(Scroll to the end if you just want the recommendations. If you need convincing, read on.)

This is a natural extension of the concerns I threw out last week. I found myself worrying a lot about the way things were going for me, and how terrifying it felt every time I looked up from my phone after a doom-scrolling spiral and watch as hours slipped away from me.

Now, I wished to write this in a website I’m setting up, but it’s best to get the writing published than focus on getting something I have a lot of challenges to overcome for. It’s about the lowest friction, which leads me to my first point.

This post will be a bit of a departure from the weekly list of links.

This post is about how you can start curating things yourself, and why it’s important you do so.

I’m going to write a bit more abstractly so that this applies to you, even if your tastes do not align with mine.

The Curation

Here’s what I mean by curation. By curation, I mean intention. It’s walking into a mall to buy shoes, buying shoes then coming back.

Malls are used to grab at your attention. They are filled with glass blocks where you can see what each store is selling inside, flashy posters advertising the latest deals, the building is usually laid out in a way that you must walk from one end to the other to get to any place you want to go, which makes you more likely to stop in on a given store.

If you walk into a mall to buy shoes, and then buy shoes, you’re practicing intention.

Let’s look at how the modern internet operates. Short-form video content algorithmically engineered to keep you watching, advertisements of whatever the app thinks you’re interested in, notifications that light up your entire phone with pretty animations.

The modern Internet is very similar to the mall. If you try to find information on any of the social media apps I mention here, it’s very easy to get lost in something completely unrelated.

Do you see how bringing some intention back into your life is not just useful but also necessary?

I will go over software made for ‘curation’ in the last section.

What Is To Be Done?

This isn’t a post that will try to convince you that social media is bad. It is an insult to the reader if I explain what is clearly obvious.

But, that’s too simple of an idea, and this situation is far from simple.

Is social media as a whole, bad? No. But you should make the choice. Intention is key.

There is one time I watched 3 straight hours of Instagram reels. I came out of that trance feeling like I gorged on too much junk food. My brain felt fuzzy, and I couldn’t find the motivation to do anything.

I could feel the quality of my thoughts decreasing. Part of it was that I was draining my energy and time away at something that I wasn’t even attentive towards.

Ask me what I got out of any of the reels I saw, and I couldn’t give you a straight answer. There is no lesson in these things. A lesson is not profitable, the point is to keep you scrolling, so the lowest common denominator of slime slathers away at your feed, numbing your thoughts as you get sucked into the toxic garbage that now makes the majority of the Internet.

I felt like a zombie, a baseless animal that did nothing except satisfy its desperate cravings as quickly as possible, with reckless abandon or thought past tomorrow.

This might not be you, maybe you have better control than I do. But if this seems to ring a bell… Get out.

Deactivate your accounts if you have to. Try to fight the many protests you might have in your head. Recognize them for what they are, your brain trying to pull you back in your constrictingly small comfort zone.

Write To Learn More

As always, I’m going to base this off the idea of intention. Watch something only because you are interested in it. Search for higher quality material. Read books. Create stuff.

Let me highlight that last step.

Do you notice how when someone mentions how uncommon yellow cars are, the next day or so will be spent noticing all the yellow cars that you wouldn’t have batted an eye at earlier.

Writing is a way to prime your brain to look for ideas connected to what you’re writing about.

The act of creation is the first step towards new material.

Your first draft is going to be imperfect… That’s why it’s a draft.

Just some recommendations, based on what I did. It didn’t feel right to give those recommendations without introducing the thought process behind them, and so we have this finally.

Writing is the best form of learning that you can do.

Writing your newsletters with the intention of publishing them means that you hold your writing to a higher standard. This inevitably means you start reading widely for the sake of your newsletter.

Start a Substack. it’s free. If you’re insecure about your writing… Great! Welcome to the club. If you find yourself making a lot of mistakes, that’s normal, you’ll get better. Obscurity is your ally. No one’s around when you’re fooling around. The moment you get better, your audience grows with you.

There’s this writer I follow by the name of Henrik Karlsson, and he has this to say:

“The reason I’ve spent so long establishing this rather obvious point [that writing helps you refine your thinking] is that it leads to another that many people will find shocking. If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn’t written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it. And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial.” - Taken from How to think in writing.

I can attest to the fact that the moment you write something down and think about how to put things into words… You know more about that thing than you would have otherwise.

Practice the act of translating the mess of thoughts into your head into clear linear writing. It is a useful, and, in this age, necessary skill to have.

Some Recommendations

This is the more specific part of this post. Some suggestions, for things that worked for me organized in a list. The point is to experiment your way into finding a sense of balance again.

Here’s what you remove:

1. Short form content. It’s not enough information to be useful, and too much at once to remember, and too addictive to keep around.
2. Recommendation algorithms. I pitch this, recommendations should be your choice, and your feeds should be your default. Switch to recommendations when you want to explore. It’s like listening to music, you listen to your artists most of the time, then you explore and look around when you want something fresh.
3. Social media apps. I think there’s a place for social media, but I don’t think it’s something you carry around with you. It should be relegated to the desktop, when you can control the sessions you peruse things more easily(many social media apps lack several features on their web version unfortunately, but that’s a good compromise to make.

Here’s what you look for instead:

1. Long-form articles are a gold mine for information that comprehensively covers a topic that leaves you feeling like you learned something new and giving you enough new things to explore.
2. RSS Feeds are your friend. If you’re unfamiliar with what RSS feeds are, it’s a way to keep up with websites and people that are outside the social media sphere. It’s also a way to isolate good websites. What I’ve found is that the websites that really matter tend to have RSS Feeds as well. Use Twine for mobile and Fluent Reader for desktop, and adding RSS feeds is as simple as just putting in the URL.
3. YouTube on mobile is a bit different. I do not use the official mobile app. But I find value in the videos I do see on there. Instead of giving that up, I have switched to using NewPipe, which you can setup to only view your subscriptions, and the best part is it treats shorts like a normal YouTube video. (Note: Download NewPipe from GitHub, the Play Store version is an ad-riddled copy.)
4. A “Read-it-Later” app is important to help keep track of those long-form articles and videos that you find interesting. I use Omnivore, which I migrated to from Raindrop. Raindrop is free and it works great for more than just articles, but Omnivore has a simplicity that Raindrop lacks. Raindrop is a great option nonetheless. Another great app is Instapaper, which I used for a while before Omnivore. These apps make it incredibly easy to focus on articles you found intriguing and then share them almost instantly. You can also save your progress which is essential for long form articles. Do you see how powerful it can be to have a place that is filled with things you want to read?
5. Newsletters like this one. The amount of beautiful essays I’ve discovered by simply using newsletters are amazing. Especially the ones that are curational. Subscribe to newsletters about things you are interested in, and then start building a chain by subscribing to the newsletters and RSS feeds that these newsletters link to.

If you follow these steps, you’ll generate a constant stream of high quality input in no time.

This survival guide gives you the tools you need to get started on capturing the things important to you.

The point is to do it for the joy of doing it. Never do it for the sake of ‘posturing’ as an intellectual. Curate your internet because you deserve better.

You are a person. Not a statistic.

Isn’t it funny how your Instagram profile, a public expression of who you are, also shows you how much your social worth is right next to your profile picture? It’s the first thing people will see about you, after your name.

Reclaim your personhood. Curate the Internet, and make it your Internet.

There’s enough to go around, and the majority of the good stuff is found outside the social Internet.

You deserve better.