Going on a diet

Going on a diet

We often go on a diet when we have over indulged and feel that our body is responding only sluggishly to any stimulus. We do not like the look of our silhouette or feel that we will not be attractive to the opposite sex unless we shape up. So we begin a regime of controlling our intake of food and drink and look away when too many sweets are put in front of us tempting us to once again indulge and fall into old patterns. Unfortunately we never quite think of our minds the same way. Are we over indulging if we spend all our time reading newspapers and magazines? Do we become hermits if all we can do is to quote the latest books from our favorite authors? Are our minds so filled with non-essential trivia that we can barely carry on a meaningful conversation? This malady of the mind has been made much worse with the internet. Now you have all the time “fast food of news” on the cable channels always available. You can gorge yourself on the latest news and essays. In short, you can avoid thinking by always wanting to read more and discover ever more esoteric facts.

As Alain Bottom point out "One of the more embarrassing and self-indulgent challenges of our time is the task of relearning how to concentrate. The past decade has seen an unparalleled assault on our capacity to fix our minds steadily on anything. To sit still and think, without succumbing to an anxious reach for a machine, has become almost impossible."

The obsession with current events is relentless. We do not need to wait for the weekly magazines to distill the essence of the daily happenings. We are made to feel that at any point, somewhere on the globe, something may occur to sweep away old certainties—something that, if we failed to learn about it instantaneously, could leave us wholly unable to comprehend ourselves or our fellows or the world. Every little occurrence anywhere in the world seems to have a cataclysmic quality about it. The cable news chattering pundits boost even minor events into world shattering dangers which we must pay attention to or we could miss out. That of course is their job, they are paid to keep our eyes glue on the TV so that advertisers can tempt us with new fangled goods. But what about us? Why do we fall into this trap? It is worth thinking about that perhaps ten years ago, we read our daily newspaper and perhaps a magazine and saw the news on the TV for perhaps half an hour a day. But today, the TV is on all day lest we miss anything.

We are continuously searching for new works of arts and culture. New artists come an go with an alarming frequency. Authors need to keep on producing books and then going on book tours to promote them. And, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds. We leave a movie theater vowing to reconsider our lives in the light of a film’s values. Yet by the following evening, our experience is well on the way to dissolution, like so much of what once impressed us in the past.

Is it not time that the need to diet, which we know so well in relation to food, and which runs so contrary to our natural impulses, should be brought to bear on what we now have to relearn in relation to knowledge, people, and ideas. Our minds, no less than our bodies, require periods of fasting. And just as in diets, we need to look for specialists who will tell which foods are good for us in the long term. Should we only gorge ourselves on the products of chefs like Paul Krugman, Eugene Robinson, EJ Dionne? Or should we mix them up with fare from the right chefs like George Will, David Brooks and Katherine Parker? Would it not be wise to sprinkle in a bit of Tom Friedman—just a sprinkle will do- to really give your mind a heady dish?

Think about it – it is time to go on a diet!