I tend to believe that a balanced informational diet is important.

That means trying to engage with a variety of different sources, different mediums, different types of information, and making sure to include hearty helpings of concrete reality, compelling (not real) narrative, analysis, perspective, and anything else I feel I’m not getting enough of and which might, if left lopsided, throw off my cognitive and creative equilibrium.

I also think it’s important to consider the quantities and potencies of the information to which we’re exposed, as too much of anything—even wonderful, healthful things—can be deleterious, as can (usually) beneficial things at the wrong moment, or a complete lack of something that may leave us with blindspots if we completely extract it from our pool of engage-with-able prospects.

I tend to believe folks should have a sense of what’s happening in the world, then, but would encourage everyone to step away from the news when it’s negatively impacting their psychological wellbeing (and to keep tabs on when that line is crossed so as to better maintain a sustainable level of situational awareness, moving forward).

Likewise, I think fiction is more valuable than some people would acknowledge, but taken to extremes, spending too much time in other worlds—be they printed in trade paperbacks or streamed to our devices as TV shows—can drain us of the energy (and time) to do the things we’d like to do (and/or would benefit from doing) in this world.

The sources of what we soak up are worthy of consideration, too, as a variety of authors, producers, content-creators, and other sorts of thing-makers will tend to offer us work derived from a wider range of influences, experiences, intentions, and underlying philosophies, which in turn provides us with a diversity of inputs (rather than a collection of ideas that all seem to agree with each other and our priors, which over time flattens our capacity to imagine and understand anything beyond a relatively confined, familiar, cozy intellectual spectrum).

What we put out into the world is rightly at the core of many mullings and conversations, as our contributions to the civilization-scale idea-exchange ideally offer some combination of value, insight, and perspective to those who ingest it.

But what we take in is just as fundamental, as our capacity to make is informed and empowered by the quality and range of raw materials, the qualia and quanta we’ve consumed over the course of our lives.

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