daily brief

you have two options for staying informed: spend 90 minutes scrolling through news sites, social media, and cable news until your cortisol levels are through the roof. or spend five minutes reading a curated summary that gives you everything that actually matters.

one of these is informed. the other is addicted.

the news consumption problem

the 24-hour news cycle wasn't designed to inform you. it was designed to keep you watching. outrage generates clicks. fear generates engagement. nuance generates nothing — so it gets eliminated in favor of sensationalism.

if you're spending more than 15 minutes a day on news, you're not staying informed. you're being farmed for attention by companies that profit from your anxiety.

the daily digest solution

subscribe to one well-curated daily email that condenses everything important into a five-minute read. a few options:

• morning brew — business and tech news with a human voice
• tl;dr — concise summaries organized by category
• the skimm — broad current events with enough context to understand them
• axios am — bullet-point news for people who value brevity

pick one. read it with your morning coffee. you're now more informed than 90% of the people who spend an hour on twitter arguing about headlines they only read.

the information diet framework

treat news consumption like food consumption. you need enough to function well, but too much makes you sick. five minutes of curated, high-quality information is the nutritional equivalent of a balanced meal. three hours of cable news is the equivalent of eating gas station sushi for every meal.

start tomorrow morning

unsubscribe from the noise. subscribe to one daily digest. read it once. then close it and go live your life with the context you need and none of the anxiety you don't. being informed doesn't require being consumed.

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