There’s only so much you can consume in a day. The supply of content has exploded. Most people haven’t adjusted how they choose what gets in.

I noticed this in myself. Hours on social media, scrolling through content that wasn’t creating any value for me. It wasn’t improving my knowledge in any way I could use to create new and unique things. An hour would pass and I couldn’t remember what I’d seen.

This wasn’t a willpower problem. It was a design problem. The algorithms feeding me content weren’t optimizing for my growth. They were optimizing for my attention.

We obsess over what data trains AI models. We debate dataset quality, bias, contamination.

We are shockingly passive about what trains us.

Your consumption is training data for your own judgment. Every piece of content is shaping how you think and what you notice. Garbage in, garbage out. This was always true. But AI makes it urgent.

AI can now produce competent content in seconds. The flood is only beginning. Meanwhile, your attention is fixed. You can only consume so much in a day. The bottleneck has shifted from production to curation.

Most people let algorithms choose their inputs. That’s like eating fast food every meal and expecting to be healthy.

The cost isn’t just wasted time. It’s the numbness.

The more you consume, the more numb you become to the input. You open apps without intent, scroll without purpose. Your ability to recognize quality degrades. You lose the sensitivity to distinguish between something that matters and something that’s just filling space. The slop accumulates.

And the pace has accelerated. Things don’t change day to day anymore. They change minute to minute. Trends compress. What’s true right now may not be true in an hour. The noise is relentless, and most of it is waste.

Cutting out that waste is the whole game.

I started treating my inputs like I treat my diet.

You wouldn’t eat whatever’s put in front of you and expect to be healthy. You’d be deliberate. You’d choose foods that give you energy, that help you perform, that compound over time into something good. Content works the same way.

I began organizing the things I like into databases. Restaurants worth returning to. Fashion brands. Writing and design I admire. Podcasts that earn the time. Music I want to revisit.

I use tools like Goodreads, Beli, and Letterboxd to save and rate books, restaurants, and films, not just to remember them but to make my taste explicit. I use Notion to organize my personal data so AI can pull from it later and help me find more of what actually fits. Some people use Obsidian. The point isn’t the tool. It’s making your preferences legible over time.

I wrote a script that summarizes all the newsletters I subscribe to and highlights the key points from the best ones each day. I wake up every morning with a summary of the most useful information from the last 24 hours, filtered for what actually matters to me. Not everything. Just the signal.

I’ve set up AI to monitor the websites I visit, my bookmarks, and surface what’s most relevant from those sources along with new information based on what I actually care about.

Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude have been the best tools for this. Google because so much of your digital life already runs through Chrome, Gmail, and Docs. Anthropic because Claude supports MCP, the Model Context Protocol, an open standard that lets AI connect directly to your data sources like Google Drive, Notion, and other tools you already use. It means the AI can actually pull from your stuff instead of working in isolation.

I’ve deleted social apps from my phone, not to disconnect, but to stop spending time inside systems optimized for distraction. AI summarizes what matters so I don’t miss signal without living in the noise.

The goal is simple: AI learns what I like, helps me see how it connects, and surfaces more of it. Not what the algorithm wants me to see. What I’ve deliberately told it matters to me.

I spend less time doomscrolling. More time creating. When I do consume, it’s bite-sized and relevant. I get right to the point instead of wading through noise to find it.

I’ve discovered things I wouldn’t have found otherwise. Restaurants. Startups worth following. Fashion brands aligned with my taste. The system surfaces signal I would have missed.

But the real value isn’t efficiency. It’s protection.

Time is all we have. With so much content competing for attention, I want to spend my consumption on things that feed the work I’m trying to do. Things that improve how I think. Things that help me create something that didn’t exist before.

The curation system defends space for what matters. The slow pursuits. The craft. The things that resist shortcuts. It filters the flood so those things have room to exist.

This will only get more seamless. AI agents that run continuously in the background, learning your preferences and acting on them, are already here. Open-source projects like OpenClaw (originally Clawdbot) give you a personal AI assistant that runs on your own hardware with persistent access to your computer, messaging apps, email, and calendar. It doesn’t wait for you to prompt it. It acts on your behalf. Security is a real concern worth contemplating before giving an agent access to this much of your life. But the infrastructure for personalized AI is being built right now. The people who start curating deliberately today will have a compounding advantage as these tools mature.

In a world of infinite content, the only leverage is what you choose to let in.

Curation isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the foundation. You are training yourself whether you’re intentional about it or not. The question is whether you’re choosing the curriculum or letting someone else choose it for you.

Cut the waste. Consume what you want to become.

Thanks for reading Mixed Realities by TJ Kawamura! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Subscribe

There’s only so much you can consume in a day. The supply of content has exploded. Most people haven’t adjusted how they choose what gets in.

I noticed this in myself. Hours on social media, scrolling through content that wasn’t creating any value for me. It wasn’t improving my knowledge in any way I could use to create new and unique things. An hour would pass and I couldn’t remember what I’d seen.

This wasn’t a willpower problem. It was a design problem. The algorithms feeding me content weren’t optimizing for my growth. They were optimizing for my attention.

We obsess over what data trains AI models. We debate dataset quality, bias, contamination.

We are shockingly passive about what trains us.

Your consumption is training data for your own judgment. Every piece of content is shaping how you think and what you notice. Garbage in, garbage out. This was always true. But AI makes it urgent.

AI can now produce competent content in seconds. The flood is only beginning. Meanwhile, your attention is fixed. You can only consume so much in a day. The bottleneck has shifted from production to curation.

Most people let algorithms choose their inputs. That’s like eating fast food every meal and expecting to be healthy.

The cost isn’t just wasted time. It’s the numbness.

The more you consume, the more numb you become to the input. You open apps without intent, scroll without purpose. Your ability to recognize quality degrades. You lose the sensitivity to distinguish between something that matters and something that’s just filling space. The slop accumulates.

And the pace has accelerated. Things don’t change day to day anymore. They change minute to minute. Trends compress. What’s true right now may not be true in an hour. The noise is relentless, and most of it is waste.

Cutting out that waste is the whole game.

I started treating my inputs like I treat my diet.

You wouldn’t eat whatever’s put in front of you and expect to be healthy. You’d be deliberate. You’d choose foods that give you energy, that help you perform, that compound over time into something good. Content works the same way.

I began organizing the things I like into databases. Restaurants worth returning to. Fashion brands. Writing and design I admire. Podcasts that earn the time. Music I want to revisit.

I use tools like Goodreads, Beli, and Letterboxd to save and rate books, restaurants, and films, not just to remember them but to make my taste explicit. I use Notion to organize my personal data so AI can pull from it later and help me find more of what actually fits. Some people use Obsidian. The point isn’t the tool. It’s making your preferences legible over time.

I wrote a script that summarizes all the newsletters I subscribe to and highlights the key points from the best ones each day. I wake up every morning with a summary of the most useful information from the last 24 hours, filtered for what actually matters to me. Not everything. Just the signal.

I’ve set up AI to monitor the websites I visit, my bookmarks, and surface what’s most relevant from those sources along with new information based on what I actually care about.

Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude have been the best tools for this. Google because so much of your digital life already runs through Chrome, Gmail, and Docs. Anthropic because Claude supports MCP, the Model Context Protocol, an open standard that lets AI connect directly to your data sources like Google Drive, Notion, and other tools you already use. It means the AI can actually pull from your stuff instead of working in isolation.

I’ve deleted social apps from my phone, not to disconnect, but to stop spending time inside systems optimized for distraction. AI summarizes what matters so I don’t miss signal without living in the noise.

The goal is simple: AI learns what I like, helps me see how it connects, and surfaces more of it. Not what the algorithm wants me to see. What I’ve deliberately told it matters to me.

I spend less time doomscrolling. More time creating. When I do consume, it’s bite-sized and relevant. I get right to the point instead of wading through noise to find it.

I’ve discovered things I wouldn’t have found otherwise. Restaurants. Startups worth following. Fashion brands aligned with my taste. The system surfaces signal I would have missed.

But the real value isn’t efficiency. It’s protection.

Time is all we have. With so much content competing for attention, I want to spend my consumption on things that feed the work I’m trying to do. Things that improve how I think. Things that help me create something that didn’t exist before.

The curation system defends space for what matters. The slow pursuits. The craft. The things that resist shortcuts. It filters the flood so those things have room to exist.

This will only get more seamless. AI agents that run continuously in the background, learning your preferences and acting on them, are already here. Open-source projects like OpenClaw (originally Clawdbot) give you a personal AI assistant that runs on your own hardware with persistent access to your computer, messaging apps, email, and calendar. It doesn’t wait for you to prompt it. It acts on your behalf. Security is a real concern worth contemplating before giving an agent access to this much of your life. But the infrastructure for personalized AI is being built right now. The people who start curating deliberately today will have a compounding advantage as these tools mature.

In a world of infinite content, the only leverage is what you choose to let in.

Curation isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the foundation. You are training yourself whether you’re intentional about it or not. The question is whether you’re choosing the curriculum or letting someone else choose it for you.

Cut the waste. Consume what you want to become.

Thanks for reading Mixed Realities by TJ Kawamura! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Subscribe