Conscious Content Consumption

Jim Rohn made famous the idea that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. While it’s true that the people we spend time with influence us, the content we consume through news, social media, blogs, books, podcast, etc can be just as influential.

Content consumption is not a minor influence but quite the contrary. The idea of mass content consumption is pretty recent for us humans considering that the printing press was invented about 600 years ago in the 1430’s. Before then, to read a book you had to read a copy that was written by hand. Sound recording and the first video recordings hit the world in the 1870’s and 1890’s respectively so less than 200 years ago all and all.

Distribution of traditional forms of content grew step by step from the hands of the few to the hands of the many. The most recent and significant distribution channel started 30 years ago in the 1990’s when the internet was born.

The point to chew on here is that the notion of information on everything at the tips of our fingers is not typical whatsoever. It allows everyday people to rot their brains, to be seduced into buying a bunch of stuff they don’t need, or to leverage the information to make the most of their lives while transforming themselves based on new ideas that can shape worldview, belief systems and perspective on life.

For most of humanity’s history people’s understanding of how the world worked and how they fit into it all was determined by where they lived, the group they were born into and the direct experiences they had. This all changed recently and the implications are significant.