You need to meal-plan your media diet

Before someone else plans it for you.

“Waiting for the Stage,” Richard Caton Woodville, 1851. (National Portrait Gallery)

It’s amazing how many books you can read when you aren’t constantly staring at a screen.

In January I set a goal of reading at least a book a week. To reach that goal, I decided to give myself a leg up: I limited social media screen time on my phone to 60 minutes a day. The experiment has worked. Not only am I far ahead of pace for 2026, I’m increasingly confident taking on ambitious works (I’ve already completed Thomas Piketty’s weighty “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” and “Capital and Ideology”). As a bonus, I also unexpectedly increased the time I spend reading stories in news apps rather than via videos or snippets from an endless scroll. I take the papers on the weekends and read them with leisure at the coffee shop. As AI threatens to transform the production and distribution of content, it’s like I’m traveling backward in time.

The new arrangement has done wonders for my relationship with media. I now feel much less frazzled by the news. That frequent feeling of “oh, I ought to read [buzzy or important book]” no longer fills me with guilt like it did before, when I knew deep down I would never get around to it. It’s striking, in retrospect, how much my relationship with media was filled with negative feelings rather than satisfaction.

So here’s a thorny question: If this new arrangement is closer to my “optimal” relationship with media, why hadn’t already I settled into this media diet organically? The news apps were already on my phone. There were plenty of great books just feet away on my shelves. I could have scrolled less at any time. Although we are experiencing a quality-information production crisis, there was still enough good stuff around to satisfy my basic desires. What was going wrong?

The answer, to borrow a framework from economics, was that I was experiencing a “principal-agent problem.”

Part of me — the smart part, which thinks it’s in charge — already knew that I’d be happier if I was spending more time reading than scrolling. But the other part of me — the impulse-driven consumer actually running the show — was just grabbing fistfuls of sugary content every time the candy jar was within reach. And in a browser or on an iPhone, the candy jar is within reach all the time. This was stressing me out! An unresolved conflict between my two consumer selves was creating what Sigmund Freud, in another time, might have called a media neurosis.

The behavioral economist Richard Thaler summed up this problematic state of consumer dualism in his 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics written lecture:

Shefrin and I proposed a theory of self-control that models individuals as organizations with two components: a long-sighted “Planner” and a myopic “Doer”. In providing a two-self model Shefrin and I were following in the footsteps of Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). He characterized self-control problems as a struggle between our “passions” and what he called our “impartial spectator”. In our model the Doer has fierce passions and cares only about current pleasure whereas the Planner is trying to somehow tame the passions and maximize the sum of Doer utilities over time. The question is how does the Planner get the Doer to be better behaved?

The answer, at least for me, was to engage in what was called a “commitment strategy,” which is when your smart, far-seeing present self preemptively makes decisions to boss around your greedy, impulsive future self. Thaler likened a commitment strategy to Odysseus lashing himself to the mast to stop himself from wrecking his ship on the shoals of the nearby singing Sirens. The combination of an arbitrary, pre-planned productivity goal (a book a week) along with some pre-imposed self-denial (time-limited scrolling, and a conscious avoidance of privacy-invading algorithmic media) did the trick. My Planner knew my Doer enjoyed reading. My Doer just needed some help snacking less on sugary algorithms and spoiling my appetite for a healthier, more protein-filled dinner.

One of the disadvantages we face in rebalancing our media diets is that we now live in an information ecosystem completely optimized to cater to our greedy Doer, not our thoughtful Planner. It isn’t Joe Consumer deploying Thalerian behavioral “nudges” to intentionally shape his media habits, but data-mining media platforms like Meta and YouTube, which were recently found in a Los Angeles trial to have deployed those very sorts of “nudges” to create products designed to hook consumers in ways that are harmful. As Casey Newton of Platformer recently said on Nilay Patel’s Verge “Decoder” podcast:

Again, and I think it’s important to underline this for folks: for Meta, addiction looks like success. They have huge teams inside the company, cognitive scientists who work to understand the human brain so that they can get you to pick up your phone and look at it as many times as possible. And this is why I feel so bad for the people who are mad at themselves for all the time they spend looking at Instagram. You were not in a fair fight. You lost a rigged game. The reason that Meta is doing that is not because they’re literally evil, it’s that they feel like the incentives of their business require them to do this.

Regulation of algorithmic media in the U.S. can be a tough sell due to the First Amendment and our more lackadaisical approach to personal privacy and social welfare. We do, however, have an abundance of absolutely rapacious trial lawyers and heartlessly risk-averse insurers, which can be a helpful tag-team in spurring corporate reform. We could also tax data-mining, as I wrote a month ago.

But in the meantime, when it comes to planning your media diet, to borrow a phrase from my union days: If you aren’t at the table, you’re on the menu. Plan your media diet before someone else plans it for you.