Is Your Media Consumption Making You Sick? Ruby Warrington’s “content diet” for better living
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The content that we consume on some level shapes who we are because it shapes, dramatically shapes how we think. And so it's a part of our diet as much as anything, any of the food or drink that we consume. ♪

Welcome to the Unspeakable Podcast. I'm your host, Megan Down. Happy holidays, everyone. Before I introduce this week's premium episode, I have a couple of announcements about, you

That's our community for free thinking women. And sometimes we include stuff for the guys. There is so much coming up in 2025, and I'm going to be telling you more about it in the coming weeks. But for now, I will say that we have several retreats planned for next year. I'll tell you about a few of them. The first one is in Dripping Springs, Texas. That's right outside of Austin, March 17th through 19th.

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absolutely amazing. It's like bursting at the seams with activities and discussions and guest speakers and book clubs and all manner of everything. We've got some holiday specials going. So if you've been on the fence about joining, this is a great time to do so. And by the way, as you know, you have to apply. That just means

Tell us how you found us, what you're interested in, and so we can make sure we're all on the same page. This is not a college application. Anyway, okay. We have reached the end of what seems like a very long year. If you make New Year's resolutions, you may have noticed that the ways that we could be living healthier lives are boundless.

There are obvious things to cut back on, like alcohol or crappy food or social media. But what if we started thinking about our overall content consumption? What we watch, what we read, what we listen to when we can't bear the sound of silence. I'm guilty of that one. That's what my guest Ruby Warrington has been thinking about lately. In fact, over the last several months, Ruby has put herself on a content diet, which

Ruby was here in March of 2023 talking about her book Women Without Kids. That's a topic that's grown all the more heated in the time since and this conversation is a little different and I thought the perfect topic for this week. Again this is a premium episode if you're not yet a

paying subscriber, you will get a taste. And if you want to hear the rest, you can join our listener community at megandown.substack.com or just the unspeakablepodcast.com, which will go right to the Substack page. So happy holidays again. And I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Ruby Warrington.

Ruby Warrington, welcome back to the podcast. Megan, thanks for having me back. Well, I always love talking with you and we have so many things we could discuss, but today we're going to focus on a concept that you brought to public attention recently, which is this concept of the content diet. So what do you mean by that? Is this a starvation diet? It's not a content fast. I want to differentiate. Okay.

I think I had just, I reached a point earlier this year. I mean, I published this piece on my newsletter, let's be clear, as to how it reached the public domain, my newsletter, which is not on Substack. And I had reached a point where I had been feeling just very, very overwhelmed by the amount of content that I was consuming and attempting to digest on a daily, if not what felt like hourly basis.

And I think I became, as a writer, I was feeling very confused. I had just come out of an intense promotional period for my previous book. And as is my way, as is our way, I was sort of thinking, what could the next project be? I'm speaking to my agent about what could the next project be? And there were just so many ideas, many of them other people's ideas kind of swirling in my consciousness that it was feeling really difficult to

latch onto or get clear about what I was feeling called to write about next from that perspective. So, but then I also started to notice that my mood in general was

I'd been feeling just generally a lot angrier, a lot more frustrated. I had started to notice how I was spending a lot of the time, a lot of my time in my head, having one-sided non-conversations with podcasters who I didn't agree with. And I realized that I hadn't

I'd sort of fallen into this pattern of consuming just unbridled content consumption. You know, my background is journalism. I graduated with a degree in sort of like print journalism in 1998. And it's always been part of my career.

business, to stay informed about what's going on in the world. And more importantly, because the kind of journalism I've always done is more sort of lifestyle and trend reporting, what people think about what's going on in the world. So I think that with that being my kind of, this is where I get my ideas. This is where I kind of feel into what's in the zeitgeist and what could be the next interesting either article, book, project, whatever it might be.

That had led to just this mass, mass kind of like overconsumption of content. And it was starting to, I was starting to become aware of how it was impacting my wellbeing, but also my kind of critical thinking capacities from a professional perspective. Yeah.

And so I decided to take a step back, which essentially meant no longer reading The New York Times, no longer reading The UK Times, unsubscribing to the vast majority of sub stacks. I had somehow wound up following it, remember, subscribing to a ton of them, taking a real active step back from social media, these kinds of things.

And I wrote a piece about this on my newsletter, like I said, and just a huge, like for me, a huge, got a huge response, which is about 40 or 50 people replied. There are about 15,000 people on my newsletter. Cause I've published, I've written about so many different things there over the years. They're quite sort of, I don't know, they're not particularly engaged audience in that way, but this got engagement. And I was like, okay, lots of people are feeling this way. And I think,

My previous book, Sober Curious, which we may talk a bit more about, I don't know, but as I've thought about it over the following months, it seems to me that we have possibly reached a point where unconsciousness,

consumption of content is no longer healthy. I mean, it's been, it feels like it's been this way for a while that, you know, you only have to dip quickly, briefly into the content kind of machine to find all sorts of articles and reports on the links between mental health and content creation. Right. But I think that content consumption and thinking about how it's impacting our wellbeing mentally, emotionally,

physically even, is something that's quite unexplored. And I think a lot of people are just feeling very overstuffed. And then what I will say is that coming out of the most recent election, it sort of feels like in a way, a bit of a Rubicon has been crossed in terms of

How we engage with the media landscape, which encompasses or rather, I don't know which which encompasses which is the content landscape now encompass the media landscape or media landscape encompasses that sort of content and the line between what's content and content.

reliable media reporting is completely, not even blurred, it is just dissolved. And I just, it feels like quite an important subject for people

people to be thinking about. Yeah. Well, this is fascinating because you just referred to your previous book, Sober Curious, but actually the book that you published most recently is Women Without Kids, which you came and talked with me about last year. And I assume, so when you're talking about doing the publicity and doing publicity around a book always involves writing more stuff, just writing more articles. Yeah.

as if this just, you know, came out of your, I just, I spontaneously was moved to write this entire op-ed, not because I'm trying to promote my book, but because I want to say this thing. So mostly by my book. Yeah. By the way. Yes. So, but okay. But actually this is fascinating as I'm listening to you because the sober curious concept is another, you know, you coined that term and now there's a whole movement around sober curiosity, which is, you know,

a sort of different approach to sobriety from alcohol. But you seem to be saying that there's a sort of sober curiosity around content consumption. - Yes. - That's brilliant. - Since the content diet piece, I've been thinking a lot about this.

You've been listening to a premium episode of The Unspeakable Podcast. To hear the rest of the conversation, become a paying subscriber at megandown.substack.com or theunspeakablepodcast.com. Hope to see you over there. Thanks.