Assuming I understand you … I feel your pain! Back in the day it was easier to manage my feed, especially since I mostly wasn’t being passively fed, what I consumed I needed to seek out. It was enough to just stay away from the obviously bad stuff. After that, the quantity of good stuff that my searching turned up was plentiful but not overwhelming. The effort it took to find good stuff was a natural brake on the amount I found.
Now I barely need to lift a finger. Just having a curiosity about a topic, however fleeting, quickly fills my feed with related stuff. Stuff that is good! Sometimes exceptional, sometimes surprising, sometimes life-changing … but mostly just good, valuable to the sort of person who values that sort of thing. And I find suddenly it isn’t enough to discern and reject the bad stuff, I need to now be picky, to consider the many good directions I could pursue, narrow them down to those I actually have time to pursue, narrow further to the ones I can most profitably pursue.
The narrowing-down I describe is aspirational — in truth, when I get overwhelmed I usually strip things way, way back, creating huge amounts of space in my attention span, then loosen my grip a bit and see what sorts of things begin to leak back in. On each go-round I’m more ruthless, more realistic about which whims might turn into profitable pursuits — those get to linger, at least for awhile — and which whims are likely to go nowhere special — those get nipped in the bud.
Since one of my personal guidelines for writing is to always give concrete examples, here is one of each.
Nipped in the bud: I like to camp, especially in west Texas, which has some of the darkest skies in the world. So I thought stargazing might be a good hobby for me. I collected quite a few books about it, studied them, bought good binoculars and a nice telescope, took them camping with me. I worked at it for awhile, learning constellations and how to locate them, celestial objects and how to train a telescope on them. It was fun. But never became more than that. Constellations and celestial objects have the quality of being unchanging, so once the novelty had worn of it didn’t do much for me to take yet another look at a nebula or the Pleaides.
At that point the drawbacks began to weigh more heavily: the cold! and the drowsiness! When I camp I enjoy early rising and early bedtimes, neither of those work well with stargazing in the depth of night. Soon enough I decided that I’d go no deeper into the hobby, returns were quickly diminishing. Now I enjoy sitting out in the early evening or (occasionially) getting up before sunrise and just looking at the stars. That’s it.
Lingering: Gaming of all sorts never worked for me — board games, card games, RPGs, first-person shooters, strategy games, construction games, cooperative games, on and on. Which bothers me: I’d like to have something like that as an occasional distraction, and though I don’t like competition I do enjoy puzzling things out. So I’m ever on the lookout for possibilities.
About a month ago, for some reason chess came to mind. I knew how to move the pieces, but anything above that level was a mystery to me. And I knew, vaguely, that there were lots of different sorts of things to learn about playing the game — strategy, tactics, history. I looked into it a little bit, enough to see that there was knowledge to be had and that I could probably absorb some of it. Maybe enough to know what it would feel to play a game like a chess player, so I could get an inkling of whether I’d like that. I signed up for an account on chess.com and day by day worked my way through the online lessons, plus some of the puzzles. I liked it! Enough to buy a standard set of books for beginners covering strategy and tactics, openings, mid-games, endgames. I’ve looked through those.
All that was enough to make it clear if chess wasn’t for me. But it didn’t. Though I don’t know yet if chess is in fact for me, there’s hope in the fact that I’ve stuck with it for forty days and look forward to doing more. And if I do end up plateauing and moving on, I’ll still be glad for what I learned.