of the items we ingest.

This wasn’t always the case. Once, people were grateful for any food they could get. Food production used to be far more challenging, susceptible to disruptions caused by weather patterns and pests, challenges we now manage more effectively. Food production also became much more industrial; the advent of synthetic fertilizers and the creation of factories bolstered our food supply.

The mass production of food has been great for society. You can get food by driving to a supermarket, and crazier yet, you can simply order it on your phone. But, with that capability also came less healthy options and the ability to overeat.

Now, we have to be in much more control and make sure we aren’t overeating and consuming junk food. Unhealthy options are prevalent due to the ease of mass production, leading to the widespread use of refined ingredients that aren't necessarily healthy but are cost-effective to produce and distribute.

Parallels to Content

Long ago, content, like food, was scarce; just having a book was an incredible status symbol.

Fast forward to the 20th century, and we had plenty of content, however, you couldn’t get it whenever you wanted and certain forms of content didn’t exist yet. There were books, newspapers, magazines, and three national networks. Since media could only come through these large platforms, it created a bottleneck, a filter for media, not only in content breadth and type but also quantity. We could only consume so much…

Then came the internet. The social media platforms, the online news networks, the blogs, the totality of written human knowledge. The Cambrian Explosion of content, if you will.

In the last 30 years, our media supply and access to it, like our food, has grown rapidly. I am a fan. I can connect with people around the world, I can find just about anything I want to read or watch, and I can get it with ease.

Just like our ability to create and share food in a greater capacity, this ability to share ideas in a greater capacity has greatly improved our human interconnectedness, but it has also allowed for more junk content and the overindulgence of that content. The tabloids, the incredibly filtered social media pictures, the endless scrolling, and worse, the insane opinion pieces, the online bullying, the unverified sources, the online pornography, the echo chambers … Unfortunately, all these bad qualities came along with the good qualities of the internet.

The mass production of content and the lack of filters led to the mass supply and consumption of the above. It is affecting us greatly and not in a positive way. As almost everyone knows, a poor diet leads to bad health outcomes. Similarly, a poor content diet and overconsumption leads to a bad mindset and mood. Even news media overload can be bad for individuals.

The internet is not bad. A vast majority of people see the internet as an overall positive, but many more people are saying there is good mixed in with the bad. We can’t throw the baby out with the bath water; we must choose the good elements and reject the bad elements. The increase in food production was not bad. Just like with the increase in our food production and thus having to choose the foods we eat, we now must have the willpower to choose what we feed our minds and how much. We can no longer consume any and all content. We have to be vigilant if we want to protect our minds and our moods.

Thoughts

Are you actively choosing bad or good content, or are you passively consuming content? What does your screen time look like?

By the way, you can even consume too much good content in one sitting. Go outside and give your mind a rest.

Thank you for reading Career Advise. Be sure to read our upcoming Out of Office issue on Friday.

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