Stuffing
Our bodies are more obese than ever [0]. What about our minds?
Just as food has become more available and more calorie-dense to most people, so has information. In the year 1900 the average American was somewhat limited as to what information they could get and where. They could talk to people. They could read. That was about it.
The average teenager today probably consumes more media in a day than the average person in 1900 consumed in a month. And that information might be more calorie-dense. Kids that watch hyper-edited, overstimulating videos (like Mr. Beast) and scroll past fifty YouTube Shorts are consuming more calories than a 1900s kid reading a newspaper. If mental obesity is real, many of us have it.
Of course mental obesity is somewhat more complicated than physical obesity. For one, we can’t see it. Nor do we currently have any good way to measure it. There is no good metric for how much information (or “junk food”) someone is holding in their head. If I spent one week of my life scrolling TikTok and Twitter and you spent it cycling in the Carpathian moutains, I have certainly consumed ~50X (or more!) information—specifically, junk food information—than you. Over the course of a lifetime, some people might have infinitely more junk food, more mental fat, sitting around in their brains than others.
Because this is so hard to measure, it’s almost impossible to say for sure whether someone is mentally obese (assuming this is even a useful term).
It’s also hard to quantify mental obesity’s effects. Physical obesity is easy; we have a long list of negative physical and mental health effects that obesity can cause. It’s not controversial at all to say that being fat is bad for you, and in fact the most controversial thing about obesity is the rigidity of the BMI scale.
Does mental obesity have a similar scale of impact? Is there any way to know?
This is where things get a bit more blurry.
The Internet has only been around for a few decades. The iPhone since 2007. TikTok since 2016. That’s ~0.006% of modern humanity’s existence on the planet. There is still not a single adult who spent their childhood scrolling TikTok and Instagram Reels. If there are negative mental or physical effects to mental obesity, it’s possible we just haven’t been mentally obese for long enough to know exactly what they are. There is still plenty of time to find out.
Perhaps the most useful answer comes from one of the most common sayings about physical health: You are what you eat. People who use voice assistants become less polite to them over time. People who use TikTok have lower grades and shorter attention spans. Allowing loads of junk food information to pollute your brain is probably not useful; bad diets lead to bad outcomes.
It might be a good thing for the world if humans started thinking about the media we consume more like the way we think about food. What if, after 30 minutes scrolling TikTok, you felt just as bad about yourself as you might feel after eating a family-sized bag of potato chips in one sitting? I don’t think that this is currently true of most people, but maybe it should be.
Is anyone building an Ozempic for the mind? [1] Or a gym for your mental fitness?
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[0] Some of our bodies. More than 700M people are still hungry.
[1] The current Ozempic affects the mind, too. Just not exactly in the way we mean here.
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