Here's a question worth sitting with: when did you last choose what to follow?
Not subscribe to something, or click follow on an account — those are actions, not choices. I mean: when did you last sit down and decide, deliberately, what topics you want to understand better, and build your information diet around that answer?
Most people haven't. Most people's information diet happened to them. They signed up for a newsletter when it was recommended, followed an account because everyone else seemed to, installed a news app because it came with their phone. Over time, the stack of sources accumulated without much intention behind it.
The result is an information diet that reflects your past self's clicks more than your current self's actual interests. And it produces a specific, recognizable feeling: you read a lot, but you don't feel well-informed about the things that actually matter to you.
The Audit
Here's a simple test to find out if your information diet is working. It takes about ten minutes.
Step 1: Write down the five topics you most want to understand.
Not what you think you should follow. Not what's professionally expected of you. What do you genuinely want to know more about?
For most people, this is some mix of professional domains, personal interests, and a few broader areas they find themselves caring about — geopolitics, a sport, a scientific field, a creative interest. Write down the actual list, not the aspirational one.
Step 2: List everything you currently read.
Newsletters, apps, accounts you check regularly, podcasts, subreddits, anything. Be honest.
Step 3: Compare the two lists.
For every item on your "currently reading" list, ask: does this serve one of the five topics I said I care about?
If the answer is "not really" or "occasionally," that source is probably noise. It might be interesting noise — you might genuinely enjoy it — but it's not building the understanding you said you wanted.
Then flip it: for every topic you said mattered to you, is there at least one source on your reading list that meaningfully covers it? If not, you're not actually following the things you said were important.
Most people who do this exercise find significant misalignment between the two lists. They're spending more time with sources they sort of follow out of habit than with sources that serve their stated interests.
The Alignment Problem
There are two failure modes the audit surfaces.
Stale subscriptions: Sources you added at some point and never removed, whose relevance to your life has shifted. The newsletter you subscribed to during a previous job. The account you followed because of one good post. These accumulate over time and create volume without value.
Topic gaps: Things you said matter to you that you're getting essentially no coverage on. This is the more interesting failure. It means you have genuine intellectual interests that your information diet is ignoring entirely — either because you haven't found good sources, or because the good sources don't exist in a format you consume.
Both are worth addressing. The stale subscriptions are easy: unsubscribe. The topic gaps are harder, because finding genuinely good coverage of a specific topic across multiple sources requires either deliberate curation or a system that does it for you.
What to Do With What You Find
The goal isn't to make your information diet smaller — it's to make it deliberate.
For misaligned sources: Unsubscribe or unfollow without guilt. You're not missing anything; you were already mostly ignoring it.
For topic gaps: This is where real work is needed. The question is whether you can find a good source that covers your topic well — and whether that source covers it in a way that serves understanding rather than just awareness.
A newsletter that covers your topic exists and is well-written? Great. Subscribe to it, unsubscribe from something else to keep the total manageable.
Your topic is niche enough that no single newsletter covers it well, or your interests cross too many domains for a bundle format to serve? That's a different problem. It's the problem that synthesis tools — briefings that pull from across sources and cover exactly the topics you specify — are designed to solve.
The Broader Principle
Your information diet is a resource. Like any resource, it's worth managing deliberately rather than letting accumulate by accident.
The question isn't "am I reading enough?" Most people are reading more than enough. The question is whether what you're reading is building the understanding you want — or just producing a sense of having been busy with information.
Those two things feel similar in the moment. Over time, the difference compounds.