When I was younger, my mom didn’t let me watch SpongeBob SquarePants—I think the reason is because she thought it would rot my brain.
Nowadays, are kids even watching TV? Short-form video is dominating the scene, with nearly half of consumers now choosing social and video platforms for entertainment instead of traditional television.
With social media platforms becoming the go-to pastime, tons of people have become more worried about what we’re consuming as we doomscroll through the internet. Sure, every now and then we might find a healthy recipe on Instagram that we want to try or a really useful life hack on TikTok that we’ll actually use.
But more often than not, we’re also probably finding the most random content out there that might be far from anything practical or thought-provoking. These are the things that your mom calls “junk” and that a large portion of the population doesn’t want to feed their brains with.
If we’re being real, I thought the exact same thing about all that stuff—until I learned about the theory of maximum taste.
The theory of maximum taste says that each person’s mind is defined by its upper limit—the best that it habitually consumes and is capable of consuming. -David Brooks
This means that if you spend your time consuming genius content and surrounding yourself with brilliant people, your mind will expand and become bigger and broader than it was before.
The worry isn’t that you’re scrolling around on TikTok for three hours straight—rather, it’s that you aren’t also deciding to put some really excellent stuff into your brain as well, on top of whatever “junk food” your brain consumes.
The takeaway here is that you can enjoy falling down a rabbit hole of memes and silly videos without feeling guilty. But if you want your mind to continue to grow, you need to search for and engage with valuable content and valuable people. Push the boundaries of your mind, because if you don’t, those boundaries will start closing in.
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