You probably think you were being mean or giving tough love by saying that, but you really hit home. When I say I obsess over this stuff, I don’t mean searching for the perfect way to build a haystack. I mean that I wonder what it’s all for and why I even try to read all that news in the first place.

For me, it’s a matter of the identity I try to cultivate for myself. I like to think of myself as an informed person, and in order to be that person, I feel like I need to consume vast quantities of information. But I also recognize that this isn’t very healthy behavior, namely because I know I could be an informed, smart person without half of this stuff. But it’s where I am right now. This is how I’m controlling it.

I wouldn’t compare it to the intense mental and physical anguish of substance abuse, but to play with that metaphor for the sake of discussion, I’ve tried going cold turkey before, dropping RSS and most of the web completely, and I literally had cravings for it, an emotional need to look at that screen. And I’ve gone the other way too, long benders of reading where I just exhaust myself and swore it off completely.

I want to and have cut it down my passive internet use, i.e. browsing, to the bare minimum I need to fuel ideas for my work. I’ve restricted it so that it doesn’t interfere with my “real” life, which believe it or not, still occupies the vast majority of my day. But I don’t see the use in arbitrarily cutting myself off when I genuinely enjoy it as a hobby. This post explains my attempts to find a happy medium between gross indulgence and deprivation, to use in moderation, if you will.