I started the year with a radical idea.

I’d discovered the benefits of a low information diet as early back as freshman year of college. Tim Ferriss and The Minimalists had my attention. They advocated taking a close look at the volume and quality of the information consumed daily.

News?
Social Media?
Blog posts, medium, LinkedIn articles?
Youtube videos?
Advertisements?
Email memos?
Coursework?
Books?

All of the above splinter our attention. Rather than a single beam of focus on the most important topic of our choosing, we have a scattered, piece-meal view of the world.

Moreover the stream of information coming in is handed to us, not chosen.

Open up the paper, editors tell you what to think.
Click on the instagram app, your feed dictates your experience.
Watch one YouTube video, the recommended bar prompts your next watch.
Log into email, every one else’s agenda stares at you with urgent or extra-urgent blue dots.

When you let the world decide what you pay attention to, the world will stretch you further than your attention could ever accommodate. An explanation for our fatigue and ineffectiveness.

And it’s true.

When I had the discipline in the past few years to tune out news, social media, random email checking, and blog surfing, I felt better. Settled. Quiet. Optimistic. Motivated.

In 2020 I took this to the extreme. If this is my foundational year of full-time teaching, then I ought to devote as much energy to teaching as possible. I adopted Joshua Waitzkin’s philosophy of “creating empty space as a way of life for the creative process.”

The radical idea? Go Information Free. Live in solitude (without the influence of any other human ideas).

I cut out every input I possibly could. No movies, articles, music (except Suzuki), books, social media, videos, podcasts, etc. I was quite harsh. I had to be strict. I was allowed to come into contact with people and have conversations with them, of course, but nothing electronic or artificial.

The first week was easy — liberating even. I traded consuming for creating. I wrote every time I wanted to read. The ideas were pouring out. I had clarity on the reality of the moment and my ideas were pulsing on a common theme.

I felt super-human. I felt like no other person on the planet was willingly doing this. I felt like no other person would understand what it felt like to go information free because the cultural tide to consume is so strong.

After the initial excitement of the first week the motivation peeled away and I was left raw. When I didn’t have consumption to distract me I was forced to look at my own thoughts, my own feelings. If an emotionally turbulent situation arose I didn’t have a book to go bury myself in. If I was feeling bored, I couldn’t indulge myself with a podcast or a YouTube video. I began to feel irritable, loopy, and stale. I was coming up with ideas but I was mostly just struggling to process my own emotions. It was a surprise how much I use novel information as a balm.

Though I only ended up making it until mid-March, when the pandemic was all the persuasion I needed to start engaging with the news, I would recommend this experiment to anyone. Few of us have gone hours, let alone a day, without novel stimuli. A couple days to a week is a creative feast. Going beyond a week starts to reveal who you are underneath the mental nibbling and digestion you constantly do. It seems beneficial, healthy even, to confront this real you sometimes.

Until July I went back to my own normal consumption habits. Then the idea struck for another experimental project. One that would restrict my novel diet while inspiring my mind with just a few sources of dense, relevant information. Read about it in my next post…