Morning Walk #29

Crisps and veggies of your information diet

Apr 24, 2022

Hi. I’m Stepa Mitaki. Morning Walk is a personal weekly newsletter where I share some musings on tech, working on startups, productivity and some nerdy stuff.

This issue was sent out to 100 subscribers (+11 from the previous week). Last week’s issue received 110 views.

📝 Crisps and veggies of your information diet

I don’t know about you, but I’m addicted to potato chips (or how the British would call them crisps). Well, I generally can’t resist unhealthy snacks from time to time.

I mean, who doesn’t like chips? They are rich in flavor and delicious, and it’s so easy to snack on them in front of the tv. But every single chips eater knows for sure they are bad for your health.

On the other you have vegetables. It’s a wide known fact they are super healthy, and it’s essential to eat them regularly. But most people won’t be as excited about eating them as they are about chips on a Friday night. The natural flavor isn’t as delicious, it’s pretty dull, and you need to make an effort to add them into your ration.

So chips give you an instant boost in pleasure, and it’s super easy to just start snacking on them instantly. Veggies need to be prepared (usually), not so tasty, and the reward is long-term.

The same goes for the information we consume.

Any media that consists of small bites of content is just like those unhealthy snacks. Scrolling through Instagram, Twitter, or short news headings is so easy yet harmful for your mind in the long term. On the other hand, reading a comprehensive op-ed column, or consuming any other type of long-form content, are more difficult. You do need to make an effort, just like with eating vegetables.

Don’t you find something inherently similar in the process of snacking on chips and scrolling social media feeds? You kind of become like a zombie, and the pack or the feed needs to come to an end for you to stop.

In my content consumption feeds (in Feedly and Telegram), I now have two folders:

🍟 Snacks

There goes short-bite content. Mostly news. It’s okay, but I want to limit myself on it. This one is super easy to consume at any moment.

🥦 Veggies

Long-form content that I need to spend quality time on. I can’t read that just when I’m standing in line; I need to make time for it.

I’ve been consuming a ridiculously unhealthy amount of short-bite content since the war in Ukraine began, and I’m starting to feel the changes it makes to my mind. I want to stop, but I can’t. Thanks to my therapist, I’ve started making some progress on it in the last couple of days, but it still might be a long way.

📰 In other news

Yesterday I reached a 3,500 days streak on Day One app. For those unfamiliar with the app, it’s the most popular journaling app out there. Yeah, “journaling” is a fancy word for “diary.” My Day One habit deserves its own story, so I won’t cover it in detail today, but I wanted to share this number as it still blows my mind.

The last time I missed writing an entry was September 21, 2012, almost 10 years ago. So that means I have documented every single day of my life for the last ten years 🤯 I have also added some memories (both text entries or just old memorable photos) to previous days, including the first photograph of myself at the age of 3 months. So overall, I have entries for 4,327 days (3,500 of which are consecutive). I’ve spent 12,445 days in this world as of yet, which means I’ve documented 35% of my entire life on Day One. Wow.

👓 Things I've been reading/watching/enjoying

Ukranian War evidence

Since the beginning of this war, Ilia Krasilshchik, the former publisher of Meduza, a Russian independent news outlet (now blocked in Russia), turned his personal Instagram account into a media outlet covering real human stories of this war. From both sides. This is phenomenal and terrifying at the same moment, but it has to be shared widely. Now he started translating his account into English.

Can Sanctions Really Stop Putin?

Hint: they won't. The New York Times takes a look at what sanctions make. I still believe it's critical to have them to hurt the economy, but they won't stop Putin. He still gets a shit ton of money from gas export and any other economic hurdles he presents as "The West wants to destroy us, so we need to work harder." And Russian people eat that.