This past weekend, I found myself in so much noise. So much excess. I was intellectually bloated.

You need to put breaths in, so that people can digest what you just fed them.

- Grey Gersten to Van Neistat

Boy, don’t we.

Consumerist culture is just that - consumerist. Gotta have more. Bigger TV, newer car… but no time to actually sit back and use it. No time to digest it.

Heck, we consume digests.

Like little baby birds, we demand short-form summaries of information, distilled into key points. Ready-made glucose for the mind.

A diet of glucose demands more glucose. If you’ve ever stopped eating sugar (and sugar-laden foods) - you know what I mean. There’s the period where your gut is craving simple carbohydrates; anything to just keep the thrill ride going. But stop the sugar train for a long enough, and the gut’s demand vanishes. The bits of the microbiome demanding pre-digested material seem to die off, leaving the bits of the gut that can digest.

The same is true for our minds.

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction.

- E.F. Schumacher

Especially today, bigger and bloated is easy.

To digest is to break a thing down, assess it, refine it, remove the dross, and repurpose it - to actually put it in the correct location within oneself. Digestion cannot be outsourced; at least not the last part! If we are not digesting what we read by reflecting, meditating, and even doing the exercise which necessitates the consumption in the first place - we end up bloated.

Stop eating, and digest.