The Mental Obesity Crisis
On trimming down everything that is unnecessary from your mental diet
Yesterday, I unsubscribed from over a hundred YouTube channels. One by one, asking myself: does this still matter? Most didn’t. Tech channels I’d followed out of habit. Creators I’d watched once and never again. Videos that felt urgent at the time and now just cluttered the feed.
When I was done, I had five channels left. All of them about writing.
The feed looked almost empty.
What we put into our bodies gets a lot of attention. Processed food, empty calories, sugar engineered to keep you eating past being full. Chronic overconsumption of the wrong things damages the body’s ability to function — not just its weight, but its metabolism, its capacity to process food the way it was meant to.
The same thing is happening to our minds.
The feeds we scroll, the notifications we chase, the content we consume without choosing — it’s information junk food. Engineered, like ultra-processed food, to bypass the signal that says enough. We’re losing our ability to regulate attention. To sit with one thought. To let an idea breathe before moving to the next one.
I’m calling it mental obesity.
A hundred channels felt like a fast food feast. Five feels like a diet I can live on.