Food for Thought - Too much information?

My street, 1/10/11

I've been thinking since the beginning of the year about this blog.  I don't know about you, but I'm finding that writing about my week and including my menus and recipes is pretty boring.  I find myself putting off (procrastinating, see below) doing the "Week of..." posts til later and later.  For example, here it is Tuesday the 11th and I've just now posted the first week of the year.  On the other hand, I've used the search function on the blog to find recipes several times, so it's been pretty convenient to have a place to find recipes. And it saved me having to go through my Sep-Dec issues of Cooking Light that were just cluttering up my countertop because I figured that if I hadn't tried something and posted it by now, it really didn't appeal to me. (How many times do you flip through a magazine as you're discarding it and tear something out and then never do anything with it, huh? huh? huh?)

Then last night Dotsie and John invited me over for chili (wonderful Walter is out of town) and we got to talking about how much information we're exposed to from a variety of sources and how it affects our ability to recall names, words, etc or to concentrate on a task for very long.  So I started thinking, am I adding to this information overload with this blog?  Or do my posts help me to catalog thoughts, events, and, yes, recipes that I want to keep track of? 

As it happens so many times when I'm mulling something over, two articles appeared that touched on these very questions.  The first was in the Commercial Appeal this morning, "Deep Reading."  The gist (see, I'm doing it myself!) is that we just skim for quick facts and interesting tidbits, we don't read for understanding and to be able to use the information or thoughts in a later, comprehensive way.  See if you can read the article all the way through!

The second article had to do with procrastination and was very interesting.  Here's the tantalizing last paragraph - I hope it moves you to read the whole thing, 'cause it's very deep.

 ♦  It’s hard to ignore the fact that all these tools are at root about imposing limits and narrowing options—in other words, about a voluntary abnegation of freedom. (Victor Hugo would write naked and tell his valet to hide his clothes so that he’d be unable to go outside when he was supposed to be writing.) But before we rush to overcome procrastination we should consider whether it is sometimes an impulse we should heed. The philosopher Mark Kingwell puts it in existential terms:

“Procrastination most often arises from a sense that there is too much to do, and hence no single aspect of the to-do worth doing. . . . Underneath this rather antic form of action-as-inaction is the much more unsettling question whether anything is worth doing at all.”

In that sense, it might be useful to think about two kinds of procrastination: the kind that is genuinely akratic (akrasia—doing something against one’s own better judgment...willingly deferring something even though you expect the delay to make you worse off.) and the kind that’s telling you that what you’re supposed to be doing has, deep down, no real point. The procrastinator’s challenge, and perhaps the philosopher’s, too, is to figure out which is which. ♦

In other words, how do we decide what is worth doing and then how do we make ourselves do it?  This is something I'll be thinking about for a while.  If you have any thoughts, please comment.

But to circle back to the beginning, I have decided that outlining the week's menus and posting the recipes is something worth doing, for me at least.  If it's not worth it to you to read those posts, well, don't.  But adding details about the week is not something I'll continue to do on a regular basis.  If something notable happens, I'll do a separate post, and I'll continue to include pictures because I like them.

What I have discovered is that I enjoy the Food for Thought posts.  I like to share interesting (to me) articles and ideas.  And I think it's a good exercise for my own intellectual improvement to try to articulate why I find something interesting, useful, etc.  So I'll continue to post periodically about books, ideas, and the like.  Hopefully, I'll become a deep reader!

View from my studio window 1/10/11