Above all problems I face, I think the biggest one is regarding the content I choose to consume. I have perfected a lot of my workflow for creating any output I desire through writing and task management, it still relies on the input that I feed myself. Even with all this, it will still come down to mindless media consumption, whether that be instagram reels or sporadic youtube videos, relying on the off chance that my algorithm tuning work will feed me something useful.
The difficulty is that I have no shortage of meaningful long term material - I keep a thorough stash of textbooks and actual books that I have just been dying to read, but I never do because of my high frequency content consumption switching. This is in addition to all the papers I have in my backlog to read.
But on 12-18-2025 I had an epiphany: the way in which I engaged with the content I consume was inherently flawed. This lead me to the realization that there are “modes of consumption”, in which I fundamentally engage with content in completely different ways. This trancends the typical categories of content, even the more abstract “tree like” structures I use (more on that below).
Modes of Consumption
I found that depending both on the nature of the content itself, but also the state of mind I was in, I would either engage with content “actively” or “passively”.
The difference is quite simple: active engagement requires you to reason deeply over the content to bring it to a processed form, which I can then log in my notes, whereas passive comes “pre-processed”, so the thoughts come intuitively and need little packaging for notetaking.
Passive Mode
Most content under this category are the youtube videos I watch, where they tend to explain the process in a way that your brain inherently follows the pattern layed out with little difficulty. There is nothing wrong with this way of consuming information, and in fact it is quite efficient and usefull when you can relax and learn at the same time.
However, active engagement puts you in circumstances much like real world problems - where you struggle to unpack the meaning of the information at first glance
Active Mode
- active vs passive modes of consumption
- any type of content can be consumed in these modes (youtube is usually passive, but if you engage/capture content then you are consuming actively)
- Academic papers are reading and have to be engaged with actively to understand, whereas novella and some books (maybe even GEB) can be actively engaged with but also tend to explain themselves to you, doing the engagement for you.
Categories of Consumption
- categories of content
- reading, watching, and “trees”
- trees are laberythns, these can be “rabbit holes” of content acitivty online(following hyperlinks and building the representation), evergreen notes, AND obsidian vaults.