You are what you read: How curating what you consume curates the way you think

Recognizing that the quality of input determines the quality of output can incentivize reading more books and less short-form content.

People today are more likely to scroll through an app’s newsfeed than pick up a book. The draw of a streaming subscription is far more tempting than the words of even the best authors. 

As technology becomes more captivating, people have largely relegated books to the back burner. Our phones and tablets have become so brilliant, so easy to use, that we cannot help but use them well and often. 

Books, meanwhile, are outdated items. Paper and plastic and leather presented in a format that hasn’t changed for centuries. 

What is happening to our minds as we spend less time with books and more time with screens?

Written language remains the primary way we communicate and learn, but the outlets we absorb language on have changed. The landscape of reading has gone digital — but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. 

Never before has a society had access to information at this magnitude. Education levels have skyrocketed as technology becomes more widely available. Literacy rates across the globe have ballooned in recent decades. 

That can’t entirely be chalked up to more books. 

Still, the sheer volume of reading content available has created noise. It can be distracting, miscellaneous, untruthful , and politically charged. 

Our reading time today is dominated by new, digital inputs that were created in seconds and minutes (tweets, news headlines, captions) rather than months or years (long-form, narrative-structure journals and books).

The information we take in shapes our ability to create and to think, which manifest as patterns of speech and behavior, which ultimately define how we exist in the world.

When long-form work is replaced by short-form content consumed at breakneck speeds, this changes the way we think and behave. This creates a fundamental issue of quality of input — the material we read — and output — mindset, perspective, channels of thought.

I don’t think it would be a stretch to forecast that the more superficial the input, the less deep the output. Personally, when I scroll through social media, it rarely occurs to me that I’m absorbing low-quality, low-effort content. 

It feels easy, enjoyable, and addictive — but that makes it troublesome.

This is impossible for me and probably most people, but suppose you gave up screens for 30 days and instead read things only on paper or in books. Think about how your thoughts would change — the depth of ideas, the concentration, the ability to articulate yourself. 

Sure, maybe this is a crude thought experiment because of how untestable it is. But it’s worth entertaining because it allows us to be more conscious of the content we consume, and the way that we consume them.

Curating the content you consume — specifically, the depth of the things you read — can be a dramatic way to curate your life. I find this framework encouraging, because it means that we have a say in the direction we choose to develop our thoughts and behavior. 

Recognizing that the quality of input determines, at least partly, the quality of output should incentivize reading more books and consuming less short-form content. 

This idea gives you a new responsibility to tackle, and poses a daunting question: What kind of output does a low-quality input lead to?

Start framing your reading habits and behavior as inputs and outputs, and observe if anything changes. It can push us to be more conscious of the times we mindlessly scroll, and also can make us feel better about the times we put our phones away.

Take stock of the way you curate what you read —because it’s just another way of curating your life.